Friday, April 24, 2009

At 74 still "Just a Kid with A Crazy Dream":
Leonard Cohen at WAMU theater 4.23.09


Once in a while, one has the opportunity to attend an event that truly feels bigger than life, a few hours that are on a scale than larger than our daily existence. Watching Leonard Cohen present a significant sampling of his life's work was certainly such an evening. A major factor contributing to the quality of this concert certainly is due to the unique quality of this man's poetry and music and his humble zen monk meets well-dressed elder persona. But another contributing factor is the sum result of the amount of care that Cohen, his musical director Roscoe Beck, and the show's sound, staging and other technical personnel put into the pacing, design and execution of this show.

On the new Leonard Cohen Live in London CD and DVD he says he appreciates the "financial and geographical inconvenience" that people take to get to his performance. Pam and I left the WAMU theater after three hours of great art and performance feeling that such measures were totally worth it. And by the content, somewhat glazed looks of others who were leaving the building to look up at the Smith Tower and other unique buildings of the Seattle skyline, I imagine the majority of folks who attended felt the same way.

In the blues, you feel the pulse on two and four. In funk, of course, its all about being on the one. On one level an evening of Leonard Cohen is one of 3/4 time or otherwise have a hard pulse on the third beat. This rhythmic component starts off immediately with his opener Dance Me to End of Love and is returned to time and time again throughout the evening in milestone compositions like Take This Waltz (obviously), So Long Marianne, and Sisters Of Mercy. It has been many years since I concerned myself much with the technical components of poetry, rhyme schemes, stichomythia, and so forth. But it seems to me that if one was to dig around with Cohens lines, you would find plenty of example and justification for why a unit of three beats is common to his work.

Cohen's show also features other examples of the presence of three; most notably the trio of women who bring a haunting texture to his music, his sometimes songwriting parter Sharon Robinson, the phenomenal sibling duo of Charley and Hatti Webb. (I will be commenting on the phenomena of the Webb Sisters in a future post) And there were frequently three guitars playing on stage at the same time: Cohen himself, veteran of other Cohen tours Bob Metzger and also the Spanish guitar master Javier Mas working out on the twelve string guitar but also bringing bandurria, lute, archlute to give an ethnic authenticity in the presentation of tunes like Gypsy Woman and The Partisan.


There are certainly gypsy and Spanish instances and overtones in many of the songs Cohen presents on this tour, but his band has a foundation of a highly well connected state of the art session band from the seventies or early eighties. And no wonder with the likes of Neil Larsen, who played on records by everyone from Foghat, George Harrison, Rikki Lee Jones, and Kenny Loggins. "Instruments of wind" musician Dino Soldo and drummer "Priest of Precision" Rafael Bernard Gayol also contribute to a world class band that has a sound that is polished, but not sterile.

My seeing Cohen this week also is a kind of personal landmark. I think he is the last major musical artist I wanted to see perform live. Larry Rohther's February 25 NY Times interview with Cohen mentioned that Cohen's rumored North American tour was indeed going to be a reality this Spring. My next stop was the Internet where I discovered that the LC fanclub presale would take place in two hours. It took a little while to find the magic password, but I had my tickets secured in the first few minutes. (Then I called Pam with "Honey, you know I don't ever do stuff like this before I talk to you but..")

Rohther's article also explains the circumstances for Cohen's touring at age 74. "“It was a long, ongoing problem of a disastrous and relentless indifference to my financial situation." His manager fleeced him of millions when he had retreated to a monastery for zen studies. ("I studied deeply in the philosphies and world religions, but cheerfulness kept breaking through" he tells audiences these days) His current personal circumstances were summarized by a "Good for us" by another woman who sat a table next to ours at our pre-concert Cajun dinner at the New Orleans restaurant in Pioneer Square.

His abandon in his performance on this tour indicates that he is here for more than economic need. Cohen seems to be experiencing a great deal of joy in performing this show across our continent. He dances frequently and even skips between segments during parts of the second set. This may surpise folks who mainly know Leonard as a poet who wrote a lot about surviving the battlefield of love, and in some cases, a literal battlefield. Cohen's work can be somber but it can be joyous. And there are many shades of somber joy in between.

The tour has been captured on DVD and CD and will, I believe, be as important a document as the 2005 documentary Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man for generations to come to appreciate, understand and enjoy this important and outstanding artist.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:42 PM
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