Five alive: with her own new live album climbing the charts, jazz virtuoso Patricia Barber tells us about the live recordings she loves best.

She's a bold and brilliant jazz pianist who also (in equal measure) sings, writes, and makes no bones about being gay. She took a couple of years off from recording when she was awarded a 2003 Guggenheim Fellowship in order to write a song cycle based on Ovid's Metamorphoses. She is without doubt the only performer ever to be summed up by Time magazine as a cross between Diana Krall and Susan Sontag.

Patricia Barber reemerges with Live: A Fortnight in France (Blue Note), recorded with her longtime quartet in March ,and April 2004. The Advocate asked Barber to quit inspiring us long enough to tell us what live recordings have inspired her.

Return To Forever Live (Columbia, 1978)

I loved this group, it was the first "modern" jazz group that caught my ear back when I was deciding whether or not to spend my life in my father's passion, jazz. After hearing Flora Purim sing and Chick Corea play and listening to the way the rhythm section reacted to the improvisations, I was hooked for life.

Bill Evans Sunday at the Village Vanguard (Live) (Riverside, 1961)

Everybody must have this recording in their collection: It is the most sublime music and sophisticated and lyrical jazz ever recorded. This trio was just coming into its own after Bill Evans broke away from the Miles Davis group. Scott LaFaro died shortly after in a car accident. Bill Evans put the piano into its proper place in jazz by using the instrument's strengths instead of trying to copy trumpet players and saxophonists by playing single lines; he used chords, impressionist runs, and pulled one note out of the top of clusters of notes to let the melody ring out ... and there has never been a more responsive rhythm section.

Elis Regina Live in Montreux (Elektra, 1982; recorded 1979)

This is the best singer Brazil has ever offered, three years before her early death. Here she is with the best Brazilian pianist, her husband at the time, Cesar Camargo Mariano. Regina's voice is the perfect combination of discipline in delivery and emotion in timbre; this creates a tension that makes us feel as if we are understood, and we understand, that nothing human is too foreign.

Joni Mitchell Shadows and Light (Live) (Elektra/Asylum, 1980)

This is what pop music could and should sound like: fabulous lyrics, a great singer, interesting instrumentalists, and a pliable rhythm section. On this record Pat Metheny makes his mark, and the electric bass of Jaco Pastorius is phenomenal, truly never to be heard like this again.

Nina Simone Nina Simone at Town Hall (Colpix, 1959)

Nina Simone is the United States's gift to the world. She played the Midtown Bar in Philadelphia in chiffon gowns just before starting to record for Colpix. Her voice is haunting, her sensibility pure African-American and politically tinged. She is strength, lyricism, vulnerability, and pure, pure art.