Bruce Cockburn Brings His Gracefully-Diverse Music to Albuquerque’s KiMo April 30th
Bruce Cockburn will be in concert April 30th, 7:30 pm at The KiMo, 423 Central Ave NW. Tickets are at www.artsandculture.cabq.gov/ brucecockburn/2343 The concert is presented by Lensic 360 and the City of Albuquerque.
Bruce Cockburn is one of Canada’s finest artists, who has enjoyed an illustrious career shaped by politics, spirituality, and musical diversity. His remarkable journey has seen him embrace folk, jazz, rock, and worldbeat styles while traveling to such far-flung places as Guatemala, Mali, Mozambique, and Nepal, and writing memorable songs about his ever-expanding world of wonders. Both an exceptional songwriter and a revered guitarist. Cockburn’s songs delve into romance, protest, and spiritual discovery. His guitar playing, both acoustic and electric, is in the league of the world’s top instrumentalists. He also is deeply respected for his activism on issues from native rights and land mines to the environment and Third World debt, working for organizations such as Oxfam, Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders, and Friends of the Earth.
A self-professed “gentle Christian”, he has always expressed a tough-yet-hopeful stance: to kick at the darkness till it bleeds daylight. “We can’t settle for things as they are,” he once warned. “If you don’t tackle the problems, they’re going to get worse.”
The Ottawa-born artist has been honored with 13 Juno Awards, an induction into both the Canadian Music Hall of Fame and the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame, as well as the Governor General’s Performing Arts Award, and has been made an Officer of the Order of Canada. But he never rests on his laurels. “I’d rather think about what I’m going to do next,” says Cockburn. “My models for graceful aging are guys like John Lee Hooker and Mississippi John Hurt, who never stop working till they drop, as I fully expect to be doing, and just getting better as musicians and as human beings.”
In his KiMo show, Cockburn will feature songs from his new album O Sun O Moon with such lyrics as “Our orders said to love them all” and “Open the vein, let kindness rain/O’er us all/O’er us all/O’er us all.” And he likely will treat his audience to some of the songs from his vast back-catalog, which includes the hits “Wondering Where the Lions Are” and the fiercely-angry “If I Had a Rocket Launcher”.
In a January 16tth phone interview with this TECN reporter, Bruce Cockburn said, “I’m using horns and some great background vocals on this new album, and I’m very happy with how it came out. But in Albuquerque, I will be performing solo with guitar.” He noted that there is “a lot of the approaching end of life” on his new album, and that “God’s will is gonna get done, no matter what — we can choose to align ourselves with it, but whatever the Spirit wants to happen, will happen.” He explains that this may be called God but “it also may be energy, the inter- connectedness of the universe — it goes to the stars, that enormous and all-encompassing pulse that also shows up in a personal way in our hearts, that feeling of both smallness and of infinite love which you can very well feel in the desert.” He notes that “If I Had a Rocket Launcher” is “very specific” about what Cockburn observed happening decades ago in Latin America and that “rage shapes our lives in a somewhat invisible way” and that it expressed a feeling rather than an intention to do violence. “Do I still have that anger? It might be different now, that was almost 50 years ago.” He talks about his abiding concern about wildfires in Hawaii and in Canada and he notes how relevant his song “Haiku “is to New Mexico.
Bruce also promises to sing his very funny new song “King of the Bolero” and to lead an audience sing-along in his concert, possibly on “When the Spirit Walks in the Room”, his joyfully-unafraid song about the vision of impending death.
“Love trickles down like honey from God” — Bruce Cockburn, “Into the Now” from O Sun O Moon