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Publication: Creatives Prevail (podcast)
By: Michael Zimmerlich
Date: May 22, 2025

Ute Lemper reflects on her four decade career as a globally acclaimed vocalist, composer, and actor. We discuss her bold reinterpretation of Kurt Weill, the weight of German history in her work, and how staying true to her creative instincts has led to timeless collaborations with artists like Tom Waits and Elvis Costello. 

Click below graphic to listen to the podcast:

Transcript:

Mike: Hey Ute, how are you?

Ute: Hello. Good morning. How are you?

Mike: Good morning to you as well. I’m doing fantastic. Thanks for asking. How are you doing?

Ute: I am here in New York and enjoying a beautiful spring day. And, um, yes, just back from a big project I did with the Pina Bausch Dance Company in Europe and enjoying a couple of days home before I take off again.

Mike: Oh, that’s wonderful. Do you travel often for your work?

Ute: Oh, I travel all the time. My career is based in Europe and most of my concerts are in France, Italy, Spain, Greece, Germany, and the UK. The summers are packed with festivals in Europe. I usually work with European promoters and agents. The projects are wonderful. But I always return to New York, which is home.

Mike: I love that. I can imagine how much your career has evolved through the years. At what point did you realize you were going to pursue performance as your life’s work?

Ute: Well, already at age 15 or 16, I knew that I would follow a path that would lead into the arts. I was studying ballet at a conservatory. I had piano lessons and was singing in a youth choir. It was my second nature. I wasn’t really interested in anything else. I had excellent grades in school, but I was drawn to music, dance, and expression.

Mike: That sense of artistic purpose really comes through in your work. When did you first start developing a relationship with the music of Kurt Weill?

Ute: My first connection was not through Weill directly but through Bertolt Brecht and German literature and history. Later, when I moved to Vienna, I encountered the world of cabaret, chanson, and Weill’s music through performances and the local culture. It resonated deeply with me. Weill’s music contains irony, despair, and truth. And growing up in post-war Germany, there was a silence surrounding our past. The Weimar era songs spoke to that silence.

Mike: Was there a specific moment where that connection became something you wanted to pursue professionally?

Ute: Absolutely. When I performed in Cabaret and then moved into The Blue Angel, the parallels became too strong to ignore. These shows touched on themes of identity, displacement, and moral complexity. And when I eventually recorded Weill’s songs, I felt like I was reclaiming something lost from my country’s artistic soul. I wasn’t just performing—I was reconstructing memory.

Mike: That’s so powerful. It reminds me of what you said elsewhere about how these songs aren’t just historical—they’re urgent. Is that how Pirate Jenny came to be?

Ute: Yes, very much. Pirate Jenny was born out of rage and frustration about what’s happening in our world today. Social injustice, suppression, violence—these are themes that have always been with us. The songs of Weill and Brecht were written in exile, in resistance. When I perform Pirate Jenny, I channel those emotions. It’s a revolutionary cry, and I want it to reach the next generation.

Mike: That reminds me—your work spans generations, and you’ve collaborated with so many great artists, from Tom Waits to Nick Cave. How do you choose your collaborators?

Ute: Authenticity is what I seek. I need to feel a deep artistic connection. With Tom Waits, for example, there was mutual respect. We didn’t talk too much. The music did the talking. These collaborations aren’t about name value. They’re about truth, emotion, and vision.

Mike: And speaking of vision, you also wrote and performed Rendezvous with Marlene, based on a phone conversation you had with Marlene Dietrich. How did that come about?

Ute: In the late ’80s, I was cast in a revival of The Blue Angel, and suddenly I was in the press a lot being compared to Marlene. And out of the blue, she called me. We spoke for hours. She told me stories—beautiful and painful. And then she disappeared again. That conversation stayed with me for decades. Eventually, I wrote a show around it. It’s a fictionalized memory—but deeply rooted in that real exchange.

Mike: That’s amazing. Do you ever feel a sense of responsibility when performing this material, given its history?

Ute: Of course. But it’s not a burden—it’s an honor. This material holds emotional and cultural weight. My job is not to replicate it but to live in it anew. I’m not doing a museum piece. I’m living the emotions now. That’s how you keep these songs alive.

Mike: I love that. And it seems like you’ve carried that mindset across your entire career, even as you shift styles and mediums. How do you stay creatively inspired?

Ute: Curiosity. And listening. The world is full of inspiration. Right now I’m working on fusing chanson with jazz, electronic elements, and storytelling. It never ends. I don’t want to be stagnant. I want to remain a student of art.

Mike: Before we wrap up, I have a few quick questions. What was your first concert?

Ute: I think my first classical concert was with my parents. But the first concert that truly excited me was seeing Nina Hagen. She was wild. Unapologetic. A true original.

Mike: Who are you listening to these days?

Ute: Billie Holiday, Miles Davis, Edith Piaf. But also Björk, PJ Harvey, and Nils Frahm. I love artists who bend genres.

Mike: And if you could give one piece of advice to emerging creatives?

Ute: Go for it. Don’t wait for permission. Don’t compromise your dignity—especially for women, that’s vital. Stay strong, stay curious, and speak your truth. The world needs honest voices.

Mike: Thank you so much. This was honestly such an honor to have you on the show.

Ute: Thank you. It was a joy to speak with you. Have a beautiful day.

Follow Ute Lemper:
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Website

Click here to read online and hear the podcast.

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Publication: JazzTimes
By: A.D. AMOROSI
Date: May 11, 2025

Photo credit: Guido Harari

It’s a tad jarring when Ute Lemper — cabaret’s reigning figure, a vocalist of great drama and severity, a woman who has put the work of Kurt Weill back on the pop map, repeatedly, since 1987 — uses the word “groovy” to describe her new album. (Lemper performs live at 54 Below on Tuesday, May 27 and Thursday, May 29.)

Yes, she’s discussing Pirate Jenny, a new jazzy celebration of composer Kurt Weill on the occasion of his 125th birthday, a record imbued with electro-laced loops and permeated with supply programmed beats. And yes, there is a notion that her strict-yet-sultry vocals, when balanced with the atmospheric symmetry of electronic music, will open the doors to younger listeners who might not know Weill’s wiry work; that in some way Lemper could bring the Weimar Republic to the club in the same way she updated the catalogs of Dietrich, Piaf, Brel and Piazzolla in the past, or took to the songs of Tom Waits, Nick Cave, Elvis Costello and Roger Waters.

But groovy?

“This album is very groovy,” says Lemper of Pirate Jenny from her longtime home in New York City, an apartment she shares with her family and served as a backdrop for the just-filmed video of her archly updated “Mack the Knife.”

“That too is groovy.”

Weill’s “Mack the Knife,” written with the legendarily political satirist-playwright Bertolt Brecht, is a great place to start, as “Mack” is currently performed nightly, blocks from Lemper’s home, by Tony-winning singer Johanthan Groff in his Broadway musical study of Bobby Darin, Just in Time.

Ute Lemper - The New
Click image above for the video on YouTube

The historian in Lemper perks up when discussing “Mack” and its countless transformations. “It has been torn into pieces from any genre that wants to make its own — maybe a jazz song or a classical piece or a pop tune,” she says. “Growing up in Germany, however, I was closest to the original version, something written in 1928 for The Threepenny Opera, and the first collaboration of two genius rebels breaking all conventions of popular music at that time. They all but created their own genre, music with strong graphic, even disturbing texts, paired with melancholic melody put into quirky, jazzy harmony.”

Around 30 years later, after the “golden era of the Weimar Republic,” this Weill-Brecht song got adopted by the American market, first as a freshly anointed jazz standard that went ‘pop’ when Louis Armstrong forgot Brecht’s lyrics, and began scatting his own. “He created his own new lyrics on the spot that were much easier going than Brecht’s,” she says of Armstrong, who ushered in the likes of Ella Fitzgerald, Bobby Darin and Sting.

When I joke that it was America and the Anglo-Saxon market that bastardized the sinister intent of “Mack the Knife,” she laughed.

“You could say that… Then again, after Weill — a Jewish composer — emigrated to France, then America after the Nazis took power, he had to deny his European songbook. America was not interested in contemporary European songbooks at that time. So he followed the footsteps of George Gershwin, Duke Ellington and [others], went to Hollywood, and wrote more swinging, jazzy shows that were very successful. He succeeded in adapting to the American music traditions of the time. Weill probably would have liked those American (pop) adaptations, though I doubt the same was true for Brecht, who meant these lyrics to satirize the most outrageous criminal activity in that society, someone meant to explode the manicured lives of corporations and banks and the cruelty of money that we live in still, 100 years later.”

Photo credit: Brigitte Dummer

Mostly, it took 1988’s Ute Lemper Sings Kurt Weill — an album that topped Billboard’s crossover chart for one full year — and her earnest, energetic performances of the composer’s songs in German to push the force of his earlier work onto the listening public’s collective consciousness. In 1990, Lemper brought Weill’s Jewishness to prominence by performing his music for the first time in Tel Aviv to an audience of Holocaust survivors.

“No one expected this music to become popular again after it had been stigmatized due to the horrible, bloody manner in which the Nazis crashed the Weimar’s culture to pieces,” she says. “After that first album, I was able to bring this repertoire to audiences worldwide. I felt a huge responsibility as a young German artist … a mission … And to go to Israel and perform with its Philharmonic, conducted by Zubin Mehta, these Holocaust survivors sang with me in German. They sang ‘Surabaya Johnny’ and ‘Mack the Knife’ and thanked me for bringing this music back to them.”

In order to bring meaning to what Kurt Weill means for her now, Lemper worked with her New York neighbor, producer David Chesky, to update the Weill vibe.

“David suggested taking Weill’s music from any hints of its cabaret past into something contemporary, reimagining these songs using a different code when it came to arranging and production,” she says, excitedly.

Photo credit: Brigitte Dummer

Giving Chesky the credit for creating a “polyphonic universe” through which she could soar through Weillsong made anew, Lemper says that the complicated chord changes of many of the originals have had their harmonies rearranged in a fashion comparable to what young ears can fathom at present. “It’s not crescendo after crescendo, with all of the evolution of classical music in its harmonies … It is a polyphonic vibe that you can stay in; of strange electronic music with a backbeat where Pirate Jenny is going to invite people into her hotel room and kill everyone because that is her plan: to kill the rich,” she says with a menacing laugh.

Pirate Jenny, then, sounds like what could happen if Portishead were a jazz act, and not strictly trip-hop, but you know — with murdering the rich as its subtext. Building upwards with its ascending chords, arid ambience and deep throbbing beats, this Pirate Jenny is fresh without losing its dramatic edge or Ute Lemper’s natural theatricality. Groovy, in other words. JT

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Publication: NPR/WPPM
By: A.D. Amorosi
Date: May 5, 2025

“Vocalist, actor, and producer Ute Lemper discusses her history of song, “Mack the Knife,” and her new album, Pirate Jenny, and its concentration on the songs of composer Kurt Weill on the occasion of his 125th birthday.”

Listen at the links below to a discussion between Ute and A.D. Amorosi on Theater in the Round (Pacifica National Public Radio) dealing with her new album and Kurt Weill.

Listen on Sound Cloud
Listen on Mixcloud

 

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Publication: London Post
By: Ldn-Post
Date: May 7, 2025

In honor of revolutionary composer Kurt Weill’s 125th birthday this year, acclaimed singer & actress Ute Lemper today announced her new album, Pirate Jenny, out April 25 via The Audiophile Society. Nearly 40 years after her breakthrough album Ute Lemper Sings Kurt Weill, she now presents fresh, electric reimaginings of Weill’s songs, whose critiques of societal injustices and corruption still ring true today.

Her first single “Mack the Knife” out on March 2nd, on Weill’s 125th birthday, followed by “Speak Low” from One Touch of Venus and “Pirate Jenny” from his work with Bertolt Brecht on The Threepenny Opera – full tracklist below. Sultry vocals and atmospheric beats are brought to life with The Audiophile Society’s immersive Mega-Dimensional Sound™, transporting longtime fans and new listeners alike to a smoky Berlin jazz club outside of time, reminiscent of Lemper’s award-winning roles as Cabaret’s Sally Bowles in Paris and Chicago’s Velma Kelly in New York and London.

“This project is about creating a new audience for Kurt Weill,” says Lemper. “By blending his timeless melodies with a groove. I’m opening the door for younger listeners who might not know his work. It’s about building a bridge between eras, where Weimar meets the club.”

A Billboard Crossover Artist of the Year, Lemper has reimagined icons like Marlene Dietrich (Rendezvous with Marlene is based on a three-hour phone call between Dietrich and Lemper), Edith Piaf and Jacques Brel, alongside more modern collaborations with artists like Tom Waits, Nick Cave, Elvis Costello, and Roger Waters (The Wall: Live in Berlin, 1990).

Pirate Jenny isn’t just a revival—it’s a reinvention. Whether you’re a fan of cabaret, a lover of jazz, or someone who lives for groove, this album promises a fresh perspective on music that has shaped generations.

Read original article online here.