Performance

Gary Tischler • June 17, 2013

When “Approaching Ali,” the one-hour opera having its world premiere at the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater Saturday and Sunday, created under the auspices of the Washington National Opera’s new commissioning program for contemporary American opera, there’ll be a little pressure on everybody involved.

That would include WNO artistic director Francesca Zambello, composer D.J. Sparr, and librettist Mark Campbell and Davis Miller, as well as performers bass Soloman Howard, Aundie Marie Moore, baritone, young boy soprano Ethan McKelvain, Tim Augustin and Catherine Martin.

The opera is the story of a young boy in North Carolina in the early 1960s who overcomes the loss of his mother and the trauma of being bullied when he sees champion boxer Muhammad Ali on television. More than 20 years later as a middle-aged writer, he seeks out his boyhood hero in person at the home of Ali’s mother in Louisville.

The work will feature a 10-piece chamber orchestra, conducted by former Domingo-Cafritz Young Artist Steven Jarvi.

But the Washington-raised Howard—who doubled as Joe in the critical and popular WNO production of

“Showboat”—has a particular challenge in performing, acting and singing the role of Ali. “As an African American who knows a little about struggling, I’ve always seen Muhammad Ali as a personal inspiration for me,” he said during a telephone interview. “He taught us what it’s like to fight, not just in the ring, but outside it, standing up for your personal beliefs and not backing down, no matter what the cost.

“When I was in high school [in Suitland, Md.], in an atmosphere of peers that couldn’t quite see an African American singer being interested in classical music, let alone opera, it sometimes got difficult,” he said in a deep, very deep bass voice that might give people pause about not showing respect. “People would say, why aren’t you singing gospel or blues or some such, or Barry White. But I was fortunate—I played football, too. So, I didn’t get that much trouble. I was fortunate to have people, teachers, mentors, who helped me fulfill my talent and my gift.”

“I grew up in D.C., and we had difficult times, but my parents kept things together,” Howard said. “I learned about strength from my mother Nellene Dickerson and my father Isaac Howard. You don’t always have the advantages other people did.”

As for the his part in the opera, it “was quite a challenge,” Howard said. “I believe in everything I do in opera that you have to learn to be the character, not just sing it correctly and with Ali, that was a serious responsibility and challenge for me. You have to do the man justice, you have to find him.

The new opera initiative “gives young singers, young artists a chance to do difficult and challenging work,” he said. “And this opera, we can hope, will broaden the audience. It’s a thoroughly American subject that ought to resonate for all Americans. It certainly did for me. The work spoke to me.”

The 32-year-old singer now is a rising part of the WNO, through its important Domingo—Cafritz Young Artist program.

The opera is based on Davis Miller’s book, “The Tao of Muhammad Ali.” His first published story, “My Dinner with Ali,” had the late David Halberstam praising it as one of the 20 best pieces of sports writing of the 20th century.

“Approaching Ali” will be performed at the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater Saturday, June 8, at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday, June 9, at 2 p.m.
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Gary Tischler •

I was a very young man when I first heard that immaculately clear, piercing and beautiful voice that belonged to Joan Baez singing folk songs I’d never heard before. It was the year of the folk singer in the music world, the protest singer, the emergence of the coffee house singers and folk festivals. In 1962, she was on the cover of Time Magazine, a thick painting depicting her strumming a guitar, long black hair, blue jeans and barefoot in a wicker chair of some sort.

Her singing, the look, the whole aura and story affected a lot of people deeply, myself included—it got me into Dylan, Sonny and Terry, Pete Seeger, the blues and folk music, the protest songs that we never sang in the Midwest or in the army.

Baez will performing at Wolf Trap, as part of a tour with the Indigo Girls at Wolf Trap Wednesday, June 12, singing some of those songs, and maybe songs from her last album, “The Day After Tomorrow.” If notes on Baez’s website give any hint of what else: songs like “Jerusalem,” “Susanne,” “Diamonds and Rust,” “It’s All Over, Baby Blue,” “God Is God” or, quite possibly, even “We Shall Overcome,” depending on the audience and its mood.

“Hello, it’s Joan,” Baez says when she calls. For a minute,I didn’t know quite what to say except thank you. I hadn’t expected this voice, because all I remembered really was the voice that sang so incredibly, or the stories and the facts and the biography, but this voice was conversational, a phone call from the here and now, not the past.

For the past seven years or so, Baez had been living in Riverside, Calif., with her mother, whom people called “Big Joan,” and who had just passed away April 20 at the age of 100. I offered my condolences. “I have to tell you a funny story,” Baez said. “We had planned a big 100th birthday party for her. At first, she didn’t want to have anything to do with that, she didn’t want a party, but then she relented, We had around 100 people over, and it was fine, and then we asked her what she wanted for her birthday. She stood there, and she said, ‘I want to drop dead.’ And you know, a week later, she passed away. It was the right time. I think is what she meant, and we were all there for her.”

Her mother was Scottish and her father, Albert Baez, a physicist and inventor, was born in Mexico. Her sister Mimi Farina was also a noted folk/protest singer and activist; she died of cancer in 2001.

You think about loss in a conversation like this, but it wasn’t like that. Baez—simply by being who she’s been for more than 50 years of singing and speaking out and being in places and lending her name and time to causes and walking with Martin Luther King, Jr., and that voice and that body of work—can bring an aura to any conversation, it could be a too-serious kind of talk that leaves out the person.

But her conversational voice is warm, and her singing voice, for that matter, has changed. “It’s time, that does that,” she says. “I occupy the middle ground, my voice, it’s an instrument, you have to take care of it, and I’m sure there are people who expect the old voice, and you can’t do that as much any more. “ Listening to some online offerings—“Diamonds and Rust” comes to mind but also the much, much later “The Day After Tomorrow,” a Steve Earl-produced album from 2008—the voice is richer and a little more diverse in its travels. It’s an older voice, but not like the old voice.

Baez finds a lot of comfort and pleasure in touring—her son Gabriel plays with her on the tour, and the rest are friends to some degree or another. “It’s like being with family, a road trip, it’s just warm and good,” she says. They’ve here, they’ve been in Colorado and Kansas and move on to New Jersey, Massachusetts and New York.

She knows her iconic status, but it’s the whole package and persona that’s the icon—the activist, her travels to the Middle East, Africa, singing at the side of Nelson Mandela, going to the suffering places and speaking and singing truth to power.

Her look has changed, the hair is short and grayer, but the image of the new girl on the block in music remains, as does the almost wounding effect of the voice.

“You know, most of the time audiences are good,” she said. “They’re people that know the music, the songs, they’ll get into it or respond, they’ll sing along. And every now and then, you get nothing, and you think, ‘Oh, boy, we’ve got our work cut out for this.’ You get all kinds of people—my generation, sure, and it gets a little nostalgic then, but also young people, and I think people who care.”

Her kind of music—the kind that seem to be about what’s going on in our daily and worldly life, isn’t much in evidence among contemporary singers, although performers today are quick to raise money and sing for causes, but their music lags behind. There are, in short, few if any passionate singer-citizens like Joan Baez around, and there is still only one Bob Dylan.

“Sure, he still does that, but then, he’s always done it,” she said of Dylan, the pied piper of the here and now, the heart within, the cool attitude without.

Baez expressed some disappointment with President Barack Obama, whom she endorsed in his first run. “I think, I don’t know, I thought he had the potential to create a movement, and that hasn’t happened,” she said.

She frets about the times and their dangers. “Maybe these are times when you savor every little thing and make them into the things that matter.”

Her voice over the phone still rings true and clear as spring water. It’s the woman who said in a PBS special about her that “social justice is the core of her true life, looming larger than music.” “It’s Joan”: Joan Baez.

Gary Tischler •

When you see that the Brubeck Brothers Quartet is playing as a big part of the Jazz at the Hamilton Live series as the D.C. Jazz Festival nears its end Friday night, you don’t necessarily think of Dan Brubeck on drums, or Chris Brubeck on bass and trombone, or their compatriots Mike DeMicco on guitar and Chuck Lamb on piano.

You think about what they’re doing which is a concert called “A Tribute to Dave Brubeck,” and you think about that guy who isn’t there but surely is. That would be Chris and Dan’s father and dad, mentor and influence, Dave Brubeck, the jazz composer and player and one of the most original American musicians and jazz players ever in a field stuffed to full glory with originals.

“It’s about my dad, sure. It’s a tribute, sure, but it’s about all of us—our memories, the influence and the love, so yeah, there’s a lot going on,” said Chris Brubeck, something of an iconoclast and multitasker and multi-talented guy who can seamlessly float in and out of rock and roll, pop, jazz, and classical music in his composing and playing, and talking. He is also the man behind and in front of the group, Triple Play, which delves into rock and blues and some straight ahead jazz, as jazz people would have it.

In “Chris Brubeck’s Triple Play Live at Arthur Zankel Music Center with Joel Brown and Peter Madcat Ruth,” a concert album recorded in 2011, you can hear the son’s eclectic tastes and his roaring, soaring trombone on such songs as “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” “Rollin’ and Tumblin’,” a bluesy ripper by Hambone Willie Newburn or Chris’s “Mighty Mrs. Hippy” and Fat’s Waller’s “Black and Blue.” Wonders of wonders, though, you can hear dad, Dave Brubeck, making a guest appearance on “St. Louis Blues” and his trademark Paul Desmond number “Take Five,” so that you get a sense of father and son merging, not for the first time, but for the last time. It’s the last known recorded performance by Dave Brubeck, coincidentally.

Coincidentally, it’s also Father’s Day two days after the concert at the Hamilton. Brubeck senior was a lifetime achievement honoree at the D.C. Jazz Festival.

“You know almost all of us, all the sons, are or were in the business at one time or another, and we played with him many times over the years,” Chris Brubeck said. “We, and I know I did, learned a lot from him, and one of the things was to respect, enjoy and play all kinds of music.”

That’s very evident if you check out YouTube and find a kind of shared talk between Chris and his father on the occasion of collaborating on writing a symphonic composition on a PBS documentary on the great American photographer Ansel Adams. “Yeah, that’s something, isn’t, it?” Chris said. “I saw a lot of similarities between dad and Adams. They were American types, they grew up in somewhat the same kind of area, big mountains, big stretches of land. Dad was taking classical musical lessons when grandpa decided to be a rancher. So, dad instead was something of a cowboy, but he played on weekends in a band.”

This is not the place to go into a biography of the grand master that Dave Brubeck was. This is about a family, two families, the kind of life lived by Brubeck, which was not a life you could call typically a jazz life. The jazz legends lived large and lived dramatically— Bird, the Duke, Ella, Billie, Miles, Dizzy, Bud Powell and so on, lives lived on the edges of disaster. That wasn’t Brubeck. As much as he traveled and played, he was always a phone call, a thought, a voice or a possible distance away from his source and reason.

“There’s sometimes this idea that dad wasn’t, I don’t know, really jazz enough, that he was too intellectual or something which isn’t true at all,” Brubeck said. “He was a giant, but he lived his own life. He revered all these men and women—witness ‘The Duke,’ which he wrote and he loved playing with people. He was a collaborationist. He felt that classical music and jazz were all part of the same stream, that you could find things in both that led you to the other. I think I got that from him.”

The young Brubeck lived a bit of the rock-and-roll life in California. Chris had his own group(s). That’s still there, but he played and travelled with his father.

“It’s still hard to believe he’s not here,” he said. “I mean, it just happened last December. I was traveling. We didn’t know that he was in trouble. I heard about it, while I was away. Everybody, all of miss him not being here.”

Fathers and sons on a Friday night in Washington, jazz all around. For sure, you can hear it—that familiar lead in to “Take Five,” like musical hipsters sauntering down the streets. That’s when you will expect to see him and know that he’ll be there anyway. Old music legends may die, but their music never fades away—especially, when you have his two boys giving and playing a tribute to the old man.

Gary Tischler •

The D.C. Jazz Festival is roaring to a big close this weekend, with some big concerts still remaining on tap, including the Roots in Southwest.

Here’s a look at some of what’s left:

Friday, June 14

Jazz Meets the Latin Classics—The Paquito D’Rivera Pan Americana Ensemble explores the classical sounds from Latin Americfa in “Jazz Meets The Latin Classics” at the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater at 7:30 p.m. D’Rivera, the festival’s co-artistic director and NEA Jazz Masters leads an all-star ensemble with guests Brenda Feliciano, and Berta Rojas exploring Piazzolla, Lecuona, Rodrigo, Villa Lobos, and D’Rivera’s own works.

Susana Baca—at the Howard Theatre, 8 p.m.

Lee Konitz with the Brad Linde Expanded Ensemble—at the Atlas Performing Arts Center, 8 p.m.

The Brubeck Brothers Quartet: Tribute to Dave Brubeck, 8:30 p.m., Hamilton Live

Pharoah Sanders—Legendary player at the Bohemian Caverns, 8:30 and 10:30 p.m.

Saturday , June 15

The Roots—The great contemporary group fusing hip hop, jazz and blues at the Kastles Stadium at the Wharf; doors open at 3 p.m.

The Karriem Riggins Quartet, the DC Jazz Loft Series Blowout Show, at D.C. Jazz Loft Pop-Up Hall, 7:30 p.m. and 1:30 a.m.

The Brass-A-Holics, GoGo Brass Funk Band, 8:30 p.m. Hamilton Live.

Sunday June 16

John McLaughlin, Howard Theatre, 8 p.m.

Gary Tischler • June 6, 2013

Virtuoso and legendary drummer Roy Haynes and his Fountain of Youth Band kicks off the 15th D.C. Jazz Festival June 5 in fitting fashion at the Hamilton, one of the festivals main venues with its Jazz at the Hamilton Live series.

It’s a big night in more ways than one: Haynes is a walking, drumming honorary member of the history of jazz and fittingly will be given the 2013 DCJF Lifetime Achievement Award.

Roy Owen Haynes has had a lasting impact on jazz—he came out of the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston to become one of the most recorded drummers in the history of jazz. He’s had a career that lasted more than 60 years even bridging the gap to the rock-and-roll generation, including Charlie Watts of the Rolling Stone, the Allman Brothers Band and Page McConnell. If you want to check out just where Haynes belongs in the parade of jazz, you might want to get a musical biography CD set, called “A Life in Time—The Roy Haynes Story,” released in 2007. On it are musical highlights from the life, time and music of Haynes, with recordings that feature Charlie Parker, Sarah Vaughan, Miles Davis, Thelonius Monk, Chick Corea, Pat Metheny as well as Haynes’s own Hip Ensemble and Fountain of Youth Quartet.

Better yet, check out You Tube, always a treasure trove of jazz music, including one in which Haynes and the great saxophonist Sonny Rollins talk over old jazz times or a jam session with Haynes and Chick Corea. Even better still, there’s a video called “Blue ‘n Boogie” and one featuring Stan Getz, Gary Burton, Steve Swallow and Haynes as well as a Terri Lyne Carrington Tribute to Haynes. Carrington, by the by, will be performing “Money Jungle Provocative in Blue” June 8 at the Hamilton as part of the festival.

Opening on Wednesday, 7:30 p.m., for Haynes is Nasar Abadey and Supernova.

Another jazz fest highlight on Wednesday is Marc Cary, performing “Solo Piano: A Tribute to Abbey Lincoln” at the Bohemian Caverns on U Street.

On tap for June 6, Pianist Allyn Johnson, called by many the “Dean of D.C. Jazz,” will be at the Phillips Collection at 5 p.m.; Trumpeter Nicholas Payton XXX will be at Hamilton Live at 7:30 p.m. and Lonnie Liston Smith will perform at Bohemian Caverns at 8 and 10 p.m.

Jordan Hellmuth • June 3, 2013

The ninth annual D.C. Jazz Festival is dancing its way back to the District this June with more than 125 shows across the city. Jazz will take over the city June 5 through June 16.

D.C. is still very much a “jazz town,” as it was when festival director and founder Charlie Fishman decided D.C. was just the place for a jazz festival in 2004. Nine years later, jazz is as alive as ever in D.C. This year’s encompassing concept, “Jazz Meets the Latin Classics,” highlights the Latin flavor of the classic roots of D.C. jazz.

Jazz at the Hamilton Live returns for a second year for D.C. Jazz with live jazz nightly throughout the festival. Events D.C. presents the “Jazz in the ‘Hoods” program, stretched jazz from corner to corner of the District, featuring Jazz at the Howard Theatre and the CapitolBop D.C. Jazz Loft Series. The Loft Series will wrap up with the all-night Blowout Show at D.C. Jazz Loft Pop-Up Hall on June 15.

The D.C. jazz world is buzzing about the Roots, which will conclude the D.C. Jazz Festival June 15 with a show at a new jazz fest venue, Kastles Stadium at the Wharf.

Keep a lookout for D.C. Jazz Festival tickets on Facebook and Twitter giveaways from The Georgetowner.

Visit www.dcjazzfest.org for a complete list of show times, locations, and ticket information.

Georgetowner • May 23, 2013

On May 14, The Georgetowner, Culture Capital, and the Restaurant Association Metropolitan Washington celebrated the Arts of D.C. at the home of Michele and Jack Evans. Sponsored By Long and Foster Real Estate, the evening won praises with hors d’ oeuvres prepared by Sebastien Archambault of Blue Duck Tarvern, John Mathieson of BLT Steak and Frederik De Pue, chef and owner of Table and Azur.

To see and read more of this event, pick up the May 22 issue of The Georgetowner.
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Gary Tischler • May 16, 2013

The Washington Ballet’s production of “The Sun Also Rises,” Ernest Hemingway’s acclaimed novel of the “Lost Generation,” ended a brief run at the Kennedy Center’s Eisenhower Theater this weekend, and that’s a shame.

It’s unfortunate that the ballet, created by Washington Ballet’s artistic director Septime Webre, wasn’t seen by more people, because it was a rare mesh of art and entertainment, the interpretation of a great work of literature through dance adding a layer onto our appreciation of the gifts, talents and time of Hemingway.

Webre didn’t re-imagine the book, nor did he slavishly perform an act of dignified homage. It was something much better—a kind of improvement of the original by adding tactile texture, a visual environment that was kinetic and often spectacular, a richness of music and movement, and an energy that was often downright dazzling. It allowed dance to add a different sort of emotion to the whole, without taking away Hemingway’s directness, his naturalistic prose style, a blunt honesty and tension which worked its way into the choreography of the pas de deux, the solos and the out and dances.

It was a considerable artistic achievement on the part of the Washington Ballet, its company and, especially, Webre, the kind that in the least should be re-mounted in another season, as was Webre’s ballet of “The Great Gatsby,” F. Scott Fitzgerald’s quintessential novel about American success stories, which now appears to be enjoying a financial, if not entirely a critical success as a Baz Luhrmann film, starring Leonardo DiCaprio.

Webre’s vision achieved this: it fleshed out the novel to give us the heart and spirit of the times. It immersed us into the imagined details of time and place, something Hemingway did with muscular prose and pitiless, sometimes pithy, dialogue. We could see how the characters—the sexually and spiritually wounded journalist Jake Barnes, the pugnacious, aggressive Princeton boxer Robert Cohn, and Lady Brett Ashley, the dazzling, charismatic and restless woman the two men both love—live, spend their days and nights, shadowed and haunted in Paris and in Spain by the war to end all wars, and instead laid the groundwork for World War II.

It’s 1926, Paris, and crowds—the ballet company of couples, gendarmes, artists, romantic rivals, writers, dancers, bartenders, hangers on, street ladies and just ladies and girls, a Greek count, and can can dancers, and boxers are always on the move—dancing in the hotel, eating and dancing and flirting and bristling in the Paris days and nights. Jake loves Brett, and Brett loves Jake but sleeps with other men. Robert wants Brett but fails to keep her. And the stage is always full—except when it’s not and a couple of times the rich, growly voice and presence of E. Faye Butler makes for a presence, singing American blues as in “You Got to Give Me Some,” like dirty rice in a jambalaya.

Webre appears to have just let his imagination roam—conjuring up great giant mystical masks at a parade for the running of the bulls in Pamploma, creating a bullfight, letting the can-can dance loose in a rush of bright skirts and garters and yelling. The backdrops are flickering silent movie newsreels of the times, giving us a hint of the frantic energies on display and the even bigger disillusionment it hides. And always, Hemingway’s words appear as opera-like supertitles, most memorably when Jake offers that he and Brett being in love would be “fun.” “It would be hell on earth,” she says

Hemingway let the couples’ frustration at being unable to complete their love stand as a symbol of the huge frustration and cynicism that arose after the catastrophe of World War I. You get a sense of that in the dancing—tense but also deeply sad—of Jared Nelson—and the dances involving him and Brett, performed with a mysterious lightness of being that is compelling by the talented Sona Kharatian.

Billy Novack’s original music and arrangements heightened the sense of the particular and familiar. It had a frenzied melancholy, flavored by flamenco, a touch of Brel, Chevalier and Piaf as well as a soulful beat that hung over the production.

It wasn’t perfect—it had to go where it had to go. It included a fishing trip that is much praised in the novel for its description of action and nature but doesn’t result in a visual or dance equivalent.

History—and their own melancholy—defeats the characters in the end no matter how strong their feelings. Webre illustrated it with one grand, overpowering image that filled the stage. La Vie en Rose, indeed.

Georgetowner • May 10, 2013

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Gary Tischler •

The German-born singer Ute Lemper is making one of her frequent jaunts to Washington, this time at the Sixth and I Street Synagogue, courtesy of the Washington Performing Arts Society May 18. Even though I’d never seen or heard her, the reputation, the name, and the marketing always struck me as resonant—she’s the siren singer of Brecht and Weill, wearing the black-strap, blonde mantle of Marlene Dietrich and Lotte Lenya.

And then again, not. Cabaret singers are members of a large and funky tribe to begin with. It’s a tribe of originals, some of them out and out jazz or blues singers, others the men and women who keep the Great American Songbook alive in hotel bars and sometimes lesser or bigger venues. They present themselves not only as singers but actors, shamen and wizards and late night witches, not necessarily of the Glinda type. They’re personas, actors as much as singers.

She is all that and then again not and so much more. Trying to catch up with her on the Internet can make you dizzy. Her biographical material makes her seem like an urban legend after a while. You would think that nobody does this much and is still looking for mountains to climb, not the next thing, or the new thing, but the thing she hasn’t done before.

Here’s a list: Munster, Germany, where she grew up, mother of four, Bambalurina, Charles Bukowski, Lily Marlene, Pigalle, Edith Piaf, Sally Bowles, Kurt Weill, Pablo Neruda, Lola, Peter Pan, Jacques Brel, the Carlysle Hotel and Joe’s Pub, Mackie Messer, the Panama Drive Band, Weimar and New York, Vera Kelly and a poodle.

The only common thread among all of these references is Ute Lemper, it’s all part of her life, the persona, the woman on stage and off.

“I like what I’m doing, “ she said in a telephone interview. “I can look back on it and think, ‘Well, maybe I haven’t had what you could call a huge, or big career’, but on the other hand, I’ve done and I’m doing what I want, I have the freedom to that, to try new things, to keep learning, and I have a rich life.”

If you define big by household name, the roaring of celebrity, drowning in the click of cameras, money that you couldn’t possibly spend, then maybe she can say she hasn’t had a big career. If you define big by the quality and size of density and variety, she has had a huge and heady career.

“I think, everything else being said, it was Weimar and Brecht and Weill that really influenced my choices,” she said. Lemper, was born in Munster, in the northern part of Germany, and she’s keenly aware of German history, angry about it, with the word “rage” coming up in some of her interviews. She is not a sleepwalker when it comes to context. “Brecht and Weill, they were perfect for each other when they worked together—not necessarily as friends, but the music match to the words, and the kind of words and characters were dark, the songs were dark but they had a jaunty edge to them as well, they engaged the audience in uncomfortable ways.”

If you go to Lemper’s website, you’re greeted by the covers of six of her albums—“Pablo Neruda, a song cycle of love poems”, “Last Tango in Berlin” (a kind of compendium which will be part of her concert), “Ultimate Tango”, “Berlin Nights, Paris Days”, “The Bukowski Project”, “Ute Lemper Sings Brecht and Weill”. Taken together, they’re a summation of her concert performance, career and persona. You’ll find Yiddish songs here, Brecht’s brittle and merciless political songs which haunt us still, the Tango, the music of Paris and Weimar Berlin, compositions by Lemper on the theme of the elegant Chilean poet Neruda and the not so elegant poet of one-step-from-the-gutter and protagonist of the movie “Barfly”, the growly, jazzy and late Charles Bukowski.

“I don’t lead a dramatic personal life,” she says. “I am dramatic on stage, I suppose, that’s like acting, you put on the glamorous dresses, the hair, it’s a persona for the music. I have four children—two grown and two at home, two and seven. My husband is a musician himself so we have a language for that and we understand each other.”

Watch her videos on YouTube. Watch her do a full-blown number on “All That Jazz”, all blonde, voice going over a cliff, flying, it’s a new razzle dazzle, complete with showgirls, she’s all arms and legs. In another concert, she’s doing “Mack the Knife”, German and English, and she asks the crowd to whistle with her. She’s a good whistler.

“I don’t know what it is,” she says, “people don’t whistle anymore. When I was a girl—I always wanted to sing, I’d bicycle to school singing, or whistling. You don’t see that any more—people are all hooked up on the phone.”

She is a true citizen of the world in the sense of having lived in Germany, Vienna, Paris, and now in New York. Vienna is where she was part of the “Cats” phenomena, playing Bombalurina, the redheaded cat.. “I hated “Cats”,” she said. “Every day, singing the same song, and it was very physical, exhausting, really.”

She was also Sally Bowles in “Cabaret”, which was more to her liking, and Velma Kelly in “Chicago” (for which she won the Laurence Olivier Award for lead performance in a musical in 2009). But she is most at home with her concerts, which has led her to become a singer-songwriter, into a partnership with the Vogler string quartet, and with Stefan Malzew, a versatile musican—he plays piano, clarinet and accordion, which allow all sorts of sounds to emerge during the course of a concert.

Lemper has a certain fearless quality to her—on the phone she’s conversational, but in her music, and with her rangy voice, she startles and surprises you, you don’t know whether she’s going to run right over the audience or if she’ll need to be rescued, she’s a growler, her melancholy tones are modulated by whether she’s singing French or German, or English, she can scream and move around with a kind of triumphant elation.

Her music is intense, which you don’t always get in conversation. Talking about Bukowski, and his dark soul, you hear a poodle in the background of her home, or a brief break to change an appointment with the dentist, the reassuring sounds and rhythm of domestic, daily life. And all that jazz.

Ute Lemper will be performing at the Sixth & I Historic Synogogue on Saturday, May 18 at 8 p.m.