Barb Jungr and the Benefits of an Open Mind

Music fans can generally be divided into two camps: Those who see music as a world of ever-expanding possibilities and those who see music as a small island where the only good things are the familiar things. The irony, of course, is that jazz is a music created by people in the first category but supported by many people in the second. What the folks on their small islands end up missing out on is that indescribable thrill you get when you discover a great artist who challenges your expectations and who forces you to listen again to a body of work as if for the first time. Jazz fans with open ears will very likely be in for such an experience when the superb English singer Barb Jungr takes the stage at New York's Flea Theater on September 23, 2002. Jungr's three week run at the Flea, ending on October 13, 2002, will mark her first appearances in the United States in over a decade, and will coincide with the U.S. release of her latest CD, Every Grain of Sand, a provocative and deeply moving examination of the work of Bob Dylan.

It is impossible to mention Bob Dylan's name without opening the door to a closet packed with well-worn cultural baggage. Actually singing the songs of Bob Dylan is almost an irresistible invitation to unpack that baggage. "I've upset so many people, you wouldn't believe," says Jungr sounding more amused than upset. "I've really offended people. If I spent a long time thinking of how to offend people, I don't think I could have done it more effectively." Some critics familiar with Jungr's previous explorations of Jacques Brel and Léo Ferré have objected to the repertoire. "I've had reviews that said, 'how could a person be this stupid to have this amount of vocal talent and put it with this work.'" Rock and folk enthusiasts have also not been shy in expressing their opinions. "The Dylan fans have been much more open and appreciative than rock journalists. Rock journalists, they've been the worst. I've had reviews that said how dare I sing the work in a dress. I can only assume that comment comes from cultural baggage because there is no logic in that statement." However, the overall response to Every Grain of Sand has been overwhelmingly positive. Since it's release in Britain in March, the CD has far surpassed sales expectations largely on the strength of word of mouth. "I have had fantastic support from all the jazz reviewers, but we have no advertising campaign. We have no publicity machine. Massive radio play—no. Massive television—no. Massive adverts—no."

Even if Jungr's label, Linn Records, could afford the kind of huge public relations assault that Blue Note recently launched for Norah Jones, the marketing of Every Gain of Sand would pose an interesting challenge. In many respects, it is easier to define the record by what it is not. It is certainly not a collection of pop/rock covers. Jungr has lifted the material out of its original guitar-based rock/folk milieu and placed it in a chamber jazz setting. The instrumentation consists largely of piano and double bass augmented by percussion, reeds, cello, violin and accordion. The CD is not an overly precious cabaret recital, but neither is it a hip, swinging, scat filled jazz spin on Dylan's music. While Jungr alternately floats, saunters and hurtles through these songs, she never brings the rhythm inside a strict four-beats-to-a-bar-and-no-cheating structure. She doesn't treat Dylan's work as raw material for improvisation, but neither does she approach it with blind reverence. She separates the songs from their associations with Dylan's performances by filtering them through her own equally idiosyncratic but considerably more musical style. As a result, rather than simply repeating the mantra that Dylan was a great songwriter, Jungr actually lays out a musical case to support that argument.

"What's interesting is that when you look at [Dylan's] work, how many ways you could categorize it," observes Jungr. "You could say -there are his God songs, his love songs, his personal songs, his political songs. Then you could say -there are his balladic songs, there are his pop songs, there are his epic songs. You could categorize it in terms of era. Then you could say there are pre-accident and post-accident songs. Which more than anything shows what a body of work it is." As for the appeal of Dylan's work, Jungr offers the following explanation. "It's like he looks out at a view. Say that view is, for the sake of argument, the Hudson River. He paints the Hudson River in pointillistic dots in the first verse. And now he looks at the same view in the second verse and does it like Van Gogh. Now he comes to the middle eight and for the middle eight, he takes the same view and makes a sculpture Now he looks at the view again and etc. He doesn't take you on a journey in the way Brel does. It's not a play. It's not linear in any way. It's like he looks at something prismatically, and because of that it is an emotional journey. You hear things, but you hear things sideways, and sometimes it's uncomfortable to do that. I think when he's great, that's why he's great."

The debate over Dylan is interesting because, for once, where there is cultural smoke, there is also musical fire. "I think Dylan is the place in the river that made the change," observes Jungr. "I think that's why he's so significant. I'm not saying that because I made the album, but because of all the research that I've done. Lennon & McCartney were much more in the tradition of the [Great American] Songbook. I think Dylan was the door opener to the other way of working." To some, the door Dylan opened liberated popular songwriting from strict conventions while to others, it resulted in the glorification of amateurism.

Dylan used the traditions of American roots music and the blues as the basis for a contemporary form of songwriting. "I think he's very much in that balladic American tradition, which, of course, is a folk tradition originally," explains Jungr. Generally speaking, American folk traditions came out of the poor and rural elements of society. The primary compositional tools were stringed instruments; usually guitar but also banjo and fiddle; all of which were considerably cheaper and more accessible than a piano. Since the music was largely passed on by oral tradition, the chord progressions tended to follow a few simple formulas and the melodies had a sparseness to them that made them easy to remember and left plenty of room for vocal ornamentation. While the folk tradition was largely a product of the rural sections of the country, jazz and Tin Pan Alley were the product of the cities. Musicians and songwriters in these urban areas began interweaving aspects of American folk music, most notably rhythm, with the harmonic and melodic depth of European classical music. Dylan's songwriting can be viewed as an effort, only partially successful, to undo those linkages and reestablish continuity with the original folk traditions, although he did abandon the clear narrative style of those traditions in favor of a more abstract kind of poetry. Still, in his rejection of the more sophisticated forms of popular music as inauthentic and his implicit idolization of the image of the lonely bluesman, Dylan can be seen as contemporary popular music's version of Rousseau, choosing emotion over reason.

When you eliminate from the discussion those who want to use the debate over Dylan as a proxy for larger cultural divisions, the argument inevitably leads you back to one core question. What criteria do we use to determine whether a song is good? That debate is especially relevant to jazz fans, who have been struggling with issues of repertoire for years. Barb Jungr brings to the discussion not only her experience as a singer, but also her experience as a prolific composer and a lyricist. "For me, a good song says something in the combination of music and lyric that is greater than the sum of its parts," explains Jungr. "I really like simplicity. I'm not a person who necessarily wants the clever clever though I like the clever clever now and again. I think all great music is instantly accessible at every level so that one could have a degree in music and get something different from it but one can go into it and know nothing and get something from it as well. I suppose that's what a really good song is. It has got levels like an onion and you can peel it and peel it and peel it and people who've got different onion ability can sit in the audience and get all of those levels or just one of them, but they can get something."

Jungr cites Jacques Brel, Bob Dylan, George and Ira Gershwin, Rodgers & Hart/Rodgers & Hammerstein and Lennon & McCartney as among her favorite songwriters. As that list suggests, Jungr does not feel any need to choose between the Great American Songbook and the singer/songwriters of the rock era. "Let's take Joni Mitchell, I think she's very interesting," suggests Jungr. "I think she's a fascinating songwriter. She takes the mirror and holds it to some of your least public places and then writes what she sees. When that's wonderful, it's wonderful, and sometimes I find it incredibly self-indulgent. Musically, she always says she goes about it in a painterly way, and I think she does. So there are things that are frankly bizarre about what she's doing, and when it works, it's wonderful and when it doesn't, it's bizarre for the sake of being bizarre. Let's take as a comparison, both musically and lyrically, the Gershwins. I get the feeling here are people whose art is supported by a volume of craft and understanding of craft. Therefore, there are no dodgy rhymes. There isn't a mirror held to any body parts. In a way, it's the application of the craft beyond oneself. In that sense, they are different animals. In the end result, they're the same because where they have created good songs, the songs do the same thing."

The singer is far less enthusiastic about contemporary popular music. "When you listen to a song, like all of this R&B which isn't R&B, not R&B as we think of R&B, you'll get one set of chords that repeats and repeats, and the singer will do this incredibly elaborate maneuvering and ornamentation, and you struggle to find what tune there is. There's far too much ornamentation because there isn't any tune. There are no chord changes. There are no changes because they've been done on a computer," says Jungr disgustedly. "You get to a point where a song should go somewhere and it doesn't go there. Production stuff happens. If we're going to say bad; bad songs to me are songs that are empty. Lots of pop music for me is bad music and I find that sad."

"I want more and more to have the very best that I can get," explains Jungr. "There are such good songs around. There is such a wealthy of repertoire in the world it seems to me that one can't even begin." Jungr's willingness to part the Iron Curtain that separates the two popular songwriting traditions in search of good material is at least part of the reason that Jungr's work defies easy categorization. Her insatiable curiosity and sharp ears have drawn her into extended investigations of jazz, blues, traditional R&B, gospel, and a wide range of folk music from American roots music to African music to Iranian tribal singing. She has distilled all of these influences into a highly personal style that suggests a contemporary amalgam of Peggy Lee and Nina Simone. Jungr sings with far more grit and spontaneity than Lee and far less narcissism and affectation than Simone. Like both women, Jungr often moves around the circumference of jazz although she can and does sing straight ahead jazz. Reflecting on a recent five night engagement at London's Pizza on the Park, Jungr observed, "I found myself doing an incredible jazz set and loving it and thinking, 'hang on a minute.' I think I'm further over the line [into jazz] than I thought. The repertoire that I've done, particularly the chanson, has probably [limited] me. There is not a lot of scope quite honestly in 'Don't Leave Me' to play melodically, so one isn't taking a jazz approach to that, but then on 'Sunday Morning St. Denis,' I am able to improvise quite a lot."

When asked to describe her work, Jungr will often use the term European cabaret, which is a very different animal than its American cousin. The term "cabaret" in the United States has come to refer to theatrical style singers performing show tunes to allegedly sophisticated audiences in small venues. European cabaret, on the other hand, presents a wider and more freewheeling range of performers (singers, comedians, etc) presenting material with an intellectual, satirical or political edge. Having said that, it would be a mistake to confuse Barb Jungr's work with the type of highly stylized European cabaret performance associated with Marlene Dietrich or, more recently, Ute Lemper. She brings a genuine warmth and naturalism to her singing that suggests her deep roots in gospel and jazz.

In fact, Jungr's views on music are far closer to what one expects to hear from a jazz musician than a cabaret performer. "It's my aim never to perform a piece the same way twice," says the singer. "The first few times you perform, you're hanging on the cliff with your fingernails. Then there comes a point when the body remembers and then you don't have to hang on the cliff. Then you can start being dangerous. Sometimes you fall off the cliff with that, and it's a disaster. Sometimes you do something incredible. It's a never-ending journey...I do think that it's a really good thing if one never sets a song then [the singer & the musicians] have got to listen all the time."

Jungr, who has taught music and performance to undergraduates at all of England's major drama and art colleges, has little patience with musical ineptitude on the part of singers. "I think it is really important to know your craft," she says. "I think as a singer you really do need to know the chords. You don't necessarily need to be able to name them all, but you should hear them all. I think it's terribly important. Many of the jokes and stories about singers are there because they are true." Jungr also points out that there is a distinction between knowledge of craft and its application. "I take the Zen view that the doing of the thing is how you learn to do it. You can endlessly go to courses on all sorts of things. I think jazz is a really interesting example of this. People are pouring out of the Guildhall [School of Music and Drama] knowing every single chord change, and, I don't think, having any sense of what it is to play. They don't have the chance to play because you cannot do what you used to be able to do 40 years ago, which is to play for 360 nights of the year, which is what you need to do if you want to be any good. I'm lucky in that I get to perform quite a lot For this year, I'm probably performing between two and four times a week, and that's really high."

Where Jungr parts company with many in the jazz community is on the question of lyrics. "I'm more and more often thinking everything is in the text," she explains. "If the melody is stunning and the lyric is dross, I couldn't sing the song. Singers sing words largely speaking. The words have got to mean something I think. That's me. I don't think that's true of all singers, and there are all sorts of singers who sing brilliantly for whom that's not true, and that's fine. I do understand music where the text isn't important, but, speaking just for myself, it's terribly important."

Jungr does exquisite justice to lyrics singing them in a voice that seems capable of expressing every gradation of feeling. Although, Jungr is drawn as a listener to singers like Edith Piaf, Maria Callas, Dinah Washington, Janis Joplin and Robert Johnson, she doesn't sing with the same kind of exposed nerve endings. Her passion and energy are tempered by a keen intellect that can't help but suggest self-awareness. You cannot synthesize her art into an overarching paradigm the way you can with Piaf's desperation, Callas's intensity, Washington's defiance, Joplin's loneliness or Johnson's fear. On Jungr's stunningly subtle performance of Dylan's "Not Dark Yet," she manages to explore all of those emotions and more in the course of a single four and half minute performance. Rather than distilling human emotions, she blends them to capture the oftentimes-contradictory impulses of the heart and mind.

"I'm not a characterizing singer," says Jungr. "I'm a sort of like Walter Matthau. I come to [the song] as me every time and that is my way into it. Which is why I'm not a jobbing performer. People ask me to do things because they want what it is I do, which is just as well I think. I'm not capable of chameleoness. I don't know why. So I suspect that I come to it from a point inside myself." However, Jungr is quick to point out that a singer should be a conduit for the lyric and not the other way around. "I try, and I'm not sure I always succeed, but I try not to impose anything [on a lyric] anymore," she explains. "I did in the past, and I think where I've done that, it's been a mistake. What I try to do is let the song do what the song is supposed to do through me. So if I pick a song, as a for example, 'I'll Be Your Baby Tonight.' I don't start off by saying, 'This would be fantastic if I did it really slow and sexy like a one night stand.' I say, 'that is a really fabulous song.' Now I'm going to sing it and sing it and sing it until the song tells me something. The song informs me."

According to Jungr, during the act of singing the song, "you have to feel as if you've written it." Consequently, she sees the distinction between original material and existing material as an illusory one. "There's no difference at all. I don't feel a greater connection to my own work. I feel just as connected to anything that I choose to sing, and there are songs of my own that I choose not to sing. There are songs that I've written for other people that I don't choose to sing."

Having said that, Jungr does see a responsibility on the part of a singer working with existing material to have a reason for singing the song. "I worked on a song by Sandy Denny, 'Who Knows Where the Time Goes.' We must have tried it 50 different ways in rehearsal. I can't tell you how fed up my musicians were. I'd say, 'let's try it like this' and 'let's do this.' I taped every single version that we'd done and I listened to them and said no, no, no. Finally, I said, 'I'm sorry I just don't think we are bringing anything to this.' To me, I just want to go over and play her version. We did lovely, lovely work but it brought nothing to it So you say, okay, fine, I tried." Jungr goes on to add, "It is very tricky, I think, especially if you are doing Great American Songbook songs, because lots of very good people have sung them. I think one has to be aware of what they've done and know what they've done and have some view of it as well. Then I'll see if I can try to do something somebody hasn't done or at least bring something of myself to it that hasn't been done. One has got to attempt that I think. You need a certain amount of nerve, don't you? It's kind of a diving board thing. I think you've got to jump off the diving board with those kinds of songs, and hope there is water in the pool. And sometimes there isn't and you've also got to be able to have enough sense to know that. There are some songs in that repertoire that I'd really balk at doing because I'm not sure what I can bring to them."

It very well may be her willingness to engage in self-criticism that ultimately separates Jungr from so many of her colleagues. "You've got to be able to that. God, we've got to be able to change position and be able to work through stuff. I think one has to have the capacity to change. You must be able to go down alleys that are cul de sacs. You must be able to say, 'I took a wrong turning. I used to think this and now I think that.' Dylan, for example. I used to not get it and now I'm thrilled that I found this body of work. In any small way, if I get people to say, 'my goodness, what a great songwriter,' then that would be fantastic." Jungr uses the risk of failure as the fuel for her artistic engine. "I think doubt is really positive. We ought to have doubts otherwise how can you possibly examine anything? I don't see how we could have found the structure of DNA without doubt. I don't see how anybody can do anything without it."

Barb Jungr's openness to risk and change may be the product of her childhood. She was born in Rochdale in the northwest of England. "My dad is Czech and he came over just after the war. My mum's German but her father is a Bohemian Czech. Of course, in America this would not be surprising at all or even interesting, but here it is where everybody's English, but of course nobody really is, but certainly they're not quite at bizarre as my family." Her parents exposed Barb to a wide range of cultural experiences starting at a very young age. "My parents were brilliant. I blame them for everything. I could hardly walk and they took me to the opera. They took me to the cinema. They took me loads of live things. We used to go see these touring variety shows, I guess like vaudeville would have been. There would be a comedian and a singer and a specialty act. Cabaret really, in the widest sense of the word. I saw a lot of live performance and a lot of live singing. And in the house, we had the radio on all the time. Even though, because my dad was a refugee, we were very poor at first, they had a turntable and I remember we had Nat King Cole and we had Ella Fitzgerald and we had an interesting collection of things that were largely speaking jazz. Not show music although I did get very, very tied up with South Pacific. South Pacific had a profound effect. I could sing the whole thing when I was about 8 years old"

The Jungr family moved to Stockport, which Barb describes as "one of those places where you were saying, 'Get me out of this place as quick as possible!'" At school, she took up the violin. "I formed an all-girls folk group when I was fourteen. We had very straight, long hair and sang these mournful versions of James Taylor songs. I used to play the violin and sing. I can't tell you how bad this must have been," laughs Jungr. "I was also leader of the violins in the orchestra, but I was a rotten violinist. They were auditioning, we used to do Gilbert & Sullivan all the time, and so they said you must come and do an audition. So I auditioned and got a lead straight off. I think the rot had really set in then so I dumped the violin, which," adds Jungr with a laugh, "was probably a good thing for music generally."

Jungr attended university at Leeds. "I joined a trad jazz band and we also had a sort of 12-string kind of bluesy, kind of folk thing, and I sang. Then I moved to London and just joined a band. I was lost as far as my family was concerned." Jungr says that she never made a conscious decision to pursue a singing career. "I think I couldn't not do it. I think it is not about wanting to do it, I think it is about not being able to not to do it. You can't help yourself. In that sense, it's sort of vocational. There was no sensible thought process in all this because if there had been I would have bloody hell done it better."

Jungr did quite a bit of studio work in the late 1970s. "I wasn't doing any live work and I began to feel the lack of that." She formed a three-part gospel harmony group, the Three Courgettes. "It was around the time of New Wave and we rearranged the material at a breakneck speed. We were incredibly popular and then it sort of went the way of all things." Jungr and guitarist Michael Parker continued to perform together as duo. "That man taught me more about the blues and gospel than I think anyone had ever done," says Jungr of her partner in Jungr & Parker. "At that point in time, the alternative cabaret circuit started. Alternative cabaret was a non-sexist, non-racist performance that arose in response to what was happening in mainstream performance. It was all in little pubs. If you had a pub with an upstairs room that could fit 40 people, you had a cabaret. I worked every night of the week and every night we'd do three or four gigs. All sorts of performers -physical performers, singers, comedians; all struggling to articulate this new way of thinking about performance. As you can imagine, it didn't last long."

However, Jungr & Parker survived the demise of the alternative cabaret circuit and remained a duo for twelve years. "We worked somewhere in the line between blues and folk music...writing these quirky little songs. We did lots of radio stuff. Lots of live radio. Lots of close harmony work because we were both such lovers of gospel music and blues. I played the harmonica, and I'm not a bad harmonica player, but I'm never going to be one of the greats...We used to do lots of radio programs like 'Stop the Week' and on Friday morning, they'd call us with a list of topics and on Friday afternoon we'd record a song. I can't tell you the amount of times we sat asking what can we say about the Queen Mother that we haven't already said. We must have written 200 of those. Great for [building] songwriting skills."

Eventually, the interests of Jungr & Parker diverged. "I'd always been interested in jazz. I'd always been interesting in theater. I'd always been interested in a kind of level of performance that we were not achieving because what we were doing couldn't embrace that Michael loves to sit in a pub or a bar and play the blues and that's what he does now. He's a terrific player. He's got a beautiful voice and a real understanding of the form. He's bloody great. But I wanted light, sound, something very different. I wanted to look into the door of different sorts of performance."

By the early 1990s, she began to experiment with the theme show format. Where other singers would perform an evening of Stephen Sondheim or Cole Porter, Jungr would do a show about death or a collection of songs about money. "These were cross genre songs. I would take an idea and see if the songs illuminated the topic." In constructing these pieces, Jungr also began to consider the nature of communication in live performance. "There is a visual element when you're singing live," observes the singer. Rather than relying on instinct, which often results in the recycling of a small number of gestures, Jungr actively thinks about the visual aspects of her singing. "My whole way of working with physicality is that it emerges from text. You never put it on. You never lay it on. In rehearsal I would allow every gesture that comes comes, then it becomes part of the stylistic presentation of that song."

Jungr believes a singer's primary focus must be on communicating with the audience. "I think if you're only singing for yourself, I'd question why you're on stage. I do think you owe people things. I think you owe them that you've got decent clothes and that you've got some skills and that you make them feel like they're seeing something worthwhile. I do think the audience is important. I think one ought to be speaking to them. I think one ought to be communicating with them outside of just the songs. I simply do not find it acceptable that some people only say, 'and this song is by Cole Porter.' I just don't think that is enough."

Jungr's experiments with cross genre theme shows allowed her to come into her own as a solo artist after nearly 15 years of working as part of a duo or trio. She forged a highly idiosyncratic style, in the best sense of that word, that allowed her to combine the musicianship and control of a jazz singer with the passion of a gospel singer and the theatrical sensibilities of a performance artist. Having successfully used a body of work as a means to explore her own singing, Jungr was finally in a position to do the reverse.

"When I was doing these shows, I found myself going to this [chanson] material and singing Brel," recalls Jungr. "Someone would ask me why I was singing that translation and I had no idea. Suddenly, I got involved with the whole issue of translating. Then I started to realize that if you were going to do this material, you'd really have to take this on board." Jungr immersed herself in the world of French chanson in an effort to better understand the form.

Originally, the term chanson was used to describe a French song of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. The term was revived and applied to a distinct strain of 20th Century French popular music that has become most associated with Jacques Brel and Edith Piaf. "They're complete one act plays," explains Jungr. "They're lyric driven. They are emotionally informed. Melodically, generally speaking, there are two sections, an A and a B. One informs the other. One is a different view of the other. Generally speaking, a story happens. The melodies of those two sections are not wildly complex. I'm not a musicologist so I can't say that it is in the way the chords are configured, but I suspect there is something to that as well. They don't talk about it in the books on chanson, but I think they ought to."

Previous efforts to translate chanson often drained the songs of their unique identity. Rob McKuen's famous translation of Brel's "Ne Me Quitte Pas" ("If You Go Away") is an excellent example. McKeun abandoned the narrative thrust of the chanson and crafted a pop song lyric, albeit a memorable one, out of the ideas in Brel's piece. Jungr wanted to convey to English speaking listeners the same kind of emotional journey that French speaking listeners had while listening to chanson. She corralled her friends Robb Johnson and Des De Moor into crafting new translations of some of the most prominent French chansons and then set out on the difficult task of obtaining permission from the various copyright holders.

The new translations by De Moor and Johnson are revelations. They not only beautifully capture the dense imagery of the chanson, but also it's unique cultural character. "What the French chanson tradition does is illuminate something that is quintessentially French," explains Jungr. "It moves into the broader sphere of being emotionally true because in the Western world we share a certain commonality of understanding of emotional codes, but...take for example, the 'Song of Old Lovers' -'I know your tricks and your deceptions you know my spells and wiles and charms / Sure we've had lovers in our beds it helped when there was time to kill.' Now, I'm sorry, 'sure we've had lovers in our beds' is not necessarily an English thing, but it is quintessentially French. It's a very obvious example but it's true."

Linn Records gave Jungr the opportunity to document her explorations on record with the release of Chanson: The Space In Between in 2000. As she would later do with Dylan, Jungr reconfigured the songs into new musical settings. She navigates the tricky emotional terrain of "Marieke," "The Poets" and "Les Marquises" avoiding both pretension and melodrama, and her rendition of "Don't Leave Me" is heartbreaking in its naked honesty. Jungr also included other material designed to comment on and compliment the chansons including fresh rethinkings of two beautiful standards, "April in Paris" and "I Love Paris." She also included Elvis Costello's "New Amsterdam," which she describes as a British chanson.

Although she has not recorded an album of the material, Jungr has spent quite a bit of time in performance exploring the idea of British chansons, songs that are quintessentially British. "I think [chansons] are idiomatic to a particular culture," explains Jungr. "We have to talk about the really big thing here, which is the influence of America on the popular music of the world, which is massive, massive, massive. I speak as a person who loves gospel music and jazz, but what is interesting to me as a European is that there are things that are clearly not American in popular music and they are interesting. I suppose when I use the term chanson, what I'm actually speaking about, if I put my hand on my heart, is things that are not American. Not because there is anything wrong with [American music], quite the reserve, but you get something different, and that's quite exciting."

Of course, her in-depth exploration of European chanson makes Jungr's decision to turn to the unmistakably American music of Bob Dylan all the more intriguing. "I was not a great Dylan fan when I was growing up," confesses Jungr. "I think I was slightly too young to have been in that place. The generation before me found him profoundly affecting, and I didn't. What brought me to him was 'Blind Willie McTell' I heard it once and never forgot it. Even though I didn't like Dylan's voice at that time, I mean I have a completely different viewpoint now, but at that time, I didn't like it. I remember that song. It had such an impression on me. Then I did a collection of songs about murder, and I did 'Who Killed Davey Moore?' At that point, I really began to understand Dylan's greatness in terms of his ability to capture something."

However, it was quite some time before the idea of recording a body of Dylan's work occurred to Jungr. "I was sitting in front of a television watching a cop show about New York," recalls the singer. "It was about 1:00 in the morning and I had just done a gig and was just trying to wind down. Out of nowhere, I thought, 'you must sing the songs of Bob Dylan.' I thought, 'for goodness sake, you've really lost it now.' Then I thought, 'I've got to take this seriously.' I pondered it for about a month before I voiced it to anyone."

Once she made the commitment to go forward, Jungr threw herself into the research. She read as much material on Dylan as she could find, "from the shabby biographies to the earnest; from the academic papers about why he is like Keats to the reminiscences by Joan Baez." Naturally, she also began sifting through Dylan's sizeable discography. "When I started to listen to the work, it was fascinating to me how many of these songs I knew. Not only did I know them, I could sing you whole chunks of them. I'd be listening to an album that I had never seen before, and I'd be singing along with it. Not only was I singing along, but I knew the next verse. What was interesting, is that I didn't know I'd known those song, though they were not necessarily the songs I picked"

Jungr approached the Dylan catalog with a critical ear as she looked for songs that could stand on their own. "Let's take as an example, 'Isis,' a song that I love and I couldn't do it. Although when you hear it, it sounds as if he's doing an incredible amount melodically, in fact, it's a very simple melody and nothing really happens. Short of doing what he's doing -he's doing fantastic things to the words, the amount of melisma is incredible, it's all over the shop -when you strip it down, unless you do that, there's nothing there for you to do. You can't do that without sounding like him so you can't sing it. I had a much bigger list than the fifteen songs that I ended up with, but when we started working on them, halfway through rehearsal, I'd say, 'Sorry, I don't know what we're doing.'" Ultimately, Jungr chose songs for the Dylan project for the same reason she chooses all her songs; her belief that she can say something different and worthwhile with the material. "I think where [Dylan] works best as a songwriter is where the balance is absolutely right between the music and the lyrics," explains the singer. "Obviously, the songs that I picked, I think that happens."

Her research also gave Jungr new insight into Dylan as a singer. "I used to really find it difficult to hear because I found that nasal tone so hard," she explains. "When I started to really strip it down, I realized, he's a great blues singer, by which I mean he's completely idiosyncratic. He makes no concession to anything except his commitment to the sound, that's to the say the voice with the word and the emotional drive of that, and so suddenly it was like a curtain opened and I thought, 'he's brilliant.'"

Jungr brings her own form of brilliance to Dylan's songs on Every Grain of Sand. Her expressive, textured voice wraps around the lyrics allowing her to use tone as well as inflection to convey meaning. She moves with confidence from the quiet seductiveness of "I'll Be Your Baby Tonight" to the fevered intensity of "Ring Them Bells." Her emotional commitment to the lyrics remains absolute, rendering the surprising romanticism of "If Not For You" and the self-loathing neediness of "I Want You" with equal clarity. Musically, she sings with impeccable control and timing.

"I'm ever so proud of this record. I think it is the best recorded piece of work that I've done," says Jungr, adding, "I expect when I do the next recording, I'll say that about the next one." For the moment, Jungr is non-committal about where her next musical adventure will take her. "If I had decided what to do next five months after Chanson, I would never have done the Dylan." Fortunately, Jungr has plenty of projects to occupy her attention. In addition to her busy schedule of live performances and teaching, Jungr is engaged in the task of writing a musical, The Ballad of Norah's Ark, with pianist Russell Churney. "The songs are all of a kind of gospel, R&B, slightly jazzy feel," offers Jungr. "The difficulty that you face is that you want to be doing this every day. I'd like to finish this next week and start the next. That's what makes you good at [writing musicals]. That's what makes you good at things like structure, what makes you good at anything, is doing it constantly over and over."

At the end of the day, what drives Jungr is the experience of the work itself. "I'm really lucky," observes the singer. "I do what I like doing most of the time. Most of the time I don't have to work with people I don't like; that's unlike nearly everyone in the world. I very rarely have to be in situations where I don't want to be in. I'm reasonably well paid. I don't do badly. I've got my own lovely flat in the center of London. I can afford holidays. I own a car. I can largely speaking pick and choose the work I want to do. Yes, of course, I'd like to be playing three weeks at the Blue Note. Yes, I'd love to play Carnegie Hall. Yes I'd like to own more than I do. But in the greater scheme of things, I do really well. Trade offs? Did I want to be married to a banker? Probably not. I'd rather be doing what I do than stacking shelves or working in a mine. I don't see where I've had to make massive trade offs. Here I am making friends all over world. I'm very, very lucky."

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