The Crazy Coqs, Piccadilly Circus, London W1 – 23 November 2024
Reviewed by Phil Brown
4****
This accomplished and captivating show is something of a precursor to an album launch in January 2025 and a brief tour entitled Hallelujah on Desolation Row in selected locations starting March. Details are on Barb Jungr’s website at https://www.barbjungr.co.uk/tour-dates
Barb Jungr is arguably Britain’s best kept jazz secret, despite a substantial body of recorded work and a long track record of performing, having started singing at the age of 2 on bus rides in Rochdale. Clearly fizzing with ideas, this could be because she draws inspiration from many sources and genres.
She certainly has a formidable range of musical talent, a powerful, expressive voice with exquisite diction, and on the evidence of this gig, the gift of engaging audiences from first contact with a spellbinding, intimate act that showcases her passion for great songwriting. A natural, witty raconteur, one of the many delights of this set were Barb’s between numbers introductions, providing insight into her choice and the song itself.
Amongst many talents are her choice of collaborators. On this performance she was accompanied by the best – Simon Wallace on sublime grand piano and arrangements, and Davide Mantovani on tasteful double bass. I’m not sure if they were mic’ed or not, but I loved the clarity and tone of the acoustic instruments . Both players were immaculate throughout and each took well crafted solos in the course of the evening. A quick glance through Barb’s back catalogue shows she has been collaborating with Simon Wallace over many years and that close relationship really shines through in classy arrangements and flawless performance.
Barb is known principally as a re-interpreter of classic and, apparently to her record label’s vexation, less well known songs, although she is an impressive songwriter in her own right (her Soho Songs suite is brilliant). That glance through her back catalogue also shows she has been re-interpreting Bob Dylan’s songs for quite a few years now. In fact, it might be said she is a Dylan obsessive. (As a lyricist, is there better to obsess over than a Nobel prize winner for literature?). She seems to have come later to Leonard Cohen, but even so, her “Hard Rain:The Songs of Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen” album was released 10 years ago.
On this occasion, Cohen songs open and close the show of 12 numbers (score Dylan 6 : Cohen 6) with Dylan dominating the middle section. As well as being amongst the greatest songwriters of their generation, Cohen & Dylan have the most distinctive of voices in popular music, making these renditions really quite unfamiliar. It’s like listening to completely new material. I must say, in Barb’s register, I thought the Dylan material came across far stronger than Cohen’s, although the bluesy treatment of the incomparable “Tower of Song” and popular favourite “Hallelujah” with a bossa nova style rhythm and Barb on egg shaker were excellent. The others, without Cohen’s deep growl which seems so much part of his art, made less of an impression.
Stand out Dylan songs were the beautifully arranged ballad “Love Minus Zero/No Limit” with lovely bass solo, the jazzy “Mississippi”, and all 10 verses of “Desolation Row”. The Traveling Wilburys hit “Handle with Care” reminded us of what a supergroup can create for fun. On a couple of occasions, Barb mentioned her work with various choirs which ended up inspiring her choice of songs and associated arrangements. One of these was “Love Minus Zero/No Limit”; the other was the dramatic ballad “Kansas City” for which Marcus Mumford/Taylor Goldsmith, fitted music to Dylan’s lyrics and which also included a fine Davide Mantovani bass solo. Of all the songs performed, these two could have been tailor made for Barb. She closed the show perfectly with a heartfelt version of Cohen’s “You Got me Singing” in a seeming personal tribute to the influence of two giants of literate songcraft.
Overall, this was a hugely impassioned performance – a special evening of entertainment and top notch musicianship, and one that rightfully highlights the topmost echelons of the tower of song by bringing some forgotten gems of songwriting back into view…
For the record, “Hallelujah” is released as a single and is available for downloading “from every possible known place in all of the planets and solar systems”.
The full programme was:
| Song | Writer | Source Album |
| Everybody Knows | Cohen | I’m Your Man |
| Tonight Will be Fine | Cohen | Songs From a Room |
| Slow | Cohen | Popular Problems |
| Love Minus Zero/No Limit | Dylan | Bringing it All Home |
| Mississippi | Dylan | Love and Theft |
| New Morning | Dylan | New Morning |
| Desolation Row | Dylan | Highway 61 Revisited |
| Tower of Song | Cohen | I’m Your Man |
| Handle with Care | Dylan + Traveling Wilburys | Traveling Wilburys |
| Kansas City | Dylan/Mumford/Goldsmith | The New Basement tapes |
| Hallelujah | Cohen | Various Positions |
| You Got me Singing | Cohen | Popular Problems |