Barb Jungr, John McDaniel - Float Like a Butterfly: The Songs of Sting

Styles: Vocal And Piano Jazz
Year: 2018
File: MP3@320K/s
Time: 67:11
Size: 157,3 MB
Art: Front

(3:12)  1. Wrapped Around Your Finger
(3:45)  2. Englishman in New York
(3:54)  3. Fields of Gold
(5:31)  4. King of Pain
(5:19)  5. Moon Over Bourbon Street
(4:12)  6. Shape of My Heart
(4:37)  7. Roxanne
(4:32)  8. It's Probably Me
(3:44)  9. Until (A Matter of Moments)
(2:31) 10. August Winds
(4:04) 11. Don't Stand So Close to Me
(4:06) 12. Fortress Around My Heart
(3:32) 13. Desert Rose
(2:12) 14. Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic
(5:07) 15. Fragile
(2:31) 16. Message in a Bottle
(4:15) 17. Every Breath You Take

In her introduction Barb Jungr has pointed out the hurdles of interpreting a singer-songwriter of near legendary status such as Sting who comes with all the trappings of such fame. It has, she suggested, made some folk recoil at the mention of his name even before getting to the essence of what the man is all about. Interpreting and adapting Sting’s songs for herself and her pianist John McDaniel throws up a number of challenges not least how to re-configure songs where the backings by the groups in the original recordings are regarded as an essential part of the package. The 18 songs in this programme cross the decades, the most recent being ‘August Winds’ from the short-lived Broadway musical The Last Ship in 2014 (opening in Newcastle on 12 March 2018, followed by a major UK and Ireland tour.). The hits are here but a number of the lesser-known songs suggest that Jungr has paid careful attention to all the texts, stripping each one down to the bare essentials and singing them with an insight and a rawness and emotional energy that she can truly call her own. Jungr can do fun too, her harmonica interpolations being a joy in their own right. ‘Russians’, a polemic against US/Russian foreign policy of the mid 1980s, is launched on the piano with Prokofiev’s ‘Entry of the Montagues and Capulets’, is a rousing anthem in her hands, as is ‘Fortress Around My Heart’. She lends ‘Every Little Thing He Does Is Magic’ a catchy bounce in contrast to the gentle sway of the tune and accompaniment in her interpretation of ‘An Englishman in New York’, so apt for the figure of Quentin Crisp. I loved her evocation of ‘Fields of Gold’, inspired it seems by a pastoral scene viewed from a window in Sting’s Wiltshire house, and in similar vein, ‘Fragile’, a song addressing green issues, prefaced by her poetic description of walking on her beloved Isle of Skye. Her linking narrative is pithy and sometimes unexpected as in her tale of Hogarthian shenanigans in a gentleman’s club in St James’ where she applied for her first job in London in 1975.She also gives us a little insight into the problems lyrics, as in ‘Desert Rose’, can present to a singer instancing a trait in Sting’s lexicon whereby he’ll alter just one word in a line making it “hideous to learn”. The pianist McDaniel is the accompanist and arranger of the songs, a consummate professional, who is at ease whether singing solo, joining in harmony on the refrains, or adding a few words of his own to the links between the songs. One senses a rare rapport between the two of them and a fervent wish from the audience that they will return before too long. http://musicaltheatrereview.com/barb-jungr-john-mcdaniel-float-like-a-butterfly-the-sting-collection-the-pheasantry/

Personnel: Vocals, Harmonica – Barb Jungr; Vocals, Piano – John McDaniel

Float Like a Butterfly:The Songs of Sting

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Barb Jungr - Come Together: Barb Jungr & John McDaniel Perform The Beatles

Size: 135,8 MB
Time: 58:26
File: MP3 @ 320K/s
Released: 2016
Styles: Jazz/Pop Vocals
Art: Front

01. Got To Get You Into My Life (3:46)
02. Things We Said Today (3:39)
03. Eleanor Rigby (4:29)
04. Mother Nature’s Son (2:13)
05. And I Love Her - All My Loving - All You Need Is Love (4:43)
06. I Will (2:17)
07. Getting Better - Here There And Everywhere (4:18)
08. For No One (2:19)
09. Back In The USSR (3:43)
10. It’s For You - Step Inside Love (3:42)
11. While My Guitar Gently Weeps (3:11)
12. The Fool On The Hill (4:26)
13. Something - The Long And Winding Road (4:30)
14. Come Together (4:08)
15. In My Life (3:23)
16. Golden Slumbers - Carry That Weight - The End (3:31)

The critic Chris Ingham has summed up the significance of the Beatles as follows: “[They] represent one of the few times in musical history when the most popular was also the best”. In our current cultural moment, the most popular is so very far from being the best that Ingham’s comment might make you wince with nostalgia. In their terrific new show, “Come Together”, however, Barb Jungr – one of Britain’s finest interpreters of popular song – and John McDaniel – the award-winning American composer and pianist – bring the past vibrantly into the present with a programme of innovatively re-arranged Beatles songs.

Jungr and McDaniel are new collaborators, and they’ve been performing this show over the past few months, including stints at the Edinburgh Festival and across the US, with more New York dates forthcoming in January. Londoners got their first chance to experience the show over four nights last week in the cosy confines of the St. James Studio. It was an occasion not to be missed.

The Beatles could hardly be described as a band that have lacked for tributes over the years, of course. But “Come Together” is about as far removed as can be imagined from the likes of a thrown-together jukebox show such as the hit West End musical Let It Be. Celebrated for her incisive and arresting treatments of the work of songwriters including Brel, Dylan, and Cohen, Jungr, whose shows at the Southbank Centre and City of London Festival have been among 2015’s cultural highlights in the capital, brings a similar approach to bear on The Beatles’ material, her vocals supplemented only by McDaniel’s supple piano-work and her own occasional harmonica-playing. McDaniel also provides harmonies throughout the set, and takes creditable leads on two White Album gems: “Mother Nature’s Son” and “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”.

The stark and dynamic presentation afforded by the cabaret context allows every word in the songs to resonate afresh. With her terrific phrasing, protean delivery, and expressive physicality that turns every track into a fully embodied experience, Jungr digs so deeply into the songs that they emerge new-minted in pretty much every case, with lyrics that you’ve barely noticed before held up to the light and revealed as the very crux of a particular composition.

Given the incredible stylistic diversity of the Beatles’ output, the range of material covered in the show is impressive, the set encompassing both oft-performed classics and album obscurities. “Got to Get You into My Life” was an infectiously exuberant opener, less a straightforward love song (or drugs paean) in this account than a joyous hymn to openness and inclusivity. “Eleanor Rigby”, with haunting high harmonies and delicate piano from McDaniel, was taut, disconsolate and deeply affecting. “The Long and Winding Road” wound itself into stridency that was equal parts desperate and cathartic, Jungr briefly transforming herself into a figure blown by the gales as she reached “the wild and windy night” lyric. Augmented by harmonica and great foot-stamping, “Back in the U.S.S.R.” was equally exhilarating.

Opening the second half, “Hello Goodbye” was delivered as a pleasingly goofy duet. By contrast, “The Fool on the Hill” was mesmerizingly intense, the track slowed and stripped of any hint of jauntiness in this arrangement, the better to quietly celebrate an outsider’s insights and secret strength. Lifting her tear-filled eyes aloft, Jungr seemed momentarily overcome by the emotion the track evoked, before moving elegantly into a drop-dead gorgeous “Something”.

Throughout, Jungr applied her customarily intelligent approach to sequencing the set, with some songs juxtaposed and combined to form story cycles and suites. A wry, sharply pointed “Piggies” mutated into a delicious “Penny Lane”: “very strange”, perhaps, but wonderfully effective. A medley comprising a gender-switched “And I Love Her”, “All My Loving” and “All You Need Is Love” (the latter stripped of obvious anthemic associations to become simply conversational) charted youthful hope and longing leading to the affirmation of “I Will”. Segueing into an exquisite “Here, There and Everywhere”, a blistering “Getting Better” traded menacing, punky verses for redemptive choruses that implied the taming of male belligerence through love. Yet ultimately the narrative concluded with the separation of the couple poignantly evoked in “For No One”, Jungr ending the song on a surprising, perfectly judged note that suggested both mature ruefulness and resolve on the part of the abandoned male.

As presented here “For No One” took on the contours of a reflection on the challenges and liberations of feminism. Indeed, bantering affectionately with McDaniel between songs, Jungr also provided some characteristically quirky, thoughtful commentary on The Beatles’s significance in pop and counter-culture, reflecting (as she did with Cohen and Dylan) on the contrasting personas of Lennon and McCartney, and also suggesting how the band’s music not only mapped but also inspired social changes. The drugged-up craziness of “Come Together” was a supreme closer, Jungr acting her way through the most surreal lyrics with furious aplomb before she and McDaniel returned to the stage for the single-song encore of “In My Life”, delivered as a radiant and gracious benediction.

“Come Together” is very much the kind of show that one can imagine shifting and expanding as Jungr and McDaniel continue to tour it, perhaps taking on different songs and arrangements. (Personally, I’d swap a pair of charming but fairly inconsequential Cilla Black-associated tracks for something meatier. “A Day in the Life”, perhaps? Oh boy.) Thrilling and revelatory, the show is that rarity: an Anglo/American collaboration that’s actually worth celebrating, and that’s enough to restore your faith in “the Special Relationship”, after all. ~by Alex Ramon

Come Together

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