A new concert date has been added to the 2013 Leonard Cohen European Summer Tour:
August 24 at Hallenstadion in Zurich, Switzerland
Tickets will go on sale at 8 am local time on Friday, June 7. Forum presale begins tomorrow, June 5.
A new concert date has been added to the 2013 Leonard Cohen European Summer Tour:
August 24 at Hallenstadion in Zurich, Switzerland
Tickets will go on sale at 8 am local time on Friday, June 7. Forum presale begins tomorrow, June 5.
In anticipation of the June 18th Paris Concert that will open the 2013 Leonard Cohen European Tour, our sibling site, DrHGuy.com has begun posting an 18-day Advent calendar with each day linked to a Leonard Cohen-related token – a striking graphic, an animated gif, a do it yourself project, an mp3 download, or some other prize. Some of the daily bagatelles are oldies new fans may have missed, some are brand new, they may have originated from DrHGuy.com or 1HeckOfAGuy.com or they may be offerings from others in the Cohen fan community, but all share one quality – they can’t be found elsewhere online1.
Like Christmas Advent Calendars, one door of which is opened daily, one new link of the 2013 Leonard Cohen European Tour Advent Calendar is activated daily so that clicking on it takes your browser to that day’s gift. (One can return to the calendar page by pressing the backspace key or the go back one page arrow on your browser.) The first three offerings, each an online debut, follow:
All of these can be accessed through today’s post: 2013 Leonard Cohen European Tour Advent Calendar: Day 3 – A Special Offering From Sylvie Simmons
The 2013 Leonard Cohen European Tour Advent Calendar will be posted daily at DrHGuy.com until and including June 18, 2013, the date of the Paris concert that opens the European Tour.
_____________________Posted in Leonard Cohen
Biggest Influence on My Music – The jukebox. I lived beside jukeboxes all through the fifties. … I never knew who was singing. I never followed things that way. I still don’t. I wasn’t a student of music; I was a student of the restaurant I was in — and the waitresses. The music was a part of it. I knew what number the song was.
- Leonard Cohen (Yakety Yak by Scott Cohen, 1994)
Leonard Cohen’s Jukebox: Over the years, Leonard Cohen has mentioned a handful of specific songs he favors. Leonard Cohen’s Jukebox is a Heck Of A Guy feature that began collecting these tunes for the edification and entertainment of viewers on April 4, 2009. All posts in the Leonard Cohen’s Jukebox series can be found at the Leonard Cohen’s Jukebox Page.
Wikipedia is useful in clarifying who/what Foetus is:
Foetus is the primary musical outlet of industrial music pioneer J. G. Thirlwell. Until 1995 the band underwent various name changes, all including the word foetus. Monikers adopted at different times include Foetus Under Glass, You’ve Got Foetus On Your Breath and Scraping Foetus Off The Wheel. After 1995 the name permanently became Foetus, though the related project The Foetus Symphony Orchestra was founded in 1997 and continues. Thirlwell acts as the sole instrumentalist, vocalist, songwriter and producer for all Foetus works and as such is the only member of the band. Other artists may occasionally collaborate with Thirlwell on Foetus works but are not considered members of Foetus. Thirlwell is solely responsible for the musical output of the band.
This laudatory assessment posted by Andy Hinds at AllMusic is, however, helpful in characterizing the band’s music and style:
Although some may dismiss Jim Thirwell, aka Foetus, as a confrontational, rabble-rousing noisemaker (which he is), his eccentric and wide-ranging talent is usually overlooked; the trouble is, most listeners simply don’t have the patience to find Thirwell’s genius amongst the deranged sound sculptures that are his songs….Seemingly a musical omnivore, Thirlwell devours everything — from swing to Krautrock — and spits it back out in a scrap heap of sonic chaos, twisted beyond recognition. His oblique yet subversive lyrical themes don’t make Ache [the album in which Gums Bleed resides] any more palatable for the faint of heart. This is the sound of unfiltered imagination, absolutely unencumbered by notions of commerce or accessibility. Brilliant.
Well, Leonard Cohen did not overlook Mr. Thirlwell’s “eccentric and wide-ranging talent” nor did he lack “the patience to find Thirwell’s genius.”1
From Tortoise-Shell by Biba Kopf (New Musical Express, March 2, 1985), we learn
For his [Leonard Cohen's] part he claims a You’ve Got Foetus On Your Breath song, called “Gums Bleed,” to be a favourite.
When Jim Thirlwell signed with Cohen’s label, Sony, an interviewer asked,2
Long ago, in an interview with Leonard Cohen, he named you as a songwriter he admired, now that you two are label-mates, will we see a collaboration?<grin>
Thirlwell responded,
Yeah, I’m doing a dance remix of Suzanne….
Video – You’ve Got Foetus On Your Breath – Gums Bleed
Gums Bleed – Lyrics:
Written by Jim Thirlwell
God! but this silence hangs heavy, it gives me a pain in the thigh
What a weight on my shoulders..the atmosphere’s colder
No one gets out of life alive
You just wear your umbilical cord like a noose and make believe it’s a tie
I got a mouth full of ulcers
I’m digging my grave with my teeth
This pain is silence beyond belief
My gums bleed for you
If this is god’s gift, he can keep it
I can’t let myself forget about
When I exaggerated the role of my coffee, my cigarettes
I wear the mark of the iconoclast across my bleeding back
I’ll be reincarnated as a hermit. (from under, the future looks black)
I got a mouth full of ulcers
I’m digging my grave with my teeth
Can’t stop thinking about my lip
This pain is silence beyond belief
Dying to an audience of one
My gums are on fire for you
I’m gonna grind myself into the ground and ground myself into the grind
Keep turning the key to wind up and kill yourself to unwind…
I got a mouth full of ulcers
I’m digging my grave with my teeth
Can’t stop thinking about my lip? this pain is silence beyond belief
Dying to an audience of one…..my gums bleed for you
The burgers are now mounting bethlehem and my gums are on fire for you
Hitmeonetimehitmetwotimeshitmethreetimeshitmefourtimeshitmefivetimeshitmesixtimes hitmeagain!
Credit Due Department: he photo of Jim Thirlwell is from foetus.org
_____________________Posted in Leonard Cohen
I found Cohen Upstairs, the first of Oana Cajal’s Leonard Cohen-inspired videos, so impressive and gratifying that I asked its creator, , to tell me something about how she became a Leonard Cohen fan.
“Cohen Upstairs” is my exhibition presented now at Centaur Theatre in Montreal, during the Danish theatre-dance production of “Dance Me To The End Of Love”.
How I became a Leonard Cohen fan? I wouldn’t call myself a “fan”. Would be too simple.
I was born a Longingner. I only don’t remember if I longed to be born but, once arrived Here, or There (Bucharest, Romania), I began longing with passion. Very young, I was longing for love, freedom, knowledge, God, guilt, forgives and a pair of American blue jeans.I was longing for Leonard Cohen before I even heard him. Then I heard him and it was like glancing at the mysteriously carved effigy of my destiny. Suzanne was the freedom of my youth, the crack in the walls of communist hell. My one way ticket to America!
I am a poet, a playwright, a painter. I believe the poetry created the world. My hobby: Survival!
My message is urgent: In the Spotlight of Death, Life shines in its brightest colors. Celebrate! This very second! Right Now! (See my series of paintings “Posters for Unwritten Plays”)
I also asked how she came to produce this video (and what a “Picto-Impulse” is).
What are the Picto-Impulses? Imagine that your soul is a ball of words and emotions. Imagine that you suddenly let it go down on Mount Baldy. The line of its descent is unpredictable, desperate, frightened, elated, funny, foolish, sacred, painful! My hand follows graphically the incredible journey of the Mind of This Line. A Line with blood in its veins… Red is my favorite color. “Of all that is written, I love only what a person has written in its own blood” (Nietzsche)
My cohenesque plans: 2 more videos: “Dreaming sweet and salty Suzanne” and “Hallelujah on Fire!” Also a picto-drama, “Entertaining The Gods with Roshi”
For more about Oana Cajal, see her web site.
For more about Dance Me To The End ON/OFF Love at the Centaur Theatre, see the Centaur Theatre web site.
Part I: Cohen Upstairs By Oana And Stefan Cajal
Video from oana maria cajal
Part II: Dreaming Suzanne By Oana And Stefan Cajal
Video by oana maria cajal
Part III: Hallelujah On Fire
Video by oana maria cajal
Posted in Leonard Cohen
All three videos by scorpiontigress were just uploaded (none show more than 5 viewings). All were taken from above the stage on the audience’s right (see screenshot above). There are no closeups, but these are sharp, enjoyable full stage views, and the sound is excellent.
Note: The best available video of each of the songs performed during the 2012 Leonard Cohen Old Ideas World Tour can be found at the Best Of 2012 Leonard Cohen Tour Video Setlist. Similarly, the best available video of each of the songs performed during the 2013 Leonard Cohen Old Ideas World Tour can be found at the Best Of 2013 Leonard Cohen Tour Video Setlist
Leonard Cohen – Hallelujah
Barclays Center, Brooklyn: Dec 21, 2012
Leonard Cohen – First We Take Manhattan
Barclays Center, Brooklyn: Dec 21, 2012
Leonard Cohen – Everybody Knows
Barclays Center, Brooklyn: Dec 21, 2012
PREVIEW: In This Post
: Indicates original content, material not found in other considerations of this subject, or unique perspective
[In 1957,] as a post-graduate at New York’s Columbia University (where Jack Kerouac got in on a football scholarship), Leonard Cohen had spent much of his spare time in the boho clubs of the Village, where the Beat-style fusion of poetry and music — “I heard Kerouac read to piano, that was good” — was drawing crowds…1
The next year, through the efforts of Maury Kaye,2 (pictured on right), an outstanding jazz pianist and trombonist as well as probably the most sought after and popular bandleader in Canada,3 Leonard Cohen and other poets were presenting their work in similar fashion, accompanied by the music of Kaye and members of his band, to club audiences in Montreal. The following excerpt is from Swinging in Paradise, The Story of Jazz in Montreal by John Gilmore:4

Original caption: “One of several versions of Maury Kaye’s group at the Black Orchid Room above Dunn’s.”
As it happened, at least a couple of photos were taken of Leonard Cohen’s first show with Maury Kaye and a recording was made of him reciting one of his poems, “The Gift” (later published in The Spice-Box Of Earth) and answering a question about the propriety of a poet being a “nightclub celebrity.”
The following video comprises that recording as the audio track and the photos of Cohen and and other images of Dunn’s and St Catherine Street as the visual elements.
Leonard Cohen With Maury Kaye – The Gift
Dunn’s – Montreal: April 8, 1958
Video by Allan Showalter
In addition to Cohen and his friend, Irving Layton, Louis Dudek, who reigned as Canada’s premier man of letters until his death in 1984 and was Leonard Cohen’s Literature professor at McGill University, partnered with Kaye, as indicated in this excerpt from Friends Bid Farewell To Great Maury Kaye by Len Dobbin:5
Leonard Cohen talked about his collaboration with Kaye in an interview with William Ruhlmann:6
I don’t think there were too many people doing it at the time…I was working with a pianist and an arranger, Maury Kaye. I did a few weeks with him. We worked together at a place called Dunn’s Birdland, which was a room on top of Dunn’s delicatessen on St. Catherine Street in Montreal. He used to write big band arrangements. He had about a 12- or 15-piece band and this little stage, and it was his gig. I’d come on at midnight, and I kind of improvised while he played. Sometimes he was playing the piano by himself and sometimes doing parts of arrangements or tunes played in a somewhat subdued way while I took my own riffs. Or sometimes I’d do set pieces, like a poem from Let Us Compare Mythologies. We did that off and on for a month, and then I worked with a great jazz guitarist from Winnipeg by the name of Lenny Breau.

Poster promoting “Poetry & Jazz With Leonard Cohen; Lenny Breau & Trio,” an event held Feb 9, 1964 at the Manitoba Theatre.
Sylvie Simmons writing in Mojo,7 provides a similar description and more specifics:
Perched on a stool in the middle of the stage, flanked on one side by Maury Kaye on the piano and, in any space available, by various members of Kaye’s 15-man band, at around midnight on April 8, 1958, Leonard Cohen, 23, gave his first professional performance.8
“Maury Kay, who was a very gifted pianist and jazz arranger, had a jazz band,” recalls Cohen, “and we started improvising together in a club on St. Catherine’s Street” — Dunn’s Jazz Parlour, which occupied the uppermost floor of a Montreal smoked meat delicatessen.
Already an acclaimed poet in Canada, Cohen had quickly developed a distaste for the poet’s usual form of performance, the poetry reading.
“I was invited to read, but I never really enjoyed them. The idea — the influence of the universities — was to read with a slight English inflection, which was meant to dignify the poem. But I liked singing, chanting my lyrics to this jazz group. It felt a lot easier. And I liked the environment better. You could drink.”
In An Interview with Leonard Cohen conducted by Michael Harris,9 Cohen again set his performances at Dunn’s against an academic perspective on poetry. To the question, “What do you think of academia and/or academic poets,” Cohen responded
I never saw myself in the academy. In fact, as soon as I could, you know, I got work in a nightclub above Dunn’s restaurant, called Birdland. I used to read poems or improvise them while Morrie Kay and his jazz group played. I even thought that that was somehow too tame for it, too academic.
Ira Nadel expands on the episode in his Leonard Cohen biography, Various Positions:10
or
You Can Take The Poet Out Of Saint Catherine Street
But You Can’t Take Saint Catherine Street Out Of The Poet

Postcard featuring St Catherine St in Montreal, c 1960, The Dunn’s sign is visible near the left side, between the Capitol and Pigalle.
Accounts of Leonard Cohen’s jazz club debut have sometimes suffered from lack of context. Ones understanding is abetted by the knowledge that, especially in the 1950s and 1960s, jazz has thrived in Montreal, lending an unmistakable flavor to the metropolis. As the introduction to Jazz City Montreal puts it:
There are many different ways to interpret Montreal’s rich jazz history…New Orleans’s mom, proximity to New York City, a longtime culture of cafés and nightclubs, a gangsta’ town, a place of convergence of rivers and railroads, a multicultural town with French flair, Paris’s daughter, Canada’s first real city. Each of these factors and many others, have all contributed to creating a place where live music thrives day after day, year in, year out. From the early ragtime period, right up to today’s zero tolerance progressive’s, there has always been the idea that jazz music was fun, and that it should swing… all nite long.
Montreal hosted premier world-class jazz players, including Louis Armstrong, Sonny Rollins, Herbie Hancock, and many, many others, as well as Canadian performers like Maynard Ferguson and Oscar Peterson. And venues for jazz, including but mot limited to jazz clubs, have long proliferated. 11 Performing above Dunn’s, Leonard Cohen was in the middle of Montreal’s night life – St Catherine Street.12
Moreover, during his adolescent and young adult years, Cohen was a stalwart participant – as a performer, as an audience member, and in some cases as a celebrity guest – in Montreal’s extensive and important jazz community.
And Leonard Cohen’s professional career as a singer-songwriter has been impacted by those experiences.
Not only are jazz influences evident in the musicology, for example, of Leonard Cohen’s Recent Songs and Dear Heather albums (it is easy to imagine “Villanelle For our Time” or “Morning Glory,” sans female vocals, as part of a setlist during the 1958 Cohen-Kaye collaboration), but Saint Catherine Street is still a feature in Cohen’s style and stage demeanor, as set forth by Walter Tunis in his review of the March 30, 2013 Leonard Cohen Louisville concert:13
[Leonard] Cohen portrayed elder romantic, poet philosopher, enlightened mystic, jazz hipster, socio-political correspondent and, yes, even dirty old man. [emphasis mine]
And, I would submit that Leonard Cohen’s early interactions with Maury Kaye and the other components of the Montreal Jazz Scene are the genuine provenance of “Anyhow” from the Old Ideas album.
Note the final portion of Cohen’s introduction to the song [emphasis mine]:
This is the moment when I take my first cigarette … I’ll step back into my old self. I’ll begin to hear the strains of the music of the most beautiful jazz orchestra in the world. My thoughts will settle, they’ll smooth out. I’ll be able to develop some kind of charitable take on my shabby life. I’ll be thinking of the past.
Leonard Cohen – Anyhow
Louisville: March 30, 2013
Video by Wirebirds (Henry Tengelsen)
Credit Due Department:
I owe special thanks to jazz pianist and adventurer, Billy Georgette, who provided invaluable insight into the Montreal jazz scene during the 1950s and 1960s as well as information specific to Maury Kaye, Dunn’s, and Leonard Cohen. His web site, Jazz City Montreal offers a unique perspective on that city’s rich jazz history.
The photo of Dunn’s atop this post and at the beginning of the video was taken by Al Bohns. That shot will also appear at the Centre d’histoire de Montreal, starting November 2013, when the museum presents the exhibit Scandal! Vice, Crime, and Morality in Montreal, 1940–1960.
The photo of Maury Kaye is by Ernie Mills. The photo of Maury Kaye and his band is by O’Neil of Montreal – Hal Gaylor, John Gilmore Jazz History Collection, Concordia University Archives.
The original Leonard Cohen-Lenny Breau poster is held in the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto. The ads for the Black Orchid Club and Dunn’s were found on Jazz City Montreal
The colorful view of St Catherine St midway through the video is a postcard found on several sites without attribution. The final black & white view of St Catherine St in the video is from the exhibition, St. Catherine Street Makes the Headlines!, at the Montréal Museum of Archaeology and History.
The audio track used in the video is from the private collection of Hippy1948.
_____________________