Patricia More Touch

The title of Breaking Stretch is a concise representation of Brennan’s envelope-pushing ambitions. Breaking references her desire to push herself and her bandmates to their limits, to mine the transcendent results of virtuosic imaginations confronted by unexpected challenges. Stretch captures her music’s intense elasticity, its ability to stretch from the taut and minutely focused to the wide-angled and reaching. Those extremes are depicted in the album’s striking artwork, a mix of astronomical and volcanic images, placing the cosmic and the subterranean side by side – the differences between the opposing poles, as in Brennan’s work, at times nearly indistinguishable.

Chicago pianist and vocalist Patricia Barber is making lots of ears burn. Her torch song touch speaks volumes to jazz vocal fanatics, but she has an adventuresome side that speaks likewise to fans of woollier jazz. Barber's vocal delivery is swaggering and burnished, always angling against oddball time signatures and often dropping weird lyrical science. From e.e. cummings poems, Barber moves into prescient observations on our society: "For company in the 21st century," she sings, "I go to the club, talk through the show / I'm so hip there's nothing about jazz / That I don't know." Trumpeter Dave Douglas and guitarist John McLean add a sharp edge, and the Choral Thunder Vocal Choir give Modern Cool soul-drenched dynamics that push the CD into the realm of instant classics.

Companion was recorded in a special three-night series of shows in July, 1999 at Chicago's famed Green Mill jazz club — an unusually short amount of time to produce a live album. To mine as much material as possible from those nights the performances were run more like recording sessions than live shows, with the crowd reverently hushed. Patricia Barber is in her element and the only thing that seems to have suffered for the recording circumstances is the album's length — at seven songs and 40 minutes, it walks the line between standard EP and full-length size. One surmises that it might have been longer had there been more album-quality material from the performances. Recalling the energy that was present on her critically worshipped Cafe Blue album, there is an ease and creativity on Companion which makes her fans' devotion understandable.