Music / Cabaret
Review: Barb Jungr – Bob, Brel & Me, St George’s
It’s been twenty years since cabaret chanson singer Barb Jungr released a selection of translated songs by the dark Belgian genius Jacques Brel, followed a few years later by an album of Bob Dylan covers. Since then she’s recorded collections by Sting, The Beatles, Leonard Cohen and countless other cover versions. She also wrote songs, either on her own or in collaboration with others, but it is fair to say her reputation has been built as a great interpreter of other people’s materials. This concert returned to early heroes Dylan and Brel but also made space for her self-written material.
In that respect it was definitely a game of three halves – though with only one interval – because while she interwove those different strands through the evening there was a consistency about each one, too. Thus Bob Dylan’s material generally got a whimsical shake-up while Jacques Brel’s songs were mined for their unsettling darkness and her own pieces slipped out more unaffectedly. These shifts in tone were emphasised by the way her two accompanists – Jenny Carr and Jamie Safir – exchanged seats after each song.
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The Dylan material ranged from an elaborate reworking of Mr Tambourine Man deconstructed in the way the man himself might have attempted to a briskly upbeat One Too Many Mornings, complete with better-than-Bobbish harmonica from Ms Jungr herself. And it was a Dylan song that provided a real highlight when she performed an assertive and angry version of This Wheel’s On Fire, the closing number and the one that fully drew on her vocal range. She has an impressive lower register and it felt like she’d saved it just for this number.
The Brel material, by contrast, was inevitably more sombre and more respectfully delivered in new translations by long-time collaborator Robb Johnson. Lesser known songs included the sardonically unromantic Tender Hearts and Cathedral, a round the world sailing trip complete with disparaging remarks about England (‘it’s always raining tea’) and Cornish girls (‘there for the taking’). It was in the more well-known Jackie that the singer came alive, revelling in the song’s rebarbative arrogance and swagger, while the chastening bleakness of To See A Good Friend Break Down And Cry (written in the shadow of Brel’s terminal illness) revealed the emotional intensity of an under-recognised classic.
Jackie came with a fine anecdote about the singer’s dealings with Madam Brel, who’d objected to Robb Johnson’s revelation of her husband’s use of the C-word, one of many well-judged and stylish interludes allowing Barb to deploy her skills as raconteur. As with telling the story of real life tiger trainer Mabel Stark, she had the cabaret performers sense of comic timing with an implied naughtiness that drew the audience in to an amiable collusion with her. That song was one of her originals, and like Rise and Shine, had an unforced jazziness and breezy timing that reflected her ownership of the material. More moving was encore piece No One Else Could Ever Wear Your Shoes, an elegiac reflection on bereavement made more poignant by the subsequent passing of her co-writer Michael Parker.
If there was a disappointment in the evening it was not the occasional wobbling vocal note – this tour began in early October, after all – but in the instrumental setting. I know there was a fuller band for earlier dates, complete with bass and drums. Shorn of these the two keyboards did not really gel, not least because the grand piano revelled in the full acoustics of the hall, leaving the electronic keys to find a place beside them. It might have been a clearer sound if there had just been one or the other. However what was not lost in all this was a sense of how an intelligent, passionate and skilful singer can often make even more out of great songs than the composers themselves.
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