12 GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE September 24, 1999

A jazz muscian with a rock-star heart

"I'm at the point now

where I want to record

and perform my own music and what feels right to me.”

by Jeffrey L. Newman

Cleveland-When jazz singer Patricia Barber talks about the person who inspires her the most, she doesn't mentioned Ella Fitzgerald or Dinah Washington or any of the usual greats. Barber's hero is alternative rocker Ani DiFranco.

"I can't imagine the hurricane force winds she had to go up against," says Barber, who like DiFranco has made her way as an out lesbian on an independent label. “She is someone a lot of people look to as inspiration."

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Barber, who has never met the rock singer, even quotes a DiFranco song as her mantra. 'I'll be the million you never made"," she recites, before adding with a laugh, “I'd be the 10,000 in the jazz world."

At 42, the Chicago musician is riding high on her fourth release, Modern Cool (Premonition Records). On Modern Cool, Barber churns out popular songs like "Light My Fire" and "She's a Lady” as well as eight original compositions, and she even sets a poem by e. e. curhmings to music with cool, rhythmic results.

The new album broke into the top 20 on Billboard magazine's jazz album chart in 1998-a rare task for an artist without major label support. Barber has been offered contracts by three major labels (she prefers not to name which ones), but has turned them all down.

"This music would never have been composed or recorded if I had signed," Barber says. "They don't let you just sign and do

what you want. They want to produce you until it meets their expectations. They think they have a foolproof formula to sell records. But with that compromise, you have no risk, no edge, no excitement."

She says that big labels want to record standards, which doesn't appeal to her.

"I'm at the point now where I want to record and perform my own music and what feels right to me," she says. "I'm a control freak, and there are very few majors that would agree to my terms of musical and professional control."

Barber has always put her musical integrity over her financial security.

From the time she started playing piano at age six, she felt music was in her blood; after all, her father was a saxophonist with the Glenn Miller band. After earning a degree in music, Barber started making the rounds at jazz clubs near Chicago. Even then, when it was nearly impossible to make ends meet, Barber never stopped playing.

"I wanted to pursue a straight line of artistic integrity," she says. "I've never worked as a musician.”

For Barber, maintaining her professional independence is well worth the cost in terms of lost exposure and promotion.

"It's a political statement for me to stay independent of the mainstream,” she says. "It can be done. I don't have to panic and jump on the train just out of fear."

Like DiFranco, Barber applies the same logic about musical independence to being out in the industry.

"It's who I am and what I'm about, it's not

some kind of statement,” she says. "Being an independent artist, I don't have to go golfing with executives, I'm given a break that way. If people have had a problem with it, I've not known about it."

Some people advised her to keep her sexuality quiet early in her career.

"I had some people tell me to wait until my record sells, then come out," she recalls. “I tell them they're about 20 years too late. What am I going to do? I was out before my records became big sellers."

But being open about her life, and her relationship, isn't about politics, says Barber, even when she's singing to another woman in one of her songs.

"I don't feel that burning edge of anger," she says. "I've never felt being gay was a burden, so I don't carry it as a torch."

What her career is really about, she says, isn't earning a bundle of money or making a big statement.

It's just about the music, plain and simple.

"Every time I play or I compose, it's magic," she says. "There's nothing else I'd rather do. As much as I would have loved to do something else or choose a safer route, I couldn't, it wouldn't have been me to do that."

Patricia Barber is performing Sunday, October 3 at the Diamondback Brewery, 724 Prospect Avenue, in Cleveland. Call 216771-1988 for showtime.

Jeffrey L. Newman is a freelance writer living in New York. He can be e-mailed at editorjeff@aol.com.