REMEMBERING A LEGEND
Artists unite for an ambitious Cohen tribute
The night that news of Leonard Cohen’s death broke, Li’l Andy was scheduled to perform as part of the 20th-anniversary festivities for his favourite bar, Barfly, with his pal Joe Grass. When they heard the word, the Montreal musicians immediately began revamping their set list.
“Joe was like, ‘We’ll do a Cohen song,’ ” Li’l Andy recounted. “I said, ‘Yeah, all the ones we know.’”
Li’l Andy started making a tally and came up with 15 titles.
“So ... we played a set of entirely Leonard Cohen material at Barfly,” he said.
Between sets, the pair wandered the two blocks up St-Laurent Blvd. to Cohen’s residence, near the corner of Marie-Anne St., where an impromptu wake was taking shape. There, they bumped into POP Montreal director Dan Seligman and some other musician friends, and it wasn’t long before talk of organizing a bigger Cohen tribute began.
God Is Alive, Magic Is Afoot: A Montreal Tribute to Leonard Cohen bids farewell to the Montreal legend, who died last month at the age of 82, Thursday evening at the Rialto Theatre. The concert sold out shortly after it was announced.
Li’l Andy will share the stage with a host of performers including indie acts Basia Bulat, Thus Owls, Brad Barr, NEeMA, Emilie & Ogden and Marie-Pierre Arthur, as well as the Shaar Hashomayim Choir and authors such as Rawi Hage.
“I had been wanting to do a Leonard Cohen tribute for a long time,” said Li’l Andy, a singersongwriter of the alt-country variety. “I thought of doing one for POP 2017 — I didn’t see any reason for leaving it until his death. I thought he’d live into his 90s.”
Li’l Andy was plain old Andrew McClelland when he discovered Cohen as a kid.
“I was in a bookstore in Ottawa,” he recalled, “and his book Stranger Music had just come out. I remember opening it to the poem I Perceive the Outline of Your Breasts . ... It’s about approaching a former lover, and he talks about seeing her in a Halloween costume. Oh my god, I was just a girl-crazy 12-year-old, and here’s this poet articulately validating my experience better than anything I had ever encountered.”
Little Li’l Andy had just started learning guitar. He soon began teaching himself the songs of Leonard Cohen, covers of which he has played throughout his career. Moving to Montreal at age 20, he holed up in an apartment at the corner of Clark and Marie-Anne, around the corner from Cohen’s residence. Over the years, he occasionally crossed paths with his idol, even striking up a casual rapport.
“When I met him the first time, in the Main (deli), I approached him after much trepidation,” Li’l Andy recounted. “He was reserved at first, but when I told him I was in a country and
western band, his eyes lit up. I said, ‘We do Tower of Song as a country and western song.’ He said, ‘I do like country.’ “
In selecting performers for the tribute concert, Li’l Andy gravitated toward other artists who had a connection to Cohen’s music, particularly people who already performed his songs.
Bulat was at the top of his list. The indie-folk singer-songwriter has long played Ain’t No Cure for
Love in her live show and had the good fortune of singing If It Be Your Will in front of Cohen himself, when he was awarded the Glenn Gould Prize at Toronto’s Massey Hall in 2012.
“It was an indescribable feeling,” said the self-professed “lifelong fan,” who was introduced to Cohen’s music by her best friend on the first day of high school, back in Toronto.
Asked what has kept her interest for all these years, she paused.
“I think there is something about all of Leonard’s lyrics that ... there’s a reason why people all around the world feel his loss so profoundly,” she said. “I think his way of feeling both the joy and the pain so strongly, musically and lyrically, reaches something that’s beyond.
“It’s more than just his poetry, and it’s more than just the music. It feels like it’s going beyond and coming from somewhere we don’t understand.”
In other news, Cohen may have been indirectly responsible for the Barr Brothers moving to Montreal.
“The only time I ever covered a Leonard Cohen song,” lead singer Brad Barr said, “was when our old band the Slip was performing in Montreal, in 2003, at Le Swimming. We played Hallelujah, and during that song the club caught on fire and the show was over. Everyone had to run outside. We were running out with our guitars, and that is where my brother met his wife. That’s the beginning of how we ended up in Montreal, and that’s the last time we played Hallelujah.”
Of course, it’s not all about the music. Hage is currently poring over Cohen’s 1963 novel The Favourite Game, in search of appropriate excerpts to read for the occasion.
“I’m hoping to find something that tells something about Leonard Cohen,” he said, “and also maybe something about death, or about Montreal.”
The Beirut-born author of books including Carnival, Cockroach and De Niro’s Game is a fan of Cohen’s prose and poetry, and especially his music.
“I listen to his music constantly,” Hage said. “I do relate — to what exactly, I’m not sure. He was overtly poetic in his music, and at the same time it had a certain depth. I think he wasn’t afraid to merge the intellect and the spiritual with the musical. That’s something I think we’re all longing for these days.”
It is not overstating matters to say that Cohen changed Gideon Zelermyer’s life this year by inviting the cantor at Westmount’s Congregation Shaar Hashomayim to perform on what turned out to be his final album, You Want It Darker, released in October. Needless to say, it’s been a busy few months.
“It’s honestly wild,” Zelermyer said. “This fall has been unlike anything I could have imagined. The album was one thing; then when he passed it got completely crazy. I can’t even count (the interviews) anymore, between the press here, in the States and in Israel. The sense of mourning people have for him all over the place is overwhelming.”
Zelermyer and the Shaar Hashomayim Choir will perform two songs on Thursday: You Want It Darker, and an a cappella rendition of If It Be Your Will, from Cohen’s 1984 album Various Positions.
“We wanted to pick something that had religious depth to the words,” he said of the latter song. “We can’t compete in a lot of ways with the rest of the acts on the program — we’re an a cappella men’s choir. It’s not in our wheelhouse to do gigs at the Rialto. On the other hand, we’re bringing something nobody else brings — the sound he was looking for from his childhood, that he wanted as part of his last album.”
All of these elements and more will converge on Thursday, in a concert designed to pay homage to the multiple facets of one of our city’s finest artists.
“I hope it’s a cross between mourning and celebration,” Li’l Andy said. “I want it to be a reminder that mourning isn’t just putting a photo on Facebook or Instagram. There has to be a place to come together to mourn someone’s life.”