Stone Cupid leader will set off 'Fireworks' at SOhO gig on Monday

A documentary on the life and times of Montreal poet-singer-songerwriter Leonard Cohen, with performances of his work by musicians who worship at his altar....I like this mix: A little bit of "live" Cohen, a lot of fresh takes on his songs from Rufus and Martha Wainwright, Antony, Beth Orton, Jarvis Cocker, Kate and Anna McGarrigle, Nick Cave (whose anecdotes are illuminating), Perla Batalla, Teddy Thompson, The Handsome Family
and the remarkable vocal gymnast Julie Christensen (whose eerie voice can sound like a human Theremin).
Except for that New York club shoot with U2 and Cohen, all the performances are from a concert at the Sydney Opera House in February, 2005....

 

Thorough it’s not, but the concert documentary “Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man” gathers solid interviews, anecdotes, recitations and tribute performances that present a fairly engaging portrait of the wry, dark poet who became a distinct voice in pop music.

“I’m Your Man” is unlikely to appeal much beyond Cohen’s loyal fans or bring converts to the brooding whimsy and dense wordplay of his songs. The movie does do a far better job than a couple of 1990s tribute albums in matching Cohen’s sobering lyricism with kindred spirits who can do justice to the tunes during a concert in his honor in Sydney, Australia.

Fellow somber travelers such as Nick Cave, Kate and Anna McGarrigle, Rufus and Martha Wainwright and Beth Orton are among those covering songs that span most of Cohen’s 40-year career.

Quick facts
Starring: Leonard Cohen, Nick Cave, Rufus Wainwright, Beth Orton, Jarvis Cocker
Director: Lian Lunson
Run time: 1 hour, 43 minutes
MPAA rating: PG-13

The reclusive Cohen offers warm and amusing recollections and teams with U2 for a version of “Tower of Song” as the documentary’s musical finale, though the strangely cloistered, unsatisfying cover winds up anticlimactic after some grand live renditions by other performers.

With Mel Gibson’s film company producing, music-video maker and former actress Lian Lunson captures music producer Hal Willner’s Cohen tribute concert “Came So Far for Beauty” at the Sydney Opera House in 2005.

Interspersed between the performances are frank, wistful segments with Cohen, who also recites some of his poetry. Canadian-born Cohen discusses his boyhood, his father’s death, the Montreal poetry scene, his spiritual quest with a Zen master and the real-life woman who inspired one of his best-known songs, “Suzanne.”

Cohen, whose bass vocals often lean more toward talking along to the music than singing, also touches on his musical abilities.

“I had the title ‘poet,’ and maybe I was one for a while. Also the title ‘singer’ was kindly accorded me even though I could barely carry a tune,” Cohen recites from one of his poems.

Even so, trained singers have trouble approaching Cohen’s soulful depth when covering his songs. Willner assembles musicians who deeply respect Cohen’s songs and know what to do with them.

Cave energetically sings “I’m Your Man” and does a hushed rendition of “Suzanne.” The McGarrigle sisters and Martha Wainwright (daughter of Kate McGarrigle and Loudon Wainwright III) bring beautiful, trilling harmonies to “Winter Lady,” and Wainwright, brother Rufus and Joan Wasser trade passionate verses on “Hallelujah.”

Annoyingly, Lunson drops interview segments into the middle of some performances, though she thankfully leaves intact the film’s two standouts, Orton’s achingly gorgeous rendition of “Sisters of Mercy” and Julie Christensen and Perla Batalla’s duet on “Anthem.”

Interviews with the musicians are a mixed bag. Rufus Wainwright vividly relates the first time he met Cohen, who was in his underwear, feeding tidbits of sausage to a sickly baby bird. Cave talks with wonder about the transformative day from his youth when a friend played him Cohen’s album “Songs of Love and Hate.”

U2 frontman Bono and guitarist The Edge have some nice insights, yet both grow overly grandiose in their fawning praise of Cohen (“He’s the man for me who comes down from the mountaintop with the tablets of stone, having been up there talking with the angels,” The Edge says).

Bono redeems himself with this great summation of Cohen’s grim yet playful sensibilities:

“A lot of writers have dared to walk up the edge of reason and stared into that great chasm, into the abyss,” Bono says. “Very few people have got there and kind of laughed out loud at what they saw.”

LEONARD COHEN I’M YOUR MAN If you can’t think of a crisis in your life that’s tied to a Leonard Cohen song, then Canadian director Lian Lunson’s velvety, exuberantly hagiographic film of a 2005 Sydney tribute concert to the Prince of Pain may not be the movie for you. If you can, the experience will be weepy bliss. Produced by Hal Willner, the concert shows off Cohen’s unifying influence on an astonishingly diverse range of musicians, from Nick Cave (giving the lounge-lizard treatment to “I’m Your Man”), to Antony jigging up and down in an unraveled sweater and making a gorgeous symphony out of “If It Be Your Will,” a sweet duet of “Anthem” by (concert organizers) Julie Christensen and Perla Batalla and a rousing rendition of “Everybody Knows” by the Wainwright family. Cohen sings “Tower of Song” at the end, flanked by U2, but his life flashes by us, intercut with the musical numbers, in grainy footage and wry commentary by the man himself. A total babe in his salad days, if that’s the right expression for a man plagued all his life with depression, at 71 Cohen looks like any one of my heavy-lidded Jewish uncles, only with better suits. (He never got into the jeans thing, even while hanging with the Beats at the Chelsea Hotel.) But notwithstanding a touching moment when he gropes for the name of a musical movement (“Punk, that’s it!”), he’s sharp as a tack and as ready as ever to debunk his own myths: He can’t carry a tune. In his years as a monk, “I hated everyone, but acted generously.” And how could he be a ladies’ man when he spent “10,000 nights alone”?

Cohen may be as obsessive a reviser of his own history as he is of his songs and poems, but his way with words is so sublime, so gently precise and musical, you’d be a churl to quibble. And he seems as genuinely humble as he is proud to be lionized in such good musical company. “The Wainwrights have brought my music to life,” he says, “and I appreciate it.” Just as well, for if anyone steals his thunder in this movie it’s the magnetic Rufus Wainwright, who, with his sister Martha, brings such rapture to “Hallelujah,” among others, that you rediscover Cohen’s songs for the continuous hymnal they are. Angelic, sexy, androgynous and mischievously louche, Wainwright couldn’t be less like the manly, bass-voiced Cohen. But in putting his own simple yet operatic spin on Cohen’s gift for suffering and exaltation, he’s also keeping the faith. I don’t know whether those rolled-back eyes are the result of ecstasy or Ecstasy, but if Wainwright carries on making music like this, he’ll make willing bisexuals of us all. (Ella Taylor)

 

Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man
Starring: Beth Orton, Bono, Nick Cave, Julie Christensen, Adam Clayton?
Directed by: Lian Lunson

I'm so proud of this Review of the recent Cohen Retrospective Show From the Sydney Morning Herald.....

Came So Far For Beauty
By Bernard Zuel
January 31, 2005


Page Concert Hall, Sydney Opera House, January 28

In Leonard Cohen's 1973 song A Singer Must Die, presenting himself before a panel of stern judges he declares: "I'm sorry for smudging the air with my song." Some smudge. Some song.
That smudge's lasting imprint on several generations of singers and fellow songwriters is the subtext of what simplistically would be called a tribute show but in effect was a celebration of song. Spread across nearly four hours it was as strong on interpretation as it was light on unnecessary reverence; as steeped in Jacques Brel and country music as German cabaret and folk; as joyous as it was moving.
You could see that with a cocked-hip Jarvis Cocker wholly inhabiting Death of a Ladies Man (in duet with Beth Orton) and bringing a self-mocking playboy touch to I Can't Forget. And certainly it was there in Nick Cave, who made us re-evaluate one of Cohen's more contentious songs, Diamonds In The Mine - "a nasty Leonard Cohen song" he cheerfully declared - by playing up some Vegas sleaze while the always impressive and flexible backing group briefly turned into Elvis
Presley's TCB band.
Not that the evening's stars were only the best-known faces. The Handsome Family took and gave great delight by relocating A Heart With No Companion to the Kentucky hills, while Teddy Thompson (whose mother Linda Thompson earlier had hushed the room with The Story of Isaac) found a bruised centre to lines such as "I choose the rooms that I live in with care/the windows are small and the walls almost bare".
And in the category of "where the hell has he been hiding?" was the hulking, shambling figure of New York singer Antony, who left open mouths on and off the stage with his heart-piercing explorations of The Guests and the prayer-like If It Be Your Will. (He's playing tonight at the Vanguard and must be seen.)

What was staggering was how each time you thought the night had just had its peak someone else would stroll on stage and give you another one. And then another. For example, Rufus Wainwright's version of Hallelujah, which escaped from the shadow of Jeff Buckley's seemingly definitive interpretation with an elegant but effortlessly transporting take, is the kind of song that would climax any regular show, but here was presented early in the first set. Three songs later a former Cohen backing vocalist, Julie Christiansen[sp], beautifully balanced The Singer Must Die between pathos and humour and upped the ante again.

Martha Wainwright's bared-to-the-bone Tower of Song was matched by her appearance with her mother and aunt, Kate and Anna McGarrigle, on a spare but riveting You Know Who I Am. But soon after that came Perla
Batalla, the other of Cohen's long-term backing vocalists, delivering a
rich, passionate exploration of Bird On a Wire.

It was a wondrous night. A long, winding, rich and constantly rewarding
evening brought to us by the musical equivalent of a fantasy football team whose dedication was to the work and not the ego.
Somewhere in California you imagine the droll Mr Cohen hearing this and saying to them, "I thank you, I thank you for doing your duty/you keepers of truth, you guardians of beauty".

 

 

Billboard February 8, 1997
Stone Cupid's Christensen In Gear With "Driving"
by Chris Morris (reprinted by permission)


LOS ANGELES--When vocalist Julie Christensen approached Dave Crouch, GM of the Rhino Records store in West Los Angeles, to see if he would take copies of her self-released album "Love is Driving," Crouch asked her where the album should be stocked.

Crouch recalls, "She said, 'It's jazz/country/ swing/folk/rock/cabaret.' It's hard to figure out where to put it, because she does all that stuff well"

Indeed, in her 15-plus years on the L.A. music scene, Christensen has been recognized as a singer's singer who is comfortable with material in every imaginable genre.

"Yeah, that's my blessing and my curse," Christensen says with a laugh about her reputation for versatility. The singer's diverse resume includes stints in a Western swing outfit and torchy jazz/blues/R&B combos; several albums co-fronting the seminal early-'80s L.A. post-punk band Divine Horsemen; leadership of her own intimate jazz/pop groups; two years as a featured backup singer for Leonard Cohen; and session and concert work with Van Dyke Parks, Exene Cervenka, John Doe, Steve Wynn, and k.d.lang, among others.

But only now has Christensen, who recorded an album for PolyGram with producer Todd Rundgren in 1990 that went unreleased, issued an album of her own that captures the full scope of her talents. Self-written, self-produced, and self-financed, "Love is Driving" has been released on Christensen's Stone Cupid Records.

She believes that audiences for other similarly eclectic and challenging femalie vocalists may gravitate to her album: "Maybe the people who listen to Sam Phillips will listen to this, or the people who listen to Marianne Faithfull."

The wide range of musical styles heard in Christensen's music has been accumulated over two decades of performing.

Born in Iowa, she sang with a western swing/country rock group before moving in 1977 to Austin, Texas, where she mixed blues and jazz during performances at the local clubs. On relocating to L.A. in 1981, she got into what she terms "post-punk."

Christensen shifted stylistic gears again when, recording a number for the L.A. cow-punk compilation "Don't Shoot," she met musician/producer Chris Desjardins, former leader of the hard-edged punk group the Flesh Eaters, who was then forming a new band, Divine Horsemen. She ended up joining the group as co-lead vocalist and later married Desjardins.

Melding her blues-drenched singing and writing to the band's ferocious punk guitar attack, Christensen cut three albums and an EP with Divine Horsemen for indie SST Records. But Christensen and Desjardins' marriage unraveled, and she exited the group in 1987.

In 1988, at the invitation of Cohen's musical director, Roscoe Beck, Christensen toured the U.S., Canada, and Europe as a backup vocalist for the singer/songwriter. She continued to perform her own material in L.A. usually in a trio format, often accompanied by the remarkable blind New Orleans pianist Henry Butler. It was during this period that A&R exec Michael Goldstone--then moving from MCA to PolyGram, and today a key executive at DreamWorks--approached Christensen at one of her solo shows at McCabe's Guitar Shop.

"He said,'Get me a tape right away.' He didn't really know what we were gonna do...He spent $50,000 doing two or three songs with a producer with whom I'd written a couple of these songs. Then Michael left PolyGram and went to Epic, and I [made an album] with Todd Rundgren producing it"

Further changes ensued within PolyGram's A&R staff, and the label decided not to release the Rundgren-produced album. After that disappointing experience, Christensen says,"I went out and got a life." In the early '90s, Christensen married again (to actor John Diehl), worked regularly with her own small groups, and made frequent appearances for the Bohemian Women's Political Alliance, a group of L.A. artist/activists. In 1993, soon after giving birth to son Jackson, Christensen went out on a second tour with Cohen.

Everything began to click for Christensen when she and her family moved to ... a picturesque town north of L.A. near Santa Barbara. Most of her current band members have ties to the town. "Getting out [there], a lot of things became clear," Christensen says. "I started working with a different piano player, Karen Hammack, who is just a gold mine and a secret weapon, and a really good friend...[Drummer]Jim Christie has been playing with me for years...I went through different bass players, but Cliff [Hugo] is somebody I played with at my first showcase at the Bla Bla Cafe in 1981. He's played with Ray Charles, and he's been with Melissa Manchester for 15 years. That trio really locked on."

Christensen says she had no intention of making an album when she cut the sessions that became "Love is Driving." "We were going in to just demo some tunes," she says. "If I had just set out to make a record, I don't know [if it would have worked], because the [PolyGram] experience was so monumentally disappointing."

The album came in--"manufacturing and all"--at less than $13,000, she says, financed with credit cards and promises of additional payment [if] a distribution deal was found.

The album features Christensen's working band,plus such guests as vocalist Perla Batalla, who worked alonside Christensen in Cohen's group; guitarist Robben Ford, an old friend and Ojai neighbor; and guitarist Greg Leisz, a former member of lang's band and current guitarist for Dave Alvin's group the Guilty Men.

So far, Christensen has been distributing "Love is Driving" herself, via mail order and through such L.A. outlets as Rhino, Aron's Records, and McCabe's...Some specialty shows on L.A. area public radio stations, like Andrea Leonard's "Twister" on KCRW Santa Monica and Howard and Roz Larman's "Folkscene" on KPFK North Hollywood, have aired the record. "Her music is very, very personal," says Larman. "I don't know if anybody else could do those songs...you can feel every emotion when she sings. You don't get that from a lot of performers. She's very intense."

Christensen, whose career is handled by Garry George Management in L.A., is currently in New York, playing previews for a bill of Sam Shepard one-act plays that opens Feb. 9 at the Public Theatre. She has one of the two leading roles in "The Sad Lament of Pecos Bill on the Eve of Killing His Wife"

While she is mainly proud of shat she has achieved by releasing her own album, Christensen says, "I don't want to be my own cottage industry. I do want somebody else to take it over...I would really love to have somebody produce [my next album] and make it a more cinematic thing, and not have to be producing it and doing all of it. I want to write songs and sing and work with the band. But if I have to produce another one, I'll do it, because now I know I can."

 

 

JULIE CHRISTENSEN: Biography
Related Genres: Rock

Sometimes listing an artist's music under one style that fits it best is a little hard to do -- sometimes it's almost impossible. With Julie Christensen the latter fits. Her music is a smooth mix of blues, R&B, jazz, and even a little pop and western swing. Maybe that's because she has sampled a little of it all along the path of her career and didn't find any she didn't like in some way.

Singer and songwriter Christensen was born and raised in Iowa. Her first band was a little country and western swing group, which also played rock. In the late 70s she moved to Texas and picked up jazz and blues. A few years later, she headed to sunny California and found post-punk floating about. She soon joined a punk band, Divine Horsemen, and even married one of its founding members, Chris Desjardins. The group released one EP and three albums while Christensen was with them.

By 1987 the marriage was over, her part in the band was over, and she was on her own again. As luck would have it, she was invited to become a backup singer for the well-known Leonard Cohen. It gave her the chance to tour through the United States, Canada, and even into Europe, and to spread her wings some.

In 1996, Christensen released her first solo album, Love is Driving. Four years later, she finally recorded a sophomore work, Soul Driver. Some of the superb tracks on her albums that fans might want to sample are "The Moon Was," "I Have a Photograph," "Shipwreck," "Biggest Fool of All," and "Sweet Sound."~ Charlotte Dillon, All Music Guide

 

 

Pop Music;
Lhasa Club Spirit Brought to Life

By: CHRIS WILLMAN

Doing a reading Friday night, local poet Doug Knott pointed out
that in the days when screenwriter Michael Blake used to live out of the
back of his car, Blake would read at the modest shows Knott put on at the
late and lamented Lhasa Club.


Now that Blake is a Golden Globe winner, Oscar nominee and all-around
toast of the town for his "Dances With Wolves" script, he can return the
favor and present similar evenings of acoustic music and verse himself,
albeit with a much higher industry profile.


Friday and Saturday nights, in otherwise separate bills, Blake was the
centerpiece of two programs dubbed "The Race Is On," in which the Lhasa
spirit was successfully transplanted to the cafe at Raleigh Studios in
Hollywood. The Southwestern-styled cafeteria at the film studio where
Blake and comrade Kevin Costner have long held fort turned out to be an
appropriately charming and intimate venue for this sort of live
performance.


Actually, more than the Lhasa, even, it was possible to imagine
oneself transported to a secret literary nightspot in Montana, given the
denim spirit and environmental concerns of the proceedings. At the late
show Friday, chanteuse Julie Christensen sang a soaringly lovely song
about driving through the majesty of Idaho to visit Exene Cervenka (not
present this time), and John Doe invoked the ghost of Woody Guthrie in
dedicating a duet with Tony Gilkyson to drought-stricken farmers.
Exactly which race the participants consider to be on was not entirely
clear, beyond the general onus of anti-war, pro-environment progressive
politics; this was one benefit where more time could have been
spent on the soapbox. (A card given out to departing attendees pitched
the Mountain Lion Preservation Foundation.)
Blake's climactic reading of an excerpt from "Helmut," a
Hollywood-themed novel in progress, was much anticipated. But the clear
highlight and crowd favorite Friday was the four-song set from Christensen, a knockout pop-jazz crooner and inspired songwriter who has everything it might take to revive the torch-song tradition among the rock crowd.

PHOTO: Julie Christensen: a set of inspired torch-songs for
rockers.
PHOTOGRAPHER: ROBERT DURELL / Los Angeles Times

Type of Material: Concert Review