Gay and Greek

Mythologies is a lousy title for a reporter who wants to protect her sources, but it’s a great way to telegraph to the folks who hand out the Guggenheims that you spent their money wisely. The throat-clearing in the press notes about Schubertian chordal structure, inventive time signatures and the life “partner” on the University of Chicago faculty—all nice touches. Sheesh.

When did Patricia Barber become a teacher’s three-headed pet? What became of the brainy colt who once told some French nogoodnik to take a hike with such cutting charm that I, immediately smitten, played hooky from a meeting to buy the album, Verse (2002)? Have jazz vocalists become so damn recherché that one of the breed’s most elegant and intuitive wisecrackers feels compelled to trot out Oedipus, Narcissus and Orpheus to justify the summer stipend?

Well…sort of. In Mythologies, it’s not Jocasta but the environment that gets a royal screwing from an imperious son blind to the consequences. “Being now gay myself,” Barber writes, it made sense to render “Narcissus” as “the gay wedding song.”

A-ha: no poindexter Cerberus here—more like Ferris Bueller, back from the Hades of the pretension circuit and ready to party! At her best, all the book-larnin’ advances her insidious cause. In Barber’s “Icarus,” beautifully conceived as a tribute to Nina Simone, the preordained crash goes unmentioned. Those uppity harmonies she picked up from Schubert keep the song in flight, sustaining the “boldfaced attempt to fly” like a thermal over that next ridge.

But at her most didactic—as in “Orpheus”—the pedant sadly takes charge. In “Phaeton,” she transparently hectors anybody who didn’t vote Green: “Mother Earth now choking/on soot and ash…who’ll save us now?”

Perhaps recognizing the need to break through the aural gauze that political lecturing tends to produce, Barber rings the bell for reinforcements. Her rescuers, however—including the Choral Thunder gospel choir and some young hip-hop artists—answer not with the sound of trumpets, but a squealing recitation of endangered species: the Indiana Bat, the Hawaiian Bat, the Mariana Fruit Bat…

Some unwinged mammals make the cut, too, and that’s what wins listeners back. Who can say no to the cuddly Black Footed Ferret? Nobody, particularly as the young rappers terrace skyward in an earnest round worthy of the Shakers. And throughout the album, there are moments (“Hunger,” “The Moon”) where Barber’s verses render a succinct and piercing summary of the paradoxes of desire.

And so my romance with Miss Barber can safely resume, notwithstanding the sermons from Mt. Olympus. Too bad she’s off the market. I guess I’ll just crank up the disc and go back to staring into the pond until she takes the stage Friday.

September 1-3. Jazz Standard, 116 E. 27th St. (betw. Park & Lexington Aves.), 212-576-2232; 7:30 & 9:30, $25-$30.