★★★★★ (★)
There is no doubt about it. Barb Jungr is the greatest interpreter of the most important musical talents and poets of the last century.
Last night at the Crazy Coqs Cabaret, at Brasserie Zedel she was singing the songs of the Canadian/Jewish songwriter Leonard Cohen. To sing his songs it is important to smile, otherwise the audience might kill themselves and Barb has the most effective and bountiful smile in the business which make his innate sadness show through even better than when performed by some miserable old git.
Barb is looking very glamorous, with her hair pinned back, wearing a peacock coloured evening dress. She sends herself up, joking about her age and about the very slender straps of her dress, hoping she will remain decent. Before you ask – she does.
Jenny Carr, a wonderful musician, plays for her. She is someone who has worked with her over and over again all over the world. They are completely in tune with each other. Listening to the musical riffs I kept thinking,. “How does she know when to come in?”
She begins with “Everybody knows”, a highly satirical song of the 1980 showing Cohen’s feelings of the rottenness pervading the whole world in the period. Very interesting to realise that we could say the same about 2020. It was a great number to begin with as it set the audience in the frame of actually laughing at the hatefulness of the world as it is now.
No changes there then! “Everybody knows the boat is leaking, everybody knows the captain lies” “Everybody knows the plague is coming”.
She sings his feelings of powerlessness – like a “bird on a wire” – and his cynical love songs always with that incredible life affirming smile. “So long Marianne” to Marianne his muse his ex lover and old friend, with its chorus of “To laugh and cry to cry and laugh about it all again”
We were in the presence of Cohen, his troubled soul, his work expressing every aspect of his life. Religion, politics, sex, revenge, depression, love. She knows it, she can feel his mind and express it in her own way with her own intelligence and understanding.
She sings the very famous songs but gives them a true modern meaning. “Dance Me to the End of Love“, and the one I was singing all the way home, “She’s touched your perfect body with her mind” the song he wrote for Suzanne, the mother of his children, in 1967, the Cohen song I remember most. I always wanted to meet Susanne living on oranges and tea all the way from China – even though she is “half mad”
But it is the dramatic songs that stop the show. Barb does one he wrote about the future which he thinks will be Mmurder with the ‘ White man dancing’ in which she stops smiling and performs the drama with her strong voice and extraordinary physical movements.
She sings “No way to say Goodbye” She and Jenny both say goodbye. The audience stand again and touch her as she makes her way through the room.