It's been a rough year for a multitude of reasons, but the music world has been hit especially hard via a painful series of deaths. Throughout 2016, we lost icons and game-changers including David Bowie, Prince, Sharon Jones, A Tribe Called Quest's Phife Dawg, and many more. While felt around the globe, the early November passing of poet, author and singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen has left a mark locally. Accordingly, this week will see two different tribute concert taking place across town. Both the “Tower of Song” concert at the Fox Cabaret on Thursday (Dec. 15) and the “I'm Your Man” celebration at the Rio Theatre on Saturday (Dec. 17) unite a wide spectrum of Vancouver artists ready to toast the prolific, impactful, and passionate songbook of Our Man.
“He's obviously super influential to a ton of people I know, including myself," Fox Cabaret live-music director Adam Fink says of booking his venue's event, adding that while he won't be onstage himself, his first band was named the Beautiful Losers, after Cohen's 1966 novel. "We thought it would be nice to do something honouring him, and hopefully making a little bit of money for charity at the same time."
Banding together at the Fox to raise funds for the Canadian Red Cross will be local artists like dark-pop performer Louise Burns and glam experimenter Johnny De Courcy. While Belle Game keyboardist and vocalist Katrina Jones has lived in Vancouver for the last five years, her involvement in both tribute nights reflects being raised in Cohen's off-and-on home base of Montreal, where it wasn’t unheard of to run into the songwriter. "He's always been this mythical creature, [but] there's a general knowing, appreciating and understanding of him in Montreal," she says. "When I was doing my undergrad at McGill, I worked at a café called Bagel Etc for four years, and it was directly across the street from his apartment. I actually had the pleasure of serving him, meeting him and hanging out with him."
Jones reveals of his ordering habits: "It was always just coffee. If he ate anything, it would be very simple, like eggs, bacon and bread. That was it. He would just come in some mornings, sit at the bar with his coffee and just want to hang out."
Endearingly, says Jones, Cohen would address everyone he came into contact with as "friend."
While not every musician on the bill had the chance to meet Cohen, his influence on their lives is no less personal. Malcolm Biddle, who performs solo as Malcolm Jack, had his love for the baritone-voiced icon passed on through his dad's old record collection. "I still have my dad's Songs of Leonard Cohen," he says, referencing Cohen’s 1967 debut. "I think a lot of people did this at the time, but it's got his initials on the front cover, MB, which is the same as mine."
While Biddle's attachment to the album will have him bringing an interpretation of "The Stranger Song" onto the Fox’s stage, he'll also cover "There is a War" from 1974's New Skin for the Old Ceremony, a piece his full band project, Dada Plan, had already been including in their live repertoire.
"He was a focused and furious artist, which is an old-world trait," Biddle praises. "In a world of hyper-fast media consumption, he could be compared with those old artists in the sense that he built a body of work, and every piece is specifically unique and perfected."
Over the last 50 years, Cohen's music evolved from the acoustic, finger-picked beauty of Songs of Love and Hate, to the synth-based smooth jazz of The Future, and onto the occasionally symphonic You Want it Darker, a mortality-focused collection that landed mere weeks before Cohen's death. No Sinner frontwoman Colleen Rennison, who will be singing at both the Fox and the Rio, admits that songs like "Suzanne" and "Hallelujah" have lived with her for years, but it's not Cohen's versions she's generally been drawn to. A self-described "second-hand fan," she loves the "potency" of Cohen's poetry, but has been far more affected by other artists' musical interpretations. "I think that it really speaks volumes of the power of words that I can hear one of his songs and be like, 'This is never something that I would choose to put on' – not that that's true for everything he's done," says Rennison. "Chances are the best writer isn't going to be the best singer; chances are the best singer isn't going to be the best writer. If you take the best singer, like k.d. lang, and pair her with a song like 'Hallelujah,' it's magic."
Rennison's own booming, blues-stained pipes are quite different than the minimalist, gravel-voiced vocals Cohen displayed on record. She'll put a twist on the 1974 song "Why Don't You Try?", which she calls a feminist anthem. "[It's] basically a pep talk to a woman that's just come out of a relationship. I love that: 'You need to hold a leash to be a lady.' You need to have somebody on a string in order to feel like a woman. I just love that line so much, because I see so many men on leashes, you know?"
But she’ll be rendering the song in her own way – which she believes is the only way to approach any of Cohen’s material. "Nobody can mimic Leonard Cohen. He's just the suavest Canadian dude ever. You have to put your own brand on it. I think that's neat about covering Cohen: that it's really up to interpretation.
The Tower of Song tribute concert takes place Thursday, Dec. 15, at Fox Cabaret (2321 Main), 8pm; tickets $12 from FoxCabaret.com. I’m Your Man is on Saturday, Dec. 17, at the Rio Theatre (1660 E. Broadway), 8pm; tickets $17 from RioTheatre.ca
