Cabaret Festival review: Monsieur Camembert – Cohen Noir
In another Cabaret Festival highlight, the excellent Monsieur Camembert celebrate the unique appeal of Leonard Cohen, and display their own musical flair in the telling.
“Ring the bells that still can ring / Forget your perfect offering / There’s a crack in everything / that’s how the light gets in.”
The poetic lines from Leonard Cohen’s ‘Anthem’ reverberate for the many admirers who have accumulated since he first swapped poetry for the Tower of Song with his debut album in 1967.
But in 2004, things had seriously cracked for Cohen himself. It was discovered that his manager, Kelley Lynch, had not only totally looted his life savings, but had sold off his publishing rights and artist royalties. Years of gruelling, largely futile, legal conflict were to follow.
In 2008, however, a whole lot of light shone in for fans everywhere. Cohen embarked on a series of world tours, not only hugely restoring his finances, but, at age 74, re-igniting his musical creativity.
Many in Adelaide will recall his Leconfield winery concert in January 2009 (I still have the ticket) and his return fixture at Thebarton the following year. Dapper in his suit and fedora, surrounded by a band of mostly Canadian talent, Leonard charmed and soothed and amused and captured audiences.
He also paved the way for more septuagenarian (now eighty-something) legends to take up travelling minstrelsy, playing to the old crowd but also the new one. He may have been a sportsman and a shepherd (and a lazy bastard living in a suit) but he had created his own Renaissance.
Apart from live concert releases, Cohen recorded more albums – the marvellous Old Ideas and Popular Problems, the aptly named You Want it Darker (released just three weeks before his death in November 2016) and the posthumous Thanks for the Dance released in 2019.
Looking around, and over-hearing, the sell-out crowd at the Dunstan Playhouse eagerly awaiting Cabaret Festival headliners Monsieur Camembert, it is evident that this is a chance to renew connection with Cohen’s music and persona – and also, perhaps, the precious and vivid memory of those peerless concerts earlier this century.
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Monsieur Camembert’s number one cheese and co-founder, Yaron Hallis, calls this latest version of their Leonard shows –which began way back in 2007 – Cohen Noir. And, perhaps with more light than shade, it is a splendidly fashioned immersion in the life, works, and wry wisdom, of a remarkable poet musician.
Spanning more years than Brel or Gainsbourg, and with more immediacy than Dylan, Leonard Cohen has described life in the seventh age, evoking memoranda from past lives, bringing old ideas and popular problems. As well as dance music with one foot in the grave. Or, maybe – eternity.
The first voice of the night we hear is Leonard Cohen himself. One of many fragments spread at intervals throughout the performance. Intriguing excerpts from interviews, speculations, confessions, aphorisms, jokes, and self-deprecations.
Sitting on a bar stool in a striped cap and a Leonard Cohen merch T-shirt under his jacket, leader, MC, vocalist and owlish narrator Yaron Hallis begins to croon, “If you want a lover …” The ten piece band saunters and swings, does the ragtime slowly. It is ‘I’m Your Man’ – one of many of Cohen’s slyly raffish musical masks, and a perfect opener for the set.
With “Where is my Gypsy Wife tonight?” Hallis shifts the mood to Cohen dread – of rejection, and uncertainty. “This is the darkness. This is the Flood.” Matthew Ottignon provides mournful bass clarinet and Susie Bishop steps forward with a simmering violin solo.
In addition to Hallis’s well-judged, gruff low-key, Leonard vocals (which are never impersonations) Cohen Noir features four guest vocalists. Lyn Bowtell’s melodically expansive reading of ‘Bird on a Wire’ lifts the musical stakes and reminds us that the focus is not only on Cohen’s poetic lyrics, but the pleasure of his tunes. Bowtell unleashes her range with memorable effect.
Another early highlight follows. ‘Who by Fire’, the composition love child of Cohen and Janis Ian, opens with bowed bass from Mark Harris and more sublime piano from Daniel Pilner (who was also terrific in the band for Ursula Yovich’s Nina Simone tribute at the festival two weeks ago.) The singer is Timothy James Bowen. Bearded, with steel framed glasses, in denim and a Stetson hat, he captures in his keening vocal the very flame of one of Cohen’s great songs.
Then it is Susie Bishop’s turn to shine. Ushered in with Pilner’s trickling piano she sings, “It’s four in the morning …” ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’, famously covered by Jennifer Warne and others, is made Bishop’s own. The band gradually joins – drums, a soaring sax solo on perfect cue – and then the curt, epistolary ending, ‘Sincerely, L. Cohen.’
The fourth singer, Diana Rouvas brings further vocal variation with a jazzy take on abject Leonard’s ‘Light as a Breeze’. Her agility and gospel inflections and phrasing nicely working the impish ironies between words and music.
The band returns with a breakneck jive take on ‘Jazz Police’ from the 1988 I’m Your Man album. They are a well-oiled unit, moving the focus among the players Charlie Meadows on jaunty guitar, a bass solo and scat attack from Mark Harris, and concluding with a saxophone seizure from Matthew Ottignon.
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A set of Cohen songs has a multitude to select from and Monsieur Camembert choose well. Guided by pattering brushstrokes from Cameron Reid, strings and basslines, Timothy James Bowen strums the opening lines of ‘So Long Marianne’. Susie Bishop’s ‘Joan of Arc’ is a haunting slow blues with call and response from Yaron Hallis which rises, without excess, to operatic crescendo.
And the trio of Bowtell, Rouvas and Bowen doowop and sashay through ‘Memories’ another boisterous glimpse of Cohen’s view of courtship as the comedy of desperation.
For the final section of the two-hour show, the fifty person Adelaide choir, Born on Monday (led by Ella and Anthony Pak-Poy) fill the stage to add majestic voice for a succession of Leonard Big Ones.
Lyn Bowtell’s reading of ‘If it Be Your Will’ is a lovely opener especially with the addition of a tuva (Mongolian throat singing) interlude from band member Bukhu.
And of course, with fifty extra voices on hand there’s going to be ‘Hallelujah’, Cohen’s most covered song and, in the process – after Jeff Buckley, k.d.lang, John Cale, Willie Nelson, the execrable Rufus Wainwright, and every second contestant for The Voice – has lost some of its subtlety and satiric Cohen edge.
It is now unassailably “anthemic”, but tonight, astutely shared by Bowtell, Rouvas, Bowen and Bishop, and the harmonic full strength choir, it is reflective rather than bombastic – and an undoubted crowd favourite.
As is ‘Everybody Knows’. If ever a song spoke to the times, it is this paeon to outrage and profound disappointment, posing as cynicism. We sang the repeated mantra with some exhilaration. Everybody Knows. We see you.
The music is upbeat samba. Meadows sprightly Django on guitar, more scat from Harris, klezmer violin from Bishop. And a singalong, clap-along ending.
“A song is an anchor thrown into a foaming sea.” Another Leonard observation comes from the disembodied ether. Present in another form. Time for ‘Anthem’. Ring the bells that still can ring, that crack in everything, the light let in.
Diana Rouvas sings it beautifully, the choir surges, and we cut away to Bukhu again. His tuva singing is unaccountably compelling, as is his solo on the ancient horsehair fiddle. The segue to Matthew Ottignon’s saxophone effortlessly lets even more music in.
So, there is nothing left but to Dance to the End of Love, which Monsieur Camembert, amiably and capably led by Yaron Hallis, proceed to do. It is the place to depart. Cohen in his late concerts made much of it, as he did ‘Anthem’.
It is another Leonard paradox. Very near the end, Yaron Hallis tells us, Cohen declared himself ready for death. A little later he corrected himself, saying maybe he was exaggerating. Whatever, he mused, “You’ll be hearing from me, Baby.” We certainly did tonight.
Monsieur Camembert: Cohen Noir continues at the Dunstan Playhouse on Saturday June 20 as part of Adelaide Cabaret Festival
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