The Men I Love: The New American Songbook

Barb Jungr is more than just a great singer. She’s one of the world’s premiere song stylists, drawing critical acclaim both sides of the Atlantic famed for her inspired recasting of material from the likes of Bob Dylan,Jacques Brel, Nina Simone and Elvis Presley. Her latest album, The Men I Love, her first for Naim documents Jungr’s love of American popular song and its songwriters. As has come to be expected with Barb,
the material displays her impressive ability to re-imagine well known popular songs, revealing deep meanings and latent emotional content that comes to light when she dislodges the songs from their original contexts:
“There is a body of great work which sits for me right inside the classic Great American Songbook, where songs both stand the test of time and also are able to be re-imagined and sometimes re-harmonised, allowing them to grow and develop beyond original recordings”
The genesis of this project was a season at the fabulous uptown venue, the Café Carlyle in New York City.
The Café had become famous for a particular type of American and European song, and Jungr decided she wanted to do something a little different. She worked with pianist, arranger, producer and friend Simon
Wallace in creating a new and varied programme of ‘Great American Songs’ by contemporary writers. The show blew the doors wide open. The season was a wonderful success, and the audiences queued up to tell Jungr how much the songs meant to them inspiring Jungr to make the show the basis of her next album.