You don’t think twice about going to see outstanding performer Barb Jungr in a show featuring Bob Dylan classic covers – you just know this versatile singer is going to bring on the fireworks. She may have been singing Dylan songs for more than 21 years (a late arrival to one of the greatest singer-songwriters of all time, in her words) but the passing of time has enhanced and enriched her performances of some of his gems.
Also a skilful interpreter of Jacques Brel and Leonard Cohen her tribute to Bob Dylan remains breathtaking as she finds hidden depths in the lyrics and delivers each song with heart-stopping passion. While she sometimes mixes the work of these three writers in her shows, her Crazy Coqs cabaret concert is dedicated to Dylan alone, a masterpiece of colour, shade and intelligent perception. Whether from one of Dylan’s brief periods of happiness or times of bleak darkness, Jungr is constantly re-examining the songs to reveal more about the music.
Jungr appears on a list of the top ten artists to have covered Dylan’s work last work, and she proves why in this stormy one-nighter. If his lyrics are words that rip you apart, then Jungr’s reading of them dares you to go further in hearing new things with grasping penetrability.
These are intense and difficult songs (as Jungr’s performance of Hard Rain demonstrated, though her introduction warned us of its hazards and, as she pointed out, even Dylan himself doesn’t always remember the words of his compositions) but you will need to go a very long way to find a performance so varied and emotionally electrifying and compelling. And when forced to peek at her lyrics folder during the tongue-twisting Hard Rain she blames herself for leaving out all the long spaces Dylan himself put into the song when he sang it. As she remarked earlier, Dylan has a lot of words in his songs – but every one of them is wonderful.
There isn’t a dud on the 11-song setlist. We are taken from the contented 70s charms of If Not for You to the late 90s cynicism of Not Dark Yet, and from the love song written after estrangement from his then wife Sara to the lyricism of Mississippi. It takes genius to be able to mix the tense sentimentality of I Want You with the perplexing perspectives of Tangled up in Blue or the surrealism of Tambourine Man in a show lasting just over an hour, but Jungr effortlessly achieves it with a wink and a sly grin before slipping into the next insightful cover.
The great skill of Jungr is not just to throw the songs out unremittingly but to provide often light-hearted introductions to each number. “I’d have been tempted to run off with The Man in the Long Black Coat,” she jests before remarking on the poetic beauty of the line “Scorpio Sphinx in a calico dress” in Sara and reminiscing about seeing Dylan in concert in Blackpool with her mum, who commented that he was, “clearly a very talented man.”
Accompanied brilliantly on piano by her long-time associate Jenny Carr, Jungr shows no sign of tiring of songs that she has been singing, recording and rediscovering for so many years. Barb Jungr is a timeless performer who never loses her star quality. In her Bob Dylan show we see what can only be described as a masterclass in cabaret perfection.
Reviewed on 14 October 2022
The Reviews Hub Score
A song interpretation masterclass
