Verse is a spare but seductively beautiful album, its understated production giving space for the mind and ear to roam. The opening track, “The Moon,” opens gradually, as if the listener were stepping delicately into a pool of water. Disconnected fragments of guitar and trumpet ripple weirdly around Barber’s half-spoken musings. But once this intro is over her voice becomes harder – never raised, but nonetheless more commanding. She risks pretentiousness or awkward poeticism with her choice of subject-matter – the lyrics are spoken in the person of the moon, that mythologized, feminized celestial body – but Barber’s vocal has a slightly alien chill which makes them utterly convincing. She delivers lines like “i hear your thoughts / i move the tides / i am your God / i am your Muse” with an almost disdainful directness, and her woundedness is edged with accusatory menace: “but tonight / there won’t be light / cause i can’t shine / without you.” But her voice, cool with a hint of astringency, is not the only one here: it is balanced by Dave Douglas’s trumpet, which wordlessly expresses the inner heat and passion left implied by the singer. Similarly, on “I Could Eat Your Words,” a smouldering bossa concerning a student’s romantic obsession with her teacher, the languorous erotic fantasies given voice by Barber are counterpointed by Douglas’s more piercingly direct solo.

The album’s most impressive setpiece is “Clues,” in which the muted sense of disorientation and disquiet that informs many of Verse’s songs receives chillingly direct form. The moody opening lyrics flit quickly by, as if the speaker were attempting at once to register and outrun her fears: “the moment slips by in silence / like dying in your sleep / peripheral vision could save you if / the movement weren’t so fleet.” But at the heart of the song is a musical dark night of the soul: lines like “the howl of the wind / the weight of the train / the flip of the switch / the crack of the ice” drop like stones, answered only by twisted shreds of orchestral strings and Neal Alger’s eerily polymorphous guitar. What musical and emotional resolution there is here is left to the strings, though their final sustained chord is profoundly ambiguous: at once ominous and peaceful.

Verse is to my mind Barber’s most fully achieved CD to date. It’s one of the strongest jazz releases of the past year.

Nate Dorward

Cadence, December 2002