Leonard Cohen in St. Louis

I know, I know, I just saw him in Chicago, I can’t afford it, etc. etc,. I don’t care. I don’t regret this at all; but if I hadn’t gone I would definitely be regretting it. It’s only a five hour drive, and I didn’t have to arrange my work schedule (although I was slightly late, which made the parking situation even more confusing).
So, here he is:

It was a more relaxed concert than in Chicago. Even though the Chicago venue was slightly smaller, the 20’s era Egyptian-style Fox Theater with 5,060 seats as opposed to Rosemont’s 4000 some seats, the St; Louis concert was a more intimate experience. The out-of-control shouting element that showed up at Chicago was missing here, as was the foreign language group. In Chicago I seem to have been surrounded by non-English speakers–Polish and I don’t know what other languages. Having once heard a George Wasouf concert at the two thousand year old Jerash Roman theater, I can appreciate the difficulty in not understanding the language. Jordanians love Wasouf for his lyrics and the feeling they evoke. I could only love the sound, the magnificent Jordanian evening under the stars, and the obvious energy of the crown as they sang along. But with Cohen it’s not only what he says, it’s how he says it.

Yes, he did “the darkness”, the yet unnamed new blues tune. So nice.

The house lights kept going on at annoying times. Like during standing ovations. Or just when a few people stood up. Or in the middle of the concert when the stage lights went off completely and the house lights went on briefly before decorum was restored. If they were trying to tell people when to applaud, or when to stand, I don’t like that at all. That should be part of the spontaneous interaction between the performer and the fans, not scripted.

Hallelujah was even better than Chicago. Even though this is probably my all-time favorite Cohen number, if it’s possible to pick a favorite, the whiny sound of the gospel style organ has always irritated me. I don’t know why. Gospel is an acquired taste, and I’m less annoyed by it than some, but I’m used to the full sound of a pipe organ. The difference in sound is like the difference between hearing Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus or Bach’s Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring on a pipe organ, or a smarmy, bible-thumping, shouter type TV preacher exhorting “dig deep brothers and sisters” as the collection plate is passed and the organ swells. Leonard is more on the Handel end of the metaphysical spectrum. The sound of the organ was subtly different at the St. Louis concert, darker maybe, and much better, but I don’t think it’s quite there yet.

One of the recitations, the one about the soldier behind the lines, they also did partly in French. (I’ll google the exact name of it later, when I’m not on the road.)  At the end when Leonard gave the names of the crew there were a few French sounding names;  this is certainly the area of Illinois with some history of French influence.

Surprisingly, a few photos turned out, although the ones that didn’t are still a tantalizing reminder of the real-life experience. I’ll post more photos when I can.

Miserlou

Here is a collection of video links centered around the song “Miserlou”, first played for me by a friend in Minneapolis the morning after a Firefly video marathon. The post was inspired by the Whose is this song? post at Poemas del Rio Wang (via Languagehat.com) about the various cultural permutations of the  Turkish song “My Scribe”.

The classic version is of course the instrumental from Dick Dale and the Del Tones from the 1963 film “A Swingin Affair”, that is the basis of all the hippie trippie surfer spinoffs.

Miserlou means Egyptian girl, from مصر pronounced “misir” Egypt. The song is popular in diverse styles of music: Greek rebetiko, Middle-Eastern belly dancing, Jewish wedding music (Klezmer), and American surf rock.  Here is a tranlsation of the Greek lyrics:

My Misirlou (Egyptian girl), your sweet glance
Has lit a flame in my heart
Ah, ya habibi, Ah, ya haleli, ah
(Arabic: Oh, my love, Oh, my night)
Your lips are dripping honey, ah

Ah, Misirlou, magical, exotic beauty
Madness will overcome me, I can’t take any more
Ah, I’ll steal you away from the Arab land

My black-eyed, my wild Misirlou
My life changes with one kiss
Ah, ya habibi, one little kiss, ah
From your sweet little mouth, ah

Other notes about the Greek language version say the Greek word Misirlou refers specifically to a Muslim Egyptian woman (as opposed to a Christian Egyptiotissa); thus this song refers to a cross-faith, cross-race, relationship, a risqué subject at its time.

Here is a mellow guitar version from Greek television with well-known Egyptian belly dancer Alexandra.

These two youtubes have a series of clips from older versions of the song.  Here is a historical overview of several recordings together of the Greek classic version (violins, flute, etc)

First recorded in 1928 by Mikes Patrinos in Athens the first American version was attributed to the Greek immigrant from Egypt, Nick Roubanis. Part of a genre of songs called “Oriental” or “Anatolitiko” they were musically a synthesis of an orientalist “fantasy” of Near East music with often Latin & Hollywood influences. Miserlou is one of the first of this genre which became very popular in Greece in the 1950s with songs such as Zaira, Mandoubala, Serah, Zehra,etc.

An even earlier claim from this video (another series of clips) that says the song was composed by the Egyptian İbrahim Efendi who was originally a Jew named Abraham Levi living in İzmir, on the west coast of Turkey.

For those with an operatic bent, here it is sung by Anita Darian on the album East of the Sun in operatic style and attributed to Armenians.

The influence of Misirlou is evident in this wonderful “Spanish Arabic fusion music“-oud vs guitar in a sort of flamenco-ish style.

UPDATE: One of the interesting things that can happen when you write something and put it online, is that you get to see who links to you, and who else they link to. By following some of these links, I have found out that Dick Dale’s birth name was the very Arab Richard Mansour, also here is a link to a 1930 recording of “Mousourlou” by Michalis Patrinos, as well as more links to more recordings.

Leonard Cohen concert

Yeah, it was good.

Finally I’m home unwinding from the Leonard Cohen concert in Rosemont, Illinois, after three and a half hours of music, a fifteen minute walk to the station in the rain, an hour and a half on the train, and another half hour driving home from where I parked. I finally arrived home at 1:30 A.M. and felt like baking some trout (recipe). (Most excellent, but next time must add salt, less banana, and a little more chile powder.)

“I’m so grateful” …he had started out, as he says many times in the Live in London album, but this crowd laughed before applauding politely. Cynical? Pragmatic? Or maybe seeing Leonard Cohen in concert was high on everybody’s things-to-do-before-you-die list. The couple next to me said they were from Poland: “He played in our town in Poland thirty years ago–we couldn’t get tickets.”

“We don’t know when we’ll be back this way again, so tonight we’re going to give you everything we’ve got”, he backtracked, to more applause, this time from the heart. And they did. The concert was almost identical to the Live in London album, except for three songs I had never heard before (“Waiting for a miracle?”). But every once in a while, I thought I heard some different lyrics and perked up my ears. And of course they did Suzanne and Sisters of Mercy, songs I played years ago that I didn’t even know he composed before buying my ticket. Yes, Leonard Cohen was entwined with my youth, but I never knew it at the time. The stars of the show were the middle eastern instruments, something like ouds, a large one and a small one with a gypsy sound, played by a Spaniard named Mas (I’ll google it in the morning–they were applauding too loud and I didn’t catch it) and the soprano sax/woodwind player.

They charged through the first two sets, with much more lengthy and polished instrumentals than the album, but didn’t really get into stride until the “encores”. The surprise was “Who by Fire” which is almost an afterthought on the album but was played with such freshness and a huge brilliant instrumental in the middle by Mr. Mas that it caught everyone by surprise. My personal favorite, Hallelujah, was performed almost by rote, they must have done it so many times for the videos as well…but a lot of effort had been spent on the lighting for that one, the final hallelujah a golden sunrise. Still, it got a standing ovation, and Cohen looked a little surprised, but why not, the song is timeless and yes it was still that good. For this American audience, some potentially controversial/explicit lyrics were mumbled a bit, and they didn’t play “democracy”. Maybe we’re too close to Peoria. There were two “encore” sets, and that’s when the band really hit its stride. “First we take Manhattan” was smokin’, partly because the drummer came out of the woodwork and did some rock n’ roll showmanship. Leonard toyed with the crowd over the encores, after “Closing Time”, coming back to sing “I tried to leave you”, then teasingly “are you satisfied?” Then when the band was really done, and Leonard had introduced the sound crew, the audience just stood and applauded passionately, this time not to bring him back but just to say thank you. I think he looked a little bit misty right then.

Everyone went to hear his voice of course, and they got that. Like the message someone left on one of his videos “This man can read a shoppinglist out loud and i die..” He started out with the raspiness everyone mentions in the reviews, but his voice warmed up quickly. Sometimes he dropped to one knee, and sang to the floor or to the oud player, and his voice seemed to get deeper and more resonant. The crowd got not just his voice, but a crew of extremely talented musicians as as well. And Leonard Cohen is no musical slouch either. For Hey, that’s no way to say goodbye he backed himself up on guitar, then played and sang backup to other musicians’ solos. The talent of the group though was greater than the sum of their parts, with Leonard’s deep voice winding gracefully around it all.

Okay, I know I’m not a real music reviewer and this hasn’t even been proofread, but it’s late (early) and I just wanted to record this before I go to bed. And a big thank you to the one who (re-) introduced me to Leonard Cohen, you know who you are.

UPDATE:
The next day and rereading this I see I talked about everything except what was most important, the content, although it is only Leonard’s spoken voice doing his own work that seems to be able to make the content accessible for me. More when I get back from work.
NOTES:
The NPR review, with musician list. It is Javier Mas the Spaniard who plays “banduria, laud, archilaud, 12-string guitar”.

Leonard Cohen’s new song “the other blues song” on YouTube:

Feels so good baby not to love you like I did
Feels so good not to love you like I did
It’s like they tore away my blindfold and they said we’re gonna let this prisoner live.
It’s like they tore away my blindfold and they said we’re gonna let this prisoner live.

Feels so good babe just to wake up in the morning by myself
Cup of coffee in the kitchen, fire up a little danger to my health.
It’s like the same old broken heart but it feels like it belongs to someone else.
I’ve got the same old broken heart but now it feels like it belongs to someone else.

Feels so good baby to see you smile back at me
It’s so good baby not to be each other’s VIP
It’s like they tore away my blindfold and they said we’re gonna let this man go free.
It’s like they tore away my blindfold and they said we’re gonna let this man go free.

Feels so good not to love you like I did
Feels so good I don’t know why but it just did
It’s like they tore away my blindfold and they said we’re gonna let this prisoner live.
It’s like they tore away my blindfold and they said we’re gonna let this prisoner live.

Concert photos:

from Time Out Chicago blog

better pictures from Leonard Cohen forum

Chicago concert setlist (taped to monitor):

MORE CONCERT NOTES:

More Youtube videos are appearing from the Chicago concert:

If you want to see Leonard Cohen, forget everything else, and

1) go to his official YouTube channel and watch Hallelujah, then

2) go to the albertnoonan YouTube channel (whoever he is), and see his high audio quality videos of the Chicago concert

part of I’m your man (from balcony)

short clip of I tried to leave you

part of The Future

For all the breaking news about Leonard Cohen, check out Heck of a Guy, a great website with tons of Leonard Cohen little known songs, esoterica, and trivia, including a Leonard Cohen halloween mask (as in “I will wear a mask for you” from I’m your man).

Some more trivia: you might guess from his name that he came from a family of rabbis….”Leonard’s maternal grandfather, Rabbi  Solomon Kinitski-Klein, was a rabbinic scholar.  He was known as Sar ha Dikdook, the Prince of Grammarians, for writing an encyclopedic guidebook to talmudic interpretations, A Treasury of Rabbinic Interpretations, and a dictionary of synonyms and homonyms, Lexicon of Hebrew Homonyms…”  Now we’re getting somewhere.  I wonder if there isn’t a little kabala in there somewhere.

Cohen ticket

This is what concert tickets look like these days. For an extra two bucks, you print it out on your own printer. My regular internet connection is down yet again, so I’m once again piggybacked on someone’s open router.   Made me a bit nervous to give credit card info over this, but the last two Leonard Cohen concerts sold out, so I didn’t want to waste any time.

An interesting thing, when you enter the security code they use to keep out the spambots, they are using it somehow to digitize books. According to the information,

The Security check allows us to…
Digitize One Word at a Time
By entering the words in the box, you are also helping to digitize books from the internet Archive and preserve literature that was written before the computer age.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

From a comment on the “First we take Manhattan” video on YouTube

daanjelll (2 days ago)
Poetry? Music? This man can read a shoppinglist out loud and i die..

Leonard Cohen is coming to town

Pledge drive week here, but I’ve been listening to NPR anyhow, and barely caught the message that Leonard Cohen will be in concert here Thursday.  Not to date me or anything, but the last concert I went to was the late Jerry Garcia when he was touring by himself.

Since my bank account got decimated on my two summer trips, and my hours have been cut, concerts aren’t high on my budget list right now, but I sort of want to go this one.  It’s at the Rosemont Theater, a 4400 seat theater.

I’m certainly not used to these prices.  A $65 ticket gets you a seat on the side way in the back (or in the balcony). For more reasonable acoustics close to the center you have to pay nearly $170, and to get close up in the “orchestra pit” (?) will cost more like $250.  He just played in Chicago last May, at two sold out concerts at the historic 3,600 seat Chicago Theater.

When I first ran into Cohen’s name on a thread somewhere and checked him out, his music at first seemed a bit maudlin, too sentimental and navel-gazing, like Rod McKuen, but then it started to grow on me. The poetry does something.  When I listened to a few of his tunes on YouTube the other night, I had tears in my eyes.   I like this one, Hallelujah.

How many 74-year-olds want to go on concert tour?  Cohen has had some recent financial troubles and lawsuits, and probably needs to replenish his retirement funds. Who knows how long he will want to continue to perform.  Maybe I should just go for it.

Here’s the Trib’s review from the May concert, including a set list.

Save a Mongolian student from leukemia; listen to Mongolian music

The fundraising effort for Urangoo Baatarkhuyag, the Mongolian with leukemia, has now gone viral. Her story is here, you can donate here.  In the Mongolian community, the word is being spread by the website MongolDuu.com, where you can also hear some genuine Mongolian music and also try out the blogosphere’s only Mongolian translate tool.

The websites are from “read”, a Mongolian who knows Russian and likes to read Asian literature classics, but she doesn’t have her own blog–yet.  She says if you  click on the link ‘burtgegdsen bukh duu’, there are 6000 mp3s you can listen to.  It’s in the main menu on the left, the fifth one from the bottom.  It’s in Cyrillic though:

Бvртгэгдсэн бvх дуу

It opens to a numbered alphabetical list of the tunes.   Here are read’s recommendations:

beginning from 209-212 Adarsuren, love his songs
213 Agiimaa i like her videoclip, i’ll post later when i find it
beginning from 729 Badruugan i love his songs too, 859 Bayasgalan Botgon duu is a nice song
1125 Bolormaa – Namrun ongo orloo eejee is my favourite

Here are my comments, along with more links:

• 209-212 Adarsuren to me sounds traditional, maybe with an eastern scale (?)  The intervals don’t sound western at all, but too bad the sound quality isn’t better on this one. He seems to be a popular karaoke artist, but I think this one is actually him, also this with a title Алтай хангайн уулс. Дуучин Адарсүрэн.
• 213 Agiimaa’s “Lonely night”, the title portion sung in English, has a club sound that reminds me of the Amman dance club scene.  (Here’s the video.)
• 729 Badruugan’s intro sounded like it was going to be like “Stairway to heaven” but turned into a 60s folk sound, an unpretentious string instrument that sounds like guitar backing up his solo voice. (Here he is in concert with better sound quality singing Улаанбаатарын үдэш, Б.Бадрууган “Ulaanbaatar evening”.)
• 859 Bayasgalan Botgon–the video is a delight not just for her lyrical voice but also for its  country setting and its furry frolicking double humped camels. (See embedded YouTube below.)
• 1125 Bolorma is a female singer backed with a very full sounding orchestra. Here is her Х.Болормаа “Намрын өнгө”. “Color of Autumn” on Youtube.

• Here is haunting Mongolian throat singing, that reminds me somewhat of the Buddhist dual tone throat singing in India.

Oh, and if you mouse over one of the song titles you will get a “message of the moment”.  Sample messages:

“Triumph–umph added to try”

“We cannot do everything at once, but we can do something at once.”

The Mongolian dictionary didn’t go as well. The translation choices are Mongolian-English, English-Mongolian, German-Mongolian, and Russian-Mongolian.  I tried looking up the only two phrases on this page.  The phrase  “burtgegdsen bukh duu” means something like “songs in mp3″, but the dictionary does nothing.  The Cyrillic form of the phrase, Бvртгэгдсэн бvх дуу, goes a little further:

1. Бельги – belgium – дуудлага cонсох – shine utga oruulah
2. Библи судар – bible – дуудлага cонсох – shine utga oruulah
3. Боливи – bolivia – дуудлага cонсох – shine utga oruulah
4. Бразили – brazil – дуудлага cонсох – shine utga oruulah
5. Британ – britian – shine utga oruulah
6. Болгар – bulgaria – дуудлага cонсох – shine utga oruulah
7. Бирм – burma – дуудлага cонсох – shine utga oruulah

That’s still not any of the the words.  All right, how about just “бvх”?  that gets me 30 different words, none of which mean anything.  Now I try “дуу” and get 120 words.  The second meaning however is “2. дуу чимээний, дуу авианы, сонсохын, дуулдцын – acoustic“, so I think this is the “audio” part of the phrase.  Maybe that one was too hard.  Let’s try the song title “Улаанбаатарын үдэш” or “Ulaanbaatar evening”.  The first word has to be the place name so the second word must mean evening. but when I plug in the word, it tells me, ” АЛДАА: Та Монгол-Англи гэсэн орчуулгын чиглэлийг сонгоод, хайх vг талбарт Монгол vг оруулсангvй.”  If I’m trying to translate into English, you would think it would give me an English message, but I can only conclude that the thing is very unhappy and that it’s not ready for prime time.

For Bayasgalan Botgon in a larger format, here it is on YouTube:

RIP Miriam Makeba

Miriam Makeba sings “When I’ve Passed On” at Bern’s Salonger. Obit here.

The same YouTube user has several other videos of Makeba worth checking out.  Then there’s her trademark “Click Song”  from Dutch TV 1979 and an energetic “Pata pata” from the same Holland 1979 performance (both with low sound volume but worth watching). The Click Song from 1966 at Bern’s Salonger in Sweden. More versions of Pata Pata: this black and white video of “Pata Pata” with the 60’s “Afro” outfits on the backup singers, or a color video “Pata, Pata” in Japan with purple/pink costumes we haven’t seen since the 60’s.  Here she is with Paul Simon with a very tight  “Under African Skies” (I love this one) in a night concert in Spain c. 1990 (with some great language clicks at the end) and again with Paul Simon “Under African Skies” at the daylight African Graceland concert.