This comes from Elizabeth Hoffman!
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f ... 9U00O1.DTL
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THE BEARDS BOW TO LEONARD COHEN
Reyhan Harmanci
Sunday, November 28, 2004
The men dressed in suits are a rough bunch, with mismatched ties, a variety of facial fuzz and an assorted smattering of derby caps and fedoras. They stand out in the crowd of casually dressed hipsters like a battalion of the Salvation Army stationed in San Francisco's 12 Galaxies club. Abruptly, as if answering some silent siren, the suited men abandon their drinks and their cigarettes and head for the stage.
They are the Conspiracy of Beards, an all-male chorus that sings only Leonard Cohen songs, and as they assemble in a crescent around choir conductor Daryl Henline, a hush falls over the chatty crowd. Male voices rise, together, to sing these lines:
I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel,
You were talking so brave and so free,
Giving me head on the unmade bed
While the limousines wait in the street ...
Some audience members react to the still somewhat shocking lyric by looking down, or audibly giggling. Most, though, keep staring straight ahead with the rapt, fixed expression found on true believers at a religious rite.
"It's really about the joy of singing," says Henline, the group's de facto leader. "Outside of academic settings or the church, people don't really get to experience choral singing, which is a shame, because it's beautiful."
With about 20 members (no one is actually sure how many Beards will show up for a gig), a growing list of dates at venues such as the Hemlock Tavern and Adobe Bookstore, a CD coming out this spring from local label Out of Round Records and plans for a European tour, the Beards are becoming a Bay Area phenomenon.
"The Beards are part of the Bay Area's quirky folk sound," says Norman Rutherford, founder of Out of Round Records. "I hate categories, but you can tell they link to a cultural movement." Rutherford says the Beards, like popular and press-friendly local acts Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsom, "don't have to carry around huge amps. They can just have their words, and it's meaningful to people."
The concept of a men's group singing Cohen songs came from Peter Kadyk, a multimedia artist who died in 2001.
"I think he started talking about it in 1993," says Patrick Kadyk, Peter's brother and a member of the Beards. "We were big Leonard Cohen fans, so the idea was to sing the songs with male friends of ours, because so much of his music deals with men and relationships. There's a religious aspect to it, although we didn't set out to do religious singing of Cohen's music."
Peter Kadyk, whom friends describe as a "visionary" artist, never got around to realizing his Cohen choir, but after his death, his wife, Anah, asked Patrick Kadyk and Henline to organize the Beards for the record release party of Hazy Loper, Patrick's band, at the Lab gallery in San Francisco in June 2003. Henline, a sound artist and composer who has worked in a dizzying number of musical genres, arranged "two or three songs" with "eight or nine guys" for the event.
"I hadn't thought of it as an ongoing project, but it's continued way past our expectations," Henline says, smiling.
After that first show, an employee of City Lights Bookstore asked the Beards to play an in-store event. Word of mouth spread fast; the Beards went from one-time experiment to practicing group within seven months. The Beards have never held auditions; members come through a "referral system." In the beginning, Henline says, "the choir was all friends with Peter. Everyone liked Leonard Cohen, but they joined because of Peter."
That has changed. "Having members that didn't know Peter, or any of us, really, validated what we were doing," Henline says.The nature of an a cappella choir allows the group to examine Cohen's lyrics in unexpected ways.
"People bring different understandings of his lyrics, which is the key to figuring out as a choir how to find the voice of the song," Henline says. "For instance, (in) that song 'You Know Who I Am,' some thought Leonard was addressing a woman and some thought he was addressing God or humanity."
Rutherford says that the choir wouldn't work as well with any other material.
"The Beards give the music that combination of irony and humor with beauty and seriousness," he says.
Adds Henline, "We don't consider this a joke, and we're also not concerned with appearing cool or afraid of looking silly. There's a lot of love, a lot of soul, in what we do. God, the harmonized voices just create such a field of energy, with the sympathetic resonation. When it first starts happening, everyone gets these smiles, and we're like" -- Henline pauses, exhaling -- "yeah."
Recently, the Beards took their act to the streets. After an abbreviated practice, they went to the Castro on Halloween night, performing amid the spectacle of costumes and crowds. Henline says that spontaneity is one of his favorite aspects of the Beards.
"We get to go to places where choirs usually can't go," he says. "I've sung in choirs all my life, but I've never had the ability to go to bars or street corners to sing before. Singing 'Everybody Knows' in the Castro was just so fitting with the times right now. It's just a great, wry observation of the multitude of lies in modern society, the kind of stuff people are putting up with every day.
"It felt really good to sing that. It's material people need to hear."
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~ a little weak in the knees, but my colour's coming back 
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