This new all-standards album from Patricia Barber features tunes that she has frequently performed as encores throughout her career, honed at her home gig at Chicago’s Green Mill and on the road. It also provides a welcome counterpart to her first all-standards album,Nightclub, released in 2000. Barber yet again proves herself to be especially adept at casting new light on this repertoire, whether in the moment of catharsis which lights up the instrumental section of Lee Hazlewood’s ‘This Town’, or the subtle iridescence she brings to Rodgers and Hammerstein’s ‘Shall We Dance?’

The self-penned ‘Mashup’ is the first of two trio instrumentals, its taut ostinatos intermittently interrupted by Barber’s freely floating chordal interjections. While Art Blakey’s fizzing drum chorus famously began the original recording of Monk’s ‘Straight, No Chaser’, here bassist Patrick Mulcahy leads things off, digging into the ingeniously shifting accents of the melodic line with aplomb.

Recorded, mixed and mastered in Digital eXtreme Definition at Chicago Recording Company’s Studio 5 with her longtime creative partner (and Grammy award winner) Jim Anderson, what’s particularly impressive about the music-making here is the dynamic control – or perhaps more accurately the dynamic restraint – which Barber and her musicians achieve. The album is brought to a hushed, mesmerising close with Stevie Wonder’s ‘All In Love Is Fair’, which serves to reaffirm Barber’s status as one of the great storytellers of jazz.