The New York Times reviews Barb Jungr

Familiar Songs, the Way You've Never Heard Them

By STEPHEN HOLDEN Published: January 19, 2008

You've probably never heard “Heartbreak Hotel” performed with the stark, no-frills approach that the British singer Barb Jungr brings to it in her show “No Regrets: The Remarkable Barb Jungr” at the Metropolitan Room. Stripping it of its hubba-hubba and bump-and-grind beat, with nary a “baby” to be heard, she forces the song to stand on its own as a surreal, minimalist, blues-flavored lament, whose last word “die” is hissed.

That performance on Thursday was typical of Ms. Jungr's radical approach to songs by Bob Dylan , Richard Thompson, Ray Davies and other songwriters whose work you think you know from recordings in which the arrangements appear indivisible from your sense of the material. Arranged for voice and accordion (played by her excellent pianist and sideman, Charlie Giordano), her version of Bob Dylan's “I'll Be Your Baby Tonight” treated the song as a funny, personal, fragrantly sexy prelude to bedroom delights.

Ms. Jungr, a professed Dylan fanatic, said on Thursday that she imagined its setting to be the Deep South, a region she admitted she had seen only in films and never visited. The three other Dylan numbers in the set included an intense reading of “I Want You,” a fervent gospel “Ring Them Bells” and a delightfully happy-go-lucky “If Not for You.”

A tragic clown, Ms. Jungr, wearing a goofy grin, wove humor and high drama into an emotional roller coaster ride that had me laughing out loud one minute and gasping at her theatrical bravura the next. She introduced Thursday's opening number, her original “Beautiful Life,” with a humorous warning: “It's a happy song. Enjoy it. It's the only one in the show.” Doom and gloom followed, but there were many intervals of sunlight.

Demonstrating formidable vocal flexibility, she took obscure songs by Brownie and Ruth McGhee (“Rainy Day”) and Eric Bibb and Levi B. Saunders (“Heading Home”) from smoky, reflective plateaus to feral emotional peaks, and then with perfect timing retreated downhill.

Her newly translated English renditions of Brel's “Ne Me Quitte Pas” (“Don't Leave Me Now”) and Piaf's “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien” (“No Regrets”) were accompanied by sharp comments about their fuzzy earlier translations and the dubious notion of singing pop songs in a language the audience doesn't understand. There is a huge difference in tone, she pointed out, between “If you go away” and “Don't leave me.”

That's the kind of acute intelligence Ms. Jungr brings to pop songs, along with the talent of a complete entertainer. A fully realized one-woman show, “No Regrets” belongs on a small Off Broadway stage.

Time Out New York - Critics Pick click here

Time Out New York loves Barb Jungr click here

Barb Jungr was awarded the Nightlife New York Award for
Outstanding Cabaret Vocalist!

By: Dan Bacalzo  ·  Jan 9, 2008  ·  New York

As previously announced, Emmy Award winner Bruce Vilanch will host the ceremony, to be directed by Carl Andress. Presenters and guest performers will include Lucie Arnaz, Charles Busch, Bill Charlap, Joanna Gleason, Julie Halston, Bill Irwin, Hilary Kole, Sandy Stewart, and Lari White.

The Nightlife Awards, which honor the best of New York's cabaret, comedy, and jazz, are decided upon by more than two dozen critics and experts on four different panels.

"No Regrets: The Remarkable Barb Jungr"

English chanteuse Barb Jungr began her six-day gig at the Metropolitan Room by telling her audience that it was Tuesday, not the sexiest day of the year. "So we have to do the best we can."

That is exactly what Jungr did. And Jungr at her best is something no one should miss.

Jungr, whose powerful voice ranges from low and husky to ringing with a slight tremolo, sang a repertoire heavily leaning toward her personal favorites, most specifically Bob Dylan. There was also some Jacques Brel, her own "Beautiful Life," (written with Adrian York), and an Edith Piaf classic, "Non, je ne regrette rien," which she performed with the same English lyrics Piaf used when she appeared in the United States. This is the song that gave the show its name, "No Regrets. The Remarkable Barb Jungr."

Of course, what's really remarkable about Barb Jungr is the way she makes every song her own. Thus Dylan's "I Want You," "If Not for You" and "I'll Be Your Baby Tonight" become love songs in ways the singer/songwriter himself may have never been able to realize. For the latter song, her New York accompanist, the superb Charlie Giordano, usually on piano, takes up his accordion for unexpectedly moving results.

A meticulous artist, Jungr was not satisfied with available translations of Brel's work. So she commissioned her own from Des de Moor for "Don't Leave Me" and "Marieke" because, as she said with a devilish glint in her eye, "People can't be bothered with learning French." For those in the audience who are unfamiliar with European geography, Jungr explained that the lines "from Brugge to Ghent" indicate a trip analogous to traveling from New York City to Trenton, NJ.

Jungr's emotionally vibrant interpretations of Elvis classics "Heartbreak Hotel," "for anyone dumped," and "In the Ghetto," a song he was initially cautioned against recording, played a big part in her repertoire as well.

If Jungr is passionate, she is also quite funny. Even the bleakest song is lightened by her ironic commentary. She peppers her performance with stories from her life that are personal enough to be interesting but not so intimate to be embarrassing. Brownie McGhee's "Rainy Day," was introduced with the revelation that she grew up "in a very wet place." Actually she grew up in a small town in northern England, which by all accounts seems something less than glamorous.

Jungr is sultry in a way that makes one think of crowded bistros entered through a beaded door, dimly lit and filled with smoke. Cigarettes are now banned in most public places. But, have no fear, Jungr provides her own smoke.

Sydney Morning Herald, 13th Sept 07

Living for the moment of the song

The name is Czech, but the accent, the Marbella tan and the sense of humour are pure Lancashire.

Barb Jungr is from Rochdale, the town in north-west England where another songbird, Gracie Fields, was born in 1898. Unlike Fields, the music hall singer who became a national favourite in the 1930s, Jungr is a jazz singer who has yet to attain a mainstream profile. But calling Jungr a jazz singer, maybe even one of the finer ones around, is underselling someone who can glide into cabaret just as comfortably as she tackles contemporary classical.

Her repertoire includes Jacques Brel and Bob Dylan, the songs of Edith Piaf and the work of the British composer Mark-Anthony Turnage.

But her defining characteristic as an interpretive voice may be a lightness of touch combined with total immersion in the song. "For me, you should never hear the singer, you should hear the song," Jungr says, shedding a layer of clothing in the Sydney sun.

"I'm a text person and that text for me is not just the lyric, it's the lyric and the melody. And it's my job to be a vessel for those things in the best way I can in the minute of doing them." As she repeats throughout the conversation, living in the moment of the song is the key.

"Someone asked me earlier where I would rack my own music and I said, 'Well, everything I do has got improvisation in it so I would rack it in jazz'. I know it's not jazz in the narrow sense of the word but in the wider sense that's what it is because you're never going to hear it the same way. It's never the same and it shouldn't be."

The contemporary demand for (an illusory) perfection in performance which, once achieved, should never change appears to miss the point of music and the point of the singer.

"I totally agree," Jungr says. "I don't know where it comes from, though it's very deeply entrenched in classical music, as you know, and I think it does such disservice. If you listen to Glenn Gould on piano and you go, 'Gosh that's beautiful', you hear, I think, his own journey to find the work. It's that journey of a performer to find the work that's interesting. Everything you do you bring to the work, everything you are, changes the work moment by moment."

Jungr still looks for and is thrilled by those moments of transcendence that come when the text and the singer become something greater than the individual parts. That moment when there is a connection, she says, between "you and the mysterious other, whatever you want to call it".

Bernard Zuel

The Sydney Morning Herald

September 15, 2007

Hotel to home, a siren's spell

BARB JUNGR

The Basement, September 13

Some artists are squashed by the recording studio. They are filtered, homogenised and starched until deprived of their own essence: the part that communicates with an audience.

Barb Jungr has made good, well-recorded albums, but none comes close to the captivation she offers in person.

Anyone who can assemble a repertoire stretching from Richard Thompson to Brownie McGhee to Jacques Brel - and make it work - is doing something right, not to mention exposing the paucity of imagination most singers bring to the art of cabaret. Cabaret? It is probably the closest label for the remarkable Jungr, an English singer with a delicious sense of humour to back up her unique interpretative powers.

Heartbreak Hotel was neither post-Presley nor gothic-dark like the version by Diamanda Galas. It was slow and desolately sparse, yet the delivery was detached. Jungr made the song eerie by making it observational. Kentucky Rain was reinvented and reinvested with an emotional content that had been "blanded" out of it. Delicate but unrelenting rain-drop notes from the piano (Matthew Carey) intensified the forlornness, while Jungr probed beneath the song's skin, just as rain infiltrates beneath clothes.

Then she stepped up a notch, casting a siren's spell against spartan piano on McGhee's Rainy Day. She broadened her palette by scatting economically over Eric Bibb's Heading Home, before delivering the coup de grace: a fresh translation of Brel's Ne Me Quitte Pas, restored to the despairing injunction "Don't leave me", as opposed to the usual "If you go away". It ripped at every heart in the room and was the finest English version of this song I have heard. For an encore she again surprised with Ray Davies's Waterloo Sunset, also stripped down and reinvested with subtext and life.

Carey expertly performed the difficult task of playing little, and took a charming solo on I'll Be Your Baby Tonight.

Music   January 31st, 2007

Jungr at heart

Barb Jungr is nothing if not distinctive. True, her expressive features (and outrageously English dental structure) will never make her a poster girl for the glamor wing of the cabaret community. But poster girls often lack depth, whereas Jungr has proved herself one of the most compelling interpreters around. As I wrote back in 2004, when she was making her first impressions on American audiences, Jungr is utterly original, with a profoundly committed style that teeters on the edge of emotional excess without tipping into self-indulgence. This week - on Thursday and Friday at 8pm, and on Saturday at 8pm and 10pm - she returns to the Metropolitan Room with a set devoted entirely to the songs of Bob Dylan, whose work she gets at from the inside, unveiling feelings and ideas that have sometimes been eluded in Dylan's own distinctive delivery. Jungr casts an unconventional spell, but her magic is real. 

(by Adam Feldman)

"The Songs, They Are A-Changing"

Jazz

By WILL FRIEDWALD

January 30, 2007

"God Knows," to quote the title of a 1990 Bob Dylan song, why there is a sudden eruption of interest in the iconoclastic singersongwriter. It's not like it's his birthday or anything, but in the last few months there has been a short-lived Broadway show, a considerably better-received all-star tribute concert at Avery Fisher Hall, as well as what may well be the first jazz instrumental album of his music. Right now, within a seven-day period, there are no less than three very different concert presentations of Dylan songs by three idiosyncratic performers who have absolutely nothing in common with one another - or with Mr. Dylan.

It would be surprising to see this much activity surrounding the music of any composer, from Mozart to Irving Berlin, but in Mr. Dylan's case, it's especially unusual. After all, he is not so much a performer and a writer as a oneman mega-force who completely changed the shape of popular music, ushering in the singer-songwriter age during the 1960s. From that point forward, Tony Bennett once told me, "record companies didn't take you seriously unless you wrote your own songs." Author Alex Halberstadt, in his new biography of the rock songwriter Doc Pomus, describes Mr. Dylan as "the boy genius who singlehandedly demolished the Brill Building." Unlike every composer before him, Mr. Dylan's message to performers was not "sing my songs and earn me royalties," but rather, "go forth and write your own damn songs!"

Despite his importance, Mr. Dylan (and others, like the Beatles) also signaled the end of the Great Age of Interpretation, as well as a certain level of professionalism in terms of both composing and singing. For the last 40 years, every musical artist has been expected to be his or her own Bob Dylan. That's why it's somewhat startling that, in the pop icon's 65th year, so many artists are singing Mr. Dylan's songs - and reinterpreting them in their own way. It's almost as if they are deliberately ignoring his message by doing so.

Yet of all the new takes on Mr. Dylan, none is more essential than Barb Jungr's ongoing show at the Metropolitan Room, which continues through Saturday. Ms. Jungr's 2002 album, "Every Grain of Sand," was the breakthrough that proved Bob Dylan songs could be re-addressed and made vital all over again by performers in vastly different genres, just like those of Stephen Sondheim or Jerome Kern. The current show, "Barb Jungr Sings Bob Dylan," features all of the strongest songs from the album, such as the declamatory sermon "Ring Them Bells" and the erotic "I'll Be Your Baby Tonight," done with accordion like a musette waltz. There are also new pieces, such as "Blind Willie McTell," a basic blues elaborated into a tricky 5/4 rhythm and a stark, Sinatra-inspired saloon treatment of "Like a Rolling Stone." On the latter, Ms. Jungr whispers the famous retort that everybody else shouts: "How does it feel?" She almost swallows these payoff lines, much in the same way that Bob Hope made a joke funnier by muttering the punch line under his breath.

In his 2004 autobiography, "Chronicle," Mr. Dylan wrote that he was profoundly influenced by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht's "Pirate Jenny," yet it remained for Ms. Jungr to show that Mr. Dylan's songs can be interpreted with the same sort of sensitivity and nuance as those of Weill. For all of the complexity and fantastic imagery of his texts, my favorite remains the simplest and most direct of his works, 1974's "Forever Young," which Ms. Jungr sings like a toast at a Jewish wedding, a first cousin to Frank Loesser's "More I Can Not Wish You." It's so straightforward and sincere that it doesn't even sound like Mr. Dylan at all - maybe it's actually by Robert Allen Zimmerman of Hibbing, Minnesota.

Barb Jungr

Barb Jungr Sings Bob Dylan

Metropolitan Room

With her opening night show at the Metropolitan Room, Barb Jungr turned this reviewer into a Bob Dylan fan. Or perhaps more accurately, into a Barb Jungr fan, as she took a dozen of Dylan's songs and turned them into Barb Jungr property.

Some Dylan lyrics, such as the opener, High Water (Rising), still have the ability to bewilder one on first listening, but Jungr's affecting and impassioned treatments of If Not for You, I'll be Your Baby Tonight and I Want You need no deep intellectual contemplation to appreciate. The songs vary from sentimental to dramatic and highly emotional.

In spite of remaining firmly anchored to a stool while she performed, Jungr is always in motion - head, arms and body continually in motion, moving with the music, swaying, gesturing. Her patter is topical, relevant and witty, and responsible in no small way for the success of her show. She's funny, she's tough, she's unpredictable, she's irreverent. And can she sing!

A special word is also due the arrangements and accompaniment of Charles Giordano. His instrumental support, on piano and accordion, is spare, extraordinarily effective in its minimalist backing to Jungr's vocalizing. There is another side in reserve, however. With Forever Young, Giordano takes off his figurative gloves and, with Jungr, lets it rip. It is an impressive show of force for both of them.

Barb Jungr Sings Bob Dylan will be at the Metropolitan Room Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays though February 3rd.

Peter Leavy
Cabaret Scenes
January 25, 2007

English chanteuse Barb Jungr knows how to give a song a personality, even when it is a song that already has a strong one. She's able to grab each song by the horns, and whether it is her own or someone else's to start with, by the time she's done, it's definitely hers. This could be a bad thing in the wrong hands, but fortunately, Jungr has the creativity, skill, and shrewd sense which put her into that select category of artists whom we're eager to hear cover songs. Her combination of covers and originals on her new Linn Records album 'Walking in the Sun' blends seamlessly into one of the most impressive albums I've heard this year.

The album starts with a cover of the early R&B classic 'Who Do You Love?' by Ellas McDaniel, better known by his stage name: Bo Diddley. Bo Diddley has always been at his strongest on riff songs which sit firmly on one chord or hover back and forth over two chords, riding the riff to intense heights. 'Who Do You Love?' is one of his most famous, a swaggering hoodoo strut like few others. Jungr knows of course that she's not going to beat Bo Diddley at his own game, so she takes the song to her turf: Backed by a jazz combo in an arrangement that starts stealthily in the congas and bass until the singer comes in hot and breathy. The notes of Diddley's original are slowed down to almost half speed, but then the beat is multiplied so that it sounds even faster and more urgent than the original. The guitar enters with one perfectly-placed blue chord that bends up to pitch. Piano and organ don't even enter with their crisp, sparse contributions until the second verse. The instruments flicker like quicksilver while Jungr's voice riffs over them, deft but slow-burning, toying with the words here and there to make them even more hers. This is an astonishingly good track, and it alone would warrant buying the album. The fact that it isn't even the highlight of the record tells you how good this disc is.

The brilliance and urgency of 'Who Do You Love?' make it a great opening track, but its deployment in that position is also a very shrewd choice: The "concept" or "theme" of this album is faith, one that could send lots of potential listeners running for cover, fearing a portentous, preachy sermon in songs. But by starting with a brash groove with overtones of voodoo, Jungr makes it clear her theme will be all-embracing, not narrowly conservative to the point of stasis. That allows her to launch into Bob Dylan's 'Trouble In Mind' without the sense of hectoring that sometimes palls on Dylan's early-1980's religious albums. Jungr emphasizes the bluesy roots of the song, continuing the nocturnal, urban feel of the opening track. Her vocal emphasizes the dreamlike patter of Dylan's "all must fall" lyrics.

The evening sun burns low in the mellow third number, 'Beautiful Life' by Jungr and Adrian York, but the narrative tone is brighter than the preceding tracks, leading to a step up into a higher key as the song describes a bright, new sunrise. The track works very nicely on its own terms, but its placement here is perfect for the overall flow of the album. Time and time again, Jungr shapes not only each line or even each song, but the entire ebb and flow of the album. Next up is Jungr's song 'Drink Me Up', a tribute to "old tent shows and all the forgotten women blues singers," as she notes in the booklet. It starts slowly but gradually builds in weight and power so that by the time it is done, it proves to have strong legs. Eric Bibb's guitar solo here is especially tasty.

The five-spot is traditionally the place for one of the catchiest songs on an album, and sure enough, Jungr plugs in a bluesy version of Marc Cohn's 'Walking in Memphis' that combines vivid observation with an irresistibly dancing swing. One can almost hear Jungr smile as she launches into the middle eight, presiding over her musical feast with delight, because only she knows that she's about to pull the carpet out from under her guests when she suddenly belts out some gospel lines over dramatic, slowed-down chords, bold as the oratory of an old-time revival. Jeff Barry's 'Walking in the Sun', a prime-of-life song if ever there was one, comes next, giving the album its title and emotionally justifying it with Jungr's full-throated delivery of the classic line, "Even a blind man can tell when he's walking in the sun." For the keystone position at the center of the album, Jungr takes the melancholy "Rainy Day" by Brownie McGhee and alters the lyrics to sing it from the woman's point of view, an impressively effective conceit. The easier path would have been to merely change the gender being sung about in the song, but this angle makes it into a portrait of a restless woman's reflection on the path she had to take. Jessica Lauren's harmonica chimes in doleful commentary in the background, growing more elaborate as the song grows in emotion. The sound of Linn Records' high resolution DSD recording is especially welcome here, as a quick perusal of the history of harmonica recordings might leave your ears black and blue from shrillness and distortion. The instrument's sound has been caught here in its natural pungency, without processing flattening or squeezing it into something ugly.

The second half of the album starts off with 'Take Out Some Insurance', a lively, teasing blues number associated with Little Jimmy Reed. It lightens the mood before Jungr tears into the next track, the most wide-flung and unexpected of the album. It starts with a harsh, aggressive a capella verse of the old traditional song 'Run On For A Long Time', which threatens that God will cut you down. But then it runs headlong into Randy Newman's acid-witted anti-faith song 'God's Song'. Its inclusion here is what makes Jungr's theme truly work. Her subject is faith, and she fearlessly dares to nail it to the wall with a blistering, theatrical account of the number. The cut uses a minimum of processing to maximum effect: Just a light touch of reverb to Jungr's vocal colors the drama without ever robbing us of the sense that the band and singer are right there in front of us, playing a show for an audience of one.

Next, astonishingly, comes Bob Dylan's almost-lost masterpiece 'Blind Willie McTell'. I say astonishingly because it is boldness bordering on sacrilege to cover a song this great. It was originally written by Dylan in the early-1980's, and was slated for use on his album 'Infidels'. But Dylan was never quite satisfied with how it turned out in the studio, and he never found a way to fit it in to the finished album. So he dropped it, and moved on to other things. Only an artist of Dylan's potency and confidence could simply drop a song like 'Blind Willie McTell', which would turn any number of lesser stars into legends had they written it. It finally saw the light of day when the famous 'Bootleg Series, Volumes I-III' were released on Compact Disc in 1991. The cut included there is a somber, passionate version with Dylan on vocal and piano and Mark Knopffler on guitar. There is also another bootleg floating around with a more conventional band arrangement, preferred by some Dylan fans, though emphatically not me. So, granted, a song that never found what Dylan regarded as a final shape. But that hardly stops it from being a masterpiece. Thus I was surprised and not a little concerned when I saw that Jungr was covering it on this album. And when the track first started, I was not happy. Jessica Lauren's arrangement here is almost buoyant, with a jazzy swing. At first glance, it seemed all wrong. But it doesn't pay to ever underestimate what Jungr and friends might have up their sleeves. As the groove settles in, it gives the song a period feel, like something out of the 1930's, with a wicked rhythmic hook. Soon it became clear that the buoyancy is actually nervous, kinetic energy. The jazz is the gallows-glamour of Great Depression-era clubs. Jungr turns up her radiance to full and slinks through the first few verses quite affectingly, if still seemingly at odds with the starkness of the song. Then she plays her trump card: The instruments abruptly cease, leaving her alone, vulnerable in the spotlight, lipstick gleaming as a tear falls. She slowly spins out the next verse and chorus like a glimpse into the center of a soul, shadowed by a few mere ghosts of dissonant notes drifting in from the background. When the instruments revive the groove, there is now an urgency and desperation that makes one believe, even if only for a few minutes, that this song couldn't be done any other way. I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't heard it myself.

Jimmy Cliff's 'Many Rivers to Cross' comes next, starting with Jungr singing over a conga drum for over one minute before any other instruments join in. The stark opening makes the warmth of the arrangement that much more welcome when it comes in, but additionally helps the ear shrug off the strong, dark flavor of the previous track in order to flow with the genial, uplifting melodic line as Jungr riffs into higher registers. Background vocals join in with the full band to send the track to its inspiring peak. It is followed by Jungr's cover of a song by her guitarist, Eric Bibb, entitled 'Heading Home'. Its "been there, done that" ennui shrewdly balances the strong emotions of the two preceding numbers, and its proclamation of heading home "through fire and rain, through hurricane" sets the stage for the last song, Carole King's wistful and tender 'Way Over Yonder', done here simply and poignantly with Jungr's intimate vocal accompanied by Jenny Carr's harp-like piano, with a lone, subdued harmonica solo from Jessica Lauren.

Linn Records' sound is mercifully free of heavy-handed processing. Instead, producer Calum Malcolm concentrates on artful balance, sweet clarity, and freshness. The regular Compact Disc layer of this hybrid release has wonderfully up-front sound at a vigorous level. Its warmth and immediacy only improve as you move into the high-resolution stereo and multichannel Super Audio CD layers. One could argue that the surround channels are under-utilized here, as they provide only ambiance. But what ambiance! There are no frills here, no guitars sneaking up behind you. The basic sonic image of the band up-close and in front of you never changes. The surrounds are used to bring the listener into the room with the musicians, and they do that quite effectively. Indeed, the consistency of approach, allied with the fact that the entire album was recorded in a mere three days - not to mention the wonderfully sculpted flow from one part of the album to the next - gives this disc the kind of unity rarely heard outside of a live concert. And even then, it is only the live concerts of the most skillful artists that achieve this sort of shaping, something akin to a full-length movie or a classical symphony. Once again, I find my thoughts turning back to Bob Dylan, who is obviously a central inspiration to Jungr, even though her own style is quite different from his. She has learned his lessons well: Lessons of vision, commitment, characterization, and control of the ebb and flow of energy. I can offer no greater praise than that. Suffice it to say that when I first started listening to this album, my first coherent thought was: "This can't possibly be this good." Now after exploring it, living with it, and running through it with a fine-toothed comb for a few weeks, all I can say is this: It is.

(c) Mark Jordan ~ 07/01/07 - High Fidelity Review

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