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Title: Barb Jungr – Waterloo Sunset (2003) [Reissue 2005]
Genre: Jazz
Format: MCH SACD ISO + DSF DSD64 + Hi-Res FLAC

Barb Jungr expresses her passionate artistry with this new collection of classic and original material. With the most original voice since Nina Simone or Edith Piaf, Barb carves a unique path through many genres of popular music. This “world-class female vocalist” (Daily Telegraph) has written three original songs for her new album. ‘Do You Play Guitar’, the album’s elegaic opening track, ‘Written Down In The Dark Again’, a disturbing exploration of sex, and ‘Lipstick Lips Lament’, a wonderful evocation of classic American song-writing.

With her previous three albums, Barb Jungr had already proved herself one of Britain’s most engrossing cabaret singers and one of the most adroit song interpreters in modern vocal pop, and Waterloo Sunset does nothing to alter or diminish that assessment. It does feel like a small step backward in terms of content after the all-Bob Dylan program of Every Grain of Sand, but it is certainly not a step down in quality and intelligence of performance. In fact, it is a return to the interpretive eclecticism of Bare, with its dramatic overhauls of pop tunes (in effect, similar to her contemporary Cassandra Wilson, if not in style) by the Everly Brothers, Leon Russell, and Richard Thompson (a masterful, almost art song “The Great Valerio”), among others, intermingled with a few of Jungr’s own delightful originals. It might even be thought of as a dressed-up version of that album, nowhere more evident than in the Ray Davies-penned title tune. The stripped-down take from Bare is damaged, lonely, movingly reflective; the reimagined version of “Waterloo Sunset” is wistful, sure, but also bluesy, impregnable, rounding the corner toward sanguinity. That this Brit Invasion song sounds perfectly fluent and fluid coming after the Tin Pan Alley jazz chestnut “Laugh Clowns Laugh” says much about the caliber of the writing, of course, but also about how Jungr is able to locate and explore the je ne sais quoi of a composition, what is both ageless and new, unknown, what connects even as it perplexes. The album sustains this inquisitive mood, plowing into emotions that lurk beneath façades, like the enigmatic clowns and jesters that dance through the lyrics, and finally bubbling over on the marvelous concluding rehabilitation of Steve Miller’s “The Joker,” in which a crass come-on is transformed into an effusive flirtation. It’s something to behold. Jungr had not quite gotten Mr. Zimmerman out of her blood either, so fans of Every Grain of Sand have a couple more Dylan treats in store with versions of the classic “Like a Rolling Stone” and the more recent Love and Theft track “High Water (For Charley Patton).” Calum Malcolm again produces beautifully, employing a carnival of colors and textures; the entirely new backing band is crackerjack throughout, breezing through music hall, cocktail jazz, bossa nova, and Western swing with the equal panache.

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Title: Barb Jungr – Walking In The Sun (2006)
Genre: Jazz
Format: MCH SACD ISO + Hi-Res FLAC

“Walking in the Sun” heralds a new direction for one of Europe’s finest voices. Drawing on influences from a wide range of musical traditions, including gospel and the blues, the album also includes some exciting new self-penned material. Music lovers will appreciate lyrics by Jimmy Reed, Carole King and Randy Newman as well as a new song by Eric Bibb.

Barb Jungr is a very well known singer in her native England, where she’s had a lengthy career of performances and collaborations with numerous artists; most recently, she participated in the “Girl Talk” sessions with Claire Martin and Mari Wilson. She’s also become quite something of a musicologist, with a very keen interest in world music and she’s lectured extensively about singing and vocal performance. Her repertory is quite broad, encompassing diverse styles ranging from French chansons to cabaret, folk, gospel and blues. This superb disc from Linn Records features an eclectic mix of gospel and blues, as well as songs from artists as diverse as Bob Dylan, Randy Newman and Carole King, and includes a couple of self-penned tunes as well. The resulting album has a very spiritual feel to it, and Barb Jungr finds a way to make just about every song in this stunning assortment her own. Barb’s smoky-sweet alto is perfect here; on the disc’s opening track Who Do You Love (popularized by George Thorogood’s raunch-n-roll version) she lends a very light vocal touch (almost a whisper), which theoretically seems totally wrong for this song, but she makes it just oh-so-right. The next track, Bob Dylan’s Trouble In Mind opens with a sensationally smooth upright bass and finger-snapping intro, and segues into Barb’s spot-on vocal – this woman really knows how to sing the blues, and she can really belt it out as required. Jessica Lauren lends a lightly-played organ accompaniment that’s sheer perfection – one thing that’s evident from the start is how the vocal and instrumental textures are so perfectly arranged throughout this excellent disc. There are a few weak spots – I’m not particularly enamoured with Barb’s delivery of the Jimmy Cliff classic Many Rivers To Cross, but then I can’t begin to tell you how many times I’ve hit the replay button on her soulful delivery of Brownie McGhee’s Rainy Day. It’s one of those magical moments where everything worked perfectly, and the resulting sounds are irresistible. The sound quality of this multichannel hybrid SACD is superb. All of my listening was done in the multichannel mode, and the instruments and voices are expertly placed in the recorded soundfield – this is a textbook example of how surround sound should be done right. Highly recommended.

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Title: Barb Jungr – Those Days (2011/2015)
Genre: Vocal Jazz, Folk
Format: SACD ISO

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Title: Barb Jungr – Love Me Tender (2005)
Genre: Pop, Jazz
Format: MCH SACD ISO + Hi-Res FLAC

Some of the greatest song writing talents of the fifties, sixties and seventies wrote for the legendary singer Elvis Presley. Barb Jungr, regarded as Britain’s foremost chansonnier and song stylist takes these songs and embarks on a journey through love, loneliness, obsession and finally, faith. ‘Love Me Tender’ is a tribute to Elvis Presley in the real sense of the word. She is not impersonating him. These tracks are real covers – deconstructions and reinterpretations – making the listener forget the original. ‘Love Me Tender’ falls into the dark sound world usually inhabited by Nick Cave and Tom Waits; unforgettable and highly original.

Barb Jungr’s three previous Linn albums have seen her exercise her extraordinary talent for metamorphosing the songs of everyone from Bob Dylan and Jacques Brel to the Everly Brothers and Ray Davies into deeply personal, thought-provoking artistic statements; “Love Me Tender” addresses songs connected with pop music’s ultimate icon: Elvis Presley. Arrangers Adrian York and Jonathan Cooper, given mostly non-musical atmospheric cues to do with Jungr’s perceptions of the Deep South, have produced a remarkably homogeneous soundscape full of tolling bells, doomy repeated chords and aching spaces, transforming songs such as Love Me Tender, Heartbreak Hotel, Are You Lonesome Tonight? and In the Ghetto into poignant meditations on emotional yearning and loss. Jungr’s voice, always affecting courtesy of its ability to move uncontrivedly between the most intimate dramatic whisper, a confiding earnestness tinged with melancholy vibrato, and a strident assertiveness, brings out all her material’s subtlest nuances and the resulting album, which also contains a haunting original, Looking for Elvis, can only bolster Jungr’s already considerable reputation as one of Europe’s most intriguing and intelligent interpreters of the contemporary song.

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Title: Barb Jungr – Every Grain Of Sand (2002) [Reissue 2003]
Genre: Rock, Folk
Format: MCH SACD ISO + Hi-Res FLAC

The cult classic album of song-styled material from the Bob Dylan songbook. Barb Jungr’s first album of Bob Dylan songs has deservedly become known as a cult classic and has won her a dedicated fan base around the world. The album even has celebrity fans, with Jeremy Irons naming it as one of the must-have albums on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs.

Every Grain of Sand is a breathtaking revelation on several fronts. First, Barb Jungr treats Bob Dylan as one of the great tunesmiths of the American popular tradition. Not merely as rock & roll’s preeminent songwriter, the direction from which virtually all others have approached his canon, but as a sophisticated composer the equal of the Gershwins, Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, or Cole Porter. Jungr dramatically re-reads that canon and she fearlessly reshapes it in the process. To cite the most radical instances, she turns “Things Have Changed” into an Eastern European jig and “Tangled up in Blue” into a jaunty, jazzy western, while “Born in Time” is a marvel full of Baroque voicings. One may quibble – and Dylan fanatics, known to be provincial on occasion, certainly will, perhaps vociferously – with an arrangement here or a lyrical interpretation or subtle shading there without – and here is the magic of the album – in the least invalidating the singer’s choices. Indeed, part of the sublime beauty of Every Grain of Sand is that it inspires, even challenges, one to make personal revisions and reinterpretations. Ultimately, Jungr is one of the few artists who has managed to not only come out on the other side of this songbook unscathed, but to actually come out having enhanced its gravity, significance, and unvarnished beauty as well as her own. She is not merely singing, but telling stories. She opens up a window of vulnerability and sensuality that had previously sat stoic beneath the surface of these songs and suffuses them with such a delicate, gauzy luminosity that they seem to glow from the inside out. Her singing is soulful and emotionally naked, and the performances are so expressive that you take something new away with each listen. The treasures (“I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight,” “Ring Them Bells,” “Not Dark Yet,” “Is Your Love in Vain?,” and “What Good Am I?”) tucked away here are endlessly rewarding. If you think you’ve heard Bob Dylan – or Barb Jungr – before Every Grain of Sand, you are, simply put, mistaken.

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Title: Barb Jungr – Chanson: The Space In Between (2000) [Reissue 2001]
Genre: Chanson, Pop
Format: SACD ISO + Hi-Res FLAC

Barb Jungr’s original take on the songs of Jacques Brel marked her Linn debut. Barb Jungr opted to use specially commissioned translations by Des de Moor and Robb Johnson for her English language renditions; the songs losing nothing in their careful translation whilst allowing Barb to fully explore and explain the emotions within the songs. Chanson: The Space In Between saw Barb turn back to her European roots which had previously been overshadowed in performance by American genres such as blues, gospel and jazz.

Timeless as it is, you could have asked, justly, whether or not the new millennium really needed yet another interpretation of the Jacques Brel songbook, so often had it been attempted, both successfully and miserably, in the preceding century. Barb Jungr definitively answered that question on Chanson: The Space in Between, and she answered resoundingly in the affirmative – it is an exhilarating purr of an effort. But then, Jungr, a longstanding anchor of the British alternative cabaret circuit, had already been compared to both Lotte Lenya and Edith Piaf prior to recording this first full-fledged effort in the genre (she had previously performed some of the music live and Bare did include a Brel song amongst its set list), so its accomplishment is no surprise. The album, too, goes well beyond Brel, featuring as it does a repertoire that includes songs by Cole Porter, Jacques Prévert, Léo Ferré, and E.Y. “Yip” Harburg from the old tradition, as well as a tune from the pen of Elvis Costello and a modern chanson from compatriot Robb Johnson. There are several reasons why Chanson is such a splendid realization of Jungr’s vision. For one, the singer specially commissioned translations of the Brel and Ferré pieces from Johnson and fellow cabaret haunter Des de Moor, and they represent the most accurate renderings of these songs into English. Secondly, producer Calum Malcolm, utilizing an extremely sympathetic band, creates rich, poignant backdrops for the songs. You can hear the mythic Paris of yore wafting throughout, particularly in “Sunday Morning St. Denis” and “Cri du Coeur,” while there is an equally strong strain of straight-ahead jazz (“Quartier Latin,” “The Space in Between”). Most important, though, are the ravishing readings given by Jungr. Her performance ranges from the almost desperate and passion-haunted, both in life and love (“La Chanson des Vieux Amants”), to the positively triumphant (“Marieke”) with equal skill, sounding as gorgeously weathered on “I Love Paris” as she seems delightfully guileless and clear-eyed on “New Amsterdam” (with its flawlessly ringing production). This is cabaret in its highest form.

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