Patty Waters – Live December 2019 By Emily Pothast

Five and a half decades ago, Patty Waters’s astonishingly unorthodox vocal performance of the traditional ballad “Black Is The Color Of My True Love’s Hair” blazed across the B side of her debut for Bernard Stollman’s ESP-Disk’ label, propelling her into the pantheon and inspiring artists from across the improvisatory spectrum. “In a way, if there had been no Patty Waters, then there would have been no Ghost,” Masaki Batoh told Edwin Pouncey in The Wire 242. After following up 1965’s Sings with an eerily atonal live album recorded on a tour of college campuses in New York state, Waters slipped into obscurity to raise her son.

Since her public re-emergence in the mid-1990s, Waters has released a handful of albums and performed sporadically, including a residency at London’s Cafe Oto in December 2017 for which she reunited with Burton Greene, the original pianist from her 1960s recordings. Live was performed in Brooklyn on 5 April 2018, with an ensemble that includes Greene alongside (bass) and Barry Altschul (percussion). The set starts out with a fretting, mournful tone; the natural vulnerability in Waters’s voice made more plaintive by the news, delivered right before the show began, that Cecil Taylor had just passed away. The group rustle through a set of standards and Waters’s “Moon Don’t Come Up Tonight”. Some of the song choices, especially “Strange Fruit”, place her in direct dialogue with an ongoing history of racialised violence. While clearly intended as a homage to Billie Holiday and a form of protest, Waters’s rendition also serves to draw attention to her own whiteness, raising questions about the role(s) of race in an idiom as openended yet socially constructed as free jazz.

The set ends with a cyclonic and stirring performance of “Wild Is The Wind”, which also appears on College Tour. These are not the captivating shrieks of a 20 year old singer. Rather, they are the free and open sounds of a woman who has lived a whole life – something we don’t hear often enough.

The Wire, December 19, p. 56 (print)