Leonard Cohen (was: Recordings: do they exist?)

[Hayyim Feldman <hf...>]

On Mon, 16 Aug 1999, robert wiener wrote:

>I don't believe that I knew about the Miriam Makeba version of "Where
>Can I Go?" -- maybe someone can fill us in.

The World Of Miriam Makeba, RCA LSP2750, 1963.

>But I did know about the Leonard Cohen "Who By Fire" quoted below your
>post.  Are there any other Leonard Cohen recordings that might
>interest us?  Anything less common, especially in French?  In fact, I
>think that I came across something in a museum in Montreal or Quebec,
>but it might have been from a private recording and I don't remember
>more.

The only thing I know of by him in French is Je Veux Vivre Tout Seul, an
unrecorded concert version of Bird on the Wire.  He recorded the Quebecois
song Un Canadien Errant - with a mariachi band! - a good choice for
whoever it was here doing a program on songs of exile awhile back.  He
also recorded The Partisan (Anna Marly/Hy Zaret) in English and French,
and has performed Die Gedanken Sind Frei in German and English.

What's less common depends on what one is (less) familiar with {:^).  If
you want something like a list of his songs of Jewish interest, I could
try to do that.  For explicitly Jewish material on a single album, I'd
recommend Various Positions.  But really, I think most LC recordings
should interest us.  He's a treasure of contemporary Yiddishkeit for
secular or religious Jews, as his fans Jew and gentile know (hamaskil
meyvin), but the Jewish communal world seems oblilvious to him. 

Read his little collection of 50 prose psalms, Book of Mercy (McClelland &
Stewart, 1984).  I don't know of anything else, by anyone, that is at once
so profoundly traditional and so completely contemporary.  Here's the
first:

 I stopped to listen, but he did not come.  I began again with a sense of
 loss.  As this sense deepened I heard him again.  I stopped stopping and
 I stopped starting, and I allowed myself to be crushed by ignorance.
 This was a strategy and it didn't work at all.  Much time, years were
 wasted in such a minor mode.  I bargain now.  I offer buttons for his
 love.  I beg for mercy.  Slowly he yields.  Haltingly he moves toward his
 throne.  Reluctantly the angels grant to one another permission to sing.
 In a transition so delicate it cannot be marked, the court is established
 on beams of golden symmetry, and once again I am a singer in the lower
 choirs, born fifty years ago to raise my voice this high, and no higher.

-Hayyim