Barbara Stephan has been kicking around between Milwaukee and Chicago for several years recording commercial music for Full Moon Productions and singing with the Eddie Butts Band and others around the city. For her solo debut, The River, she revisits the brassy exuberance and passion of 1960s and ’70s R&B. Though pitched as a throwback to Motown’s glory years, Stephan harks more to the contemporaneous run of influential soul music at Memphis’ Stax label, with its lesser concern for pop crossover and looser-limbed rhythmic intuition than much of what was laid down in Detroit back when.
Regardless of geographic and stylistic distinctions, Stephan utterly sells the EP’s half-dozen songs, imbuing them with conviction commensurate to Dusty Springfield or Sharon Jones. Stephan’s vocalizing is lighter in timber than those of the aforementioned divas, but still redolent of vintage soul’s gospel roots and more secular longings. It would be no far stretch to imagine The River receiving play on today’s adult R&B radio and, at the very least, being the basis for a fiery concert presentation. Though Stephan has worked in a variety of styles, she could do far worse than to stick with what works so well for her here.
