Patricia Barber is a jazz vocalist, pianist, and songwriter. She was born in Chicago, which has always been her permanent home. She has released over a dozen albums since her debut in 1989. I hadn’t even heard of her when, while heading home from see a friend perform at the Jazz Showcase, my dad suggested that we stop at the Green Mill (where she performed every Monday night for years and years and years) to check her out. One of the songs on her set was “Mourning Grace”, a setting of the poem by Maya Angelou:

When this song ended, I needed a moment to collect myself. This music hit me like a ton of bricks. I don’t think anyone tried talking to me in that moment, but if they did, I couldn’t hear them.

In 2003, Barber was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in music composition – this is almost unheard of for a “popular” songwriter. She used the freedom granted her by that fellowship to produce the album Mythologies, a song cycle in which each song is dedicated to one of the 11 characters from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Although the first track, “Icarus”, is also dedicated to Nina Simone.

“In my version, [he] doesn’t crash. He just keeps flying up until you can’t see him anymore. I grafted the Nina Simone story onto the Icarus story and dedicated the song to her. It starts with Daedalus, Icarus’s father, crafting the wings. The second verse is about Nina at the Midtown club outside of Philadelphia in her chiffon dress. They both know that only by taking a big risk will you ever fly.”

What’s too easy to overlook is that even if she couldn’t sing or compose, she still might have had a full career purely as a pianist: