Australian Ladies Tribute Concert to LC Anniversary Nov 7th

Tributes & covers; Leonard's songs on the soundtracks and TV
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B4real
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Australian Ladies Tribute Concert to LC Anniversary Nov 7th

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All-female lineup announced for Leonard Cohen tribute show
Taking place on the anniversary of the singer's death next month
By
Caleb Triscari
15th October 2020

https://www.nme.com/en_au/news/music/au ... ow-2785219
Melbourne broadcaster Triple R has teamed up with the Festival of Jewish Arts and Music (FOJAM) to present an all-female tribute concert to Leonard Cohen.

Included as part of FOJAM’s Homeward Bound program, the Ladies Who Sing Leonard event will coincide with the singer’s death on November 7. Kate Ceberano, Katie Noonan, Deborah Conway, Emma Donovan and Kee’ahn will be among the evening’s performers.

The event will be live-streamed from 8.30pm AEDT, with a ‘pay what you can’ ticketing system in place.

In a statement, FOJAM’s artistic director Lior Albeck-Ripka described the event as “poignant” considering how many Australians are currently feeling isolated.

“We are absolutely thrilled to present this divine tribute show,” she said.

“His work has had, and continues to have, such a deep impact on so many artists and people around the world.
“We really want this to be an immersive experience despite the digital limitations, and are hoping we can create a feeling of connection between audiences and artists.”

Anita Lester, the festival’s curator, added, “This project is inspired by my (sometimes confused) Jewish heritage, the spirit of my homeland and all the sex, love and death that falls in between.

“Leonard Cohen taught me that art can change the lives of the people around you.”

Cohen died in 2016, shortly after the release of his final album ‘You Want It Darker’.
EDIT:
And for the record, another cover of one of LC's songs -
In 2021 Kate Ceberano will release her 28th album 'Sweet Inspiration'.
If It Be Your Will, is the first track on it - https://www.jbhifi.com.au/products/cd-v ... iration-cd
It doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to B4real ~ me
Attitude is a self-fulfilling prophecy ~ me ...... The magic of art is the truth of its lies ~ me ...... Only left-handers are in their right mind!
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Andrew (Darby)
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Re: Australian Ladies Tribute Concert to LC Anniversary Nov 7th

Post by Andrew (Darby) »

Bev, I strongly recommend you and whoever else is able to catch this live-streaming concert, as Junk and I really enjoyed the venue-based concert that this seems to be modelled on (with the same name), which we attended at the beginning of the year 8), though the artist line-up is clearly different and it will obviously not feel quite the same, by virtue of the medium’s limitations. :?

Here’s the report on the earlier event mentioned above:
viewtopic.php?t=38788

Cheers,
Andrew :)
'I cannot give the reasons
I only sing the tunes
The sadness of the seasons
The madness of the moons'
~ Mervyn Peake ~
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B4real
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Re: Australian Ladies Tribute Concert to LC Anniversary Nov 7th

Post by B4real »

Thanks for the heads-up, Andrew.
I'm not really into covers of Leonard but this does seem a little different because it is for a special remembrance occasion.
It doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to B4real ~ me
Attitude is a self-fulfilling prophecy ~ me ...... The magic of art is the truth of its lies ~ me ...... Only left-handers are in their right mind!
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B4real
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Re: Ladies Who Sing Leonard Tribute Concert to LC Anniversary Nov 7th

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It seems that this tribute is put together by the same person as the one Andrew and Junk saw in Feb this year -
https://www.beat.com.au/ladies-who-sing ... usic-2020/
Ladies Who Sing Leonard will see 16 of music’s leading female vocalists sing Leonard Cohen songs to commemorate the late great songwriter.

The Festival of Jewish Arts and Music (FOJAM) will present the virtual concert Ladies Who Sing Leonard on Saturday November 7. Put together by Melbourne musician Anita Lester, the 90-minute Leonard Cohen tribute show will feature an ensemble of powerful women vocalists, including Ninet Tayeb, Deborah Conway and Gabriella Cohen.

November 7 is the fourth anniversary of Cohen’s death and the event is intended as a celebration of the Canadian-Jewish songwriter’s life and career.

“There’s something celebratory about remembering someone’s life in Judaism,” says Lester. “So it was a nice way of honouring him and we’re making it a celebration as opposed to something a little bit morbid.”

Lester’s deep appreciation of Cohen’s body of work led her to organise the inaugural Ladies Who Sing Leonard event, which took place at Memo Music Hall on February 6, 2020. Deborah Conway, Gabriella Cohen, Alma Zygier and Sophia Tuv will reprise their roles for the upcoming FOJAM iteration, where they’ll be joined by the likes of Kate Ceberano, Emma Donovan, Kylie Auldist, Katie Noonan and the aforementioned Israeli star Ninet Tayeb.....

Lester posted the letter and accompanying ‘You Want It Darker’ video on the 20th anniversary of her father’s death. As for whether Cohen ever saw them, well, there’s no doubt about it – Lester’s letter and performance were re-posted by the official Leonard Cohen Facebook page on September 27, 2016.

Lester also received a letter in return, but she’d prefer not to disclose its contents. “Basically it was saying that he felt as though we sung from the same primal wound – we were speaking from the same place,” she says.
Lester’s deep appreciation of Cohen’s body of work led her to organise the inaugural Ladies Who Sing Leonard event, which took place at Memo Music Hall on February 6, 2020. Deborah Conway, Gabriella Cohen, Alma Zygier and Sophia Tuv will reprise their roles for the upcoming FOJAM iteration, where they’ll be joined by the likes of Kate Ceberano, Emma Donovan, Kylie Auldist, Katie Noonan and the aforementioned Israeli star Ninet Tayeb.

“It was really important for me that I could engage different types of artists, elders and some new and unheard performers, as well as some Indigenous performers,” says Lester. “I’m very passionate about any Indigenous storytelling. People who are Indigenous have this innate quality of storytelling in their art and he [Cohen] was very passionate about having authentic voices tell his stories.”....

“I’ve encouraged some of the women who are new to Leonard to do the ones that they know. So we will have some of the hits in there and then there’s definitely some more obscure ones. I’ve spoken to all the women now and I can tell that they’ve made the songs their own in some way.”
It doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to B4real ~ me
Attitude is a self-fulfilling prophecy ~ me ...... The magic of art is the truth of its lies ~ me ...... Only left-handers are in their right mind!
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B4real
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Re: Ladies Who Sing Leonard Tribute Concert to LC Anniversary Nov 7th

Post by B4real »

More background info relating to Leonard and this coming tribute concert -

Sure, men liked Leonard Cohen. But, for women, it was something else

Michael Dwyer
By Michael Dwyer
October 30, 2020 — 4.00pm
https://www.smh.com.au/culture/music/su ... 568m4.html
Leonard Cohen's response came by proxy. He had only weeks left in this world, after all; his body failing and his mind on higher things, you'd imagine, than fan mail from Melbourne. But when he saw Anita Lester's Facebook post of September 2016, he told his messengers, he recognised an artist singing from "the same primal wound".

"I want to tell you something," she had written to him, tagging him in a post that also included her video cover of his then-new song, You Want It Darker. "When I was 10, my father passed away very suddenly. Shortly after he died, my mother gave me his favourite book. It was your Beautiful Losers." When Cohen's people reposted the video with his response a few days later, it went viral.

Lester, at 10, had been too young to understand the densely mystical, hypersexual prose of Cohen's second novel of 1966. The revelations came from his albums, also bequeathed by her father, which she played in an attic bedroom. "I fell hard," she wrote, "for the words you weave and the pictures you paint."

She wasn't alone there. The curious thing about Leonard Cohen devotees is that we all feel we've come to him alone, in an attic of some kind. We fall hard because he digs so deep. We feel no pain though. "You feel he has his arm around you," Nick Cave once remarked.

"Maybe for a man," Lester muses today, as she prepares to virtually stage the latest incarnation of Ladies Who Sing Leonard, a curated tribute for the Festival of Jewish Arts and Music. Deborah Conway, Kate Ceberano, Katie Noonan, Kylie Auldist, Melody Pool, Emily Lubitz and Israeli singer Ninet Tayeb are among the 16 singers.

"I feel like it's quite different for a woman," the singer-songwriter and poet says. "He lit me up in a different way as well. It may be an arm around you, but it was also quite romantic."

Quite. As ironically noted in an early album title, Death of A Ladies' Man, Cohen's romantic reputation loomed large in his life and work. "Because of a few songs/ Wherein I spoke of their mystery/ Women have been/ Exceptionally kind/ To my old age," he croaked seductively sometime around his 70th birthday.

"I definitely was aware of it," Lester says of the lusty appetite which may have been a tad unseemly in the mouth of a lesser septuagenarian. "Everyone has their things that they're attracted to. And I think a lot of young women who don't have father figures look for that in lots of different places. So it didn't deter me. Quite the opposite actually."

Sex had little to do with Deborah Conway's epiphany. She came to Cohen decades earlier; always liked his songs but like many, was repelled by the sound of his records. The "nasally voice" and "crazy busy" production of his middle period gave way to cheesy Casio tones from the late `80s onwards. She recalls the words of his label boss Walter Yetnikoff circa `84: "Look Leonard, we know you're great, but we don't know if you're any good."

She "fell head over heels" at last in January 2009, when she and her husband Willy Zygier took a slightly apprehensive trip to Rochford Winery in Coldstream to witness the opening night of what would snowball into several long and rapturous Australian tours.

"We get to the first song and literally, we're both in tears," she recalls. ''We spring to our feet, everyone's in tears, every song gets a standing ovation. Our hearts are breaking with the beauty of it. It is truly the finest concert that I've ever been to ... a lesson not only in how to be an incredible musician, but also how to be an incredible human being. A mensch.''

Looking back, it's almost as if Cohen had to wait until his mid-70s to find the songs himself, to free them from the younger man's famously arduous cycles of obsessive editing, studio spin, self-doubt, spiritual turmoil and depression and let their hard-won truths stand up and slow dance by themselves.

That said, Anita Lester never had a problem with the sound of Cohen's records. She tells a story about her friend Zach Rae, the American multi-instrumentalist who played on the last couple of them, who makes a half-joking analogy to the maestro's way with the ladies.

"He was saying, you know, Leonard wasn't this typically handsome guy. But at any age, he could romance the hell out of any woman and make them fall head over heels, regardless. He says it's the same with the music. It's like it removes itself from body and it just cuts to the core. It's something greater, you know?"

Even the sonic sceptics tend to agree that body and soul found perfect harmony in the wake of that miraculous globe-touring rebirth of 2008 onwards. Four late albums, including the posthumous Thanks For The Dance, found Cohen surrendering music and production to focus on recitation of pure, distilled, poetic wisdom in a voice of fathomless, coal-black gravity. "They're all magnificent," Conway affirms.

In the absence of a melody as such, Anita Lester had to imagine her own for her viral version of You Want It Darker. "I went on a trip to Paris with my mum for the Jewish feast of Yom Kippur," she explains. "We went into the synagogue where my grandparents were married, broke the fast there, and they do this prayer, which is called the Mourner's Kaddish.

"It was the most spiritual musical experience I'd ever had to that point. And then the next week, Leonard released that album, and I realised that the song You Want It Darker is that prayer, essentially. It's the same message, the same kind of language." "Hinene, hinene," Cohen intones, echoing Abraham's surrender when God asks him to sacrifice his son, Isaac, in the book of Genesis: "Here I am, I'm ready."

"So I thought, you know what, I'll do it," Lester says. "I didn't even think about it. I sat on my roof in London, a friend filmed me and put it on the internet and I wrote this letter … and that started this whole little journey."

Despite her own solo projects in music and verse, she agrees it's potentially endless. "I feel a little bit reticent about being 'the Leonard girl'," she says, "but yeah, you could be worse things. He's definitely my mentor; my invisible mentor. I read him, I listen to him, and I also understand his foundation, which is a deep study of spiritual texts and poetry. There's a world underneath him."

Ladies Who Sing Leonard streams on Saturday, November 7, from 8.30pm. Book at fojam.com.
It doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to B4real ~ me
Attitude is a self-fulfilling prophecy ~ me ...... The magic of art is the truth of its lies ~ me ...... Only left-handers are in their right mind!
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