Patricia Barber is a jazz singer and composer who received a Guggenheim Fellowship to produce an album of jazz songs based on the mythological characters in Ovid's Metamorphoses. On her website, Barber describes her thoughts about each of the songs in the cycle. "Morpheus is very dear to me," she writes, "because I have sleep issues, bad insomnia. It’s a prayer to the God of Sleep to send his son, Morpheus, the God of Dreams. It is one of my favorite songs of the entire song cycle....Pygmalion is very much in a classic American song form, written in that 32-bar style. There are a few harmonic variations and of course, what a wonderful story, how he waits for this cold piece of rock, this statue of a woman to come to life. That was easy for me to generalize to the universal question: 'Can I will you to love me? Can I will the fantasy to life?' "
You can read the rest of her song notes and hear tracks from Mythologies on Barber's website. And if you're in Chicago, you can hear her perform her work on Monday evenings at the Green Mill jazz club through June 25th.
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