Publication: UK Jazz News
By: Dominique Jackson
Date: 9 June 2025

Ute Lemper brings her “extraordinarily fresh take on familiar songs” by Kurt Weill to London this Friday…

Have you ever heard ‘Mack the Knife’? Well, of course you have. The swing classic, written in 1928 by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht, has been covered by an astonishingly wide range of artists, including Michael Bublé, Nick Cave, Bobby Darin, the Doors, Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, Robbie Williams and Sting.

However, you have certainly never heard anything remotely like Ute Lemper’s latest version of the ballad of old gangster Macheath, which opens her new album, ‘Pirate Jenny: Kurt Weill Reimagined’. The album was released in March this year to mark the 125th birthday of the innovative German born, Jewish composer, excoriated and forced to flee by the Nazis, who became the toast of Broadway and Hollywood, before his untimely death after a heart attack at the age of just fifty years old.

The bold, and darkly evocative, beat-driven album was produced by Grammy-nominated David Chesky, long feted for his imaginative reissues, re-recordings and re-imaginings, and is released on Chesky’s own The Audiophile Society label.

Lemper, a forthright and enduring champion of Weill’s music, performs at London’s Cadogan Hall on Friday 13 June. Accompanied only by pianist Vana Gierig, the German-born chanteuse will bring her unique approach and peerless vocals to a selection of Weill’s music, ranging from the Berlin Weimar epoch classics, through those of his troubled French exile, to his timeless additions to the great American Song Book.

‘Pirate Jenny’, already lauded for its sultry, atmospheric noir groove and hypnotic beats, was co-produced by Lemper and Chesky and was inspired by an off the cuff, late night conversation between the two musician friends, in a New York city cab, heading home after a gig. Their intent was to do something radical with Weill, rethinking the cabaret classics for a younger generation, likely to be more familiar with the electronic vernacular of much of today’s music.

This is not the first time that Lemper has undertaken a similarly innovative project. Her 2000 collaboration with Neil Hannon of the Divine Comedy, entitled ‘Punishing Kiss’, featured songs written especially for her by contemporary artists, including Nick Cave, Elvis Costello, Philip Glass and Tom Waits. The resulting album, recorded in London, has a distinctly contemporary edge and also succeeded in attracting a new, younger generation of listeners.

On ‘Pirate Jenny’, the result is an extraordinarily fresh take on familiar songs, including ‘Surabaya Johnny’ and ‘Salomon Song’, some of which were written almost 100 years ago. The album’s polyphonic vibe of rejigged and smoothened harmonies offers a nuanced, relaxing, interpretation of many of the often baleful narratives of the originals and, frequently, as on ‘Speak Low’ or in the Ira Gershwin-penned ‘My Ship’, revels in the distinctly Bossa Nova and Latin-influenced rhythms and syncopations for which Chesky, who grew up in Miami, is well known.

Lemper’s devotion to Weill, and to his music, which she first encountered, as a young dance and performance student in mid-1980s West Berlin, is undimmed. Her eyes shine as she recalls how she learned more of, and immersed herself in, the tragic, complex history of the Weimar period. “How could I not be aware of such history, in that brutally divided city, where the Cold War was still raging?”

Yet Lemper herself still professes surprise at the huge international success of her 1988 recording for Decca: ‘Ute Lemper sings Kurt Weill’. The album stayed at the top of Billboard’s crossover charts for over a year and is widely credited with emphatically bringing Weill’s music to a new, far broader, global audience.

“I will never forget, being here in London, around that time, and seeing the entire façade of Tower Records’ huge store in Piccadilly Circus plastered with my own face”. The record had a very distinctive monochrome sleeve, with green art deco detail, featuring a stylized black and white portrait of Lemper. The project, however, had a rather more mixed reception back in Germany.

“It was still too early,” posits Lemper. “Nobody in Germany was ready to look back and examine the period which led directly to the [Second World] War.” Time, though, has been a significant healer and, while the singer acknowledges that she has lived her own, very personal and complicated history with her native Germany, she now actually feels a peace and a calm whenever she returns there from New York’s Upper West Side, which she has called home since 1998.

“[Germany] has grown in my heart and the country now has a fixed place on the map of my preferences, in the mosaic of my own identity, but above all, in my trust,” she writes in her 2023 memoir: “Die Zeitreisende: Zwischen Gestern und Morgen” (Time Traveller. Between Yesterday and Tomorrow) published by Graff und Unzer, which swiftly became a Spiegel bestseller in Germany.

Lemper proves to be an acute and perspicacious historian, as well as a lyrical and moving writer, notably when she recalls her childhood, growing up in a devout Catholic household in the relative affluence of Münster in the West. She deftly conjures the tedium of church on a Sunday, with the suffocating whiff of incense and mothballs. Later, a family trip beyond the Wall, to the drab, grey streets of East Berlin with lengthy queues, peopled by the dejected and the downtrodden, on every corner, gave young Ute another stark lesson in 20^th century history.

The polyglot Lemper, who has translated works by Brazilian Paulo Coelho and Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda, into songs and who also speaks French and Italian, is equally poetic when recounting her own experience of the panic and strange aftermath of the 9/11 attacks in her newly adopted city. Her meditations on the abnormality and the solitude of the pandemic lockdown, cocooned with family in their isolated upstate New York retreat, are similarly both wise and penetrating.

After Cadogan Hall, Lemper is taking the Weill programme back to cabaret club, 54 Below, clearly one of the singer’s treasured, more intimate, venues, located for a dozen years in the basement of New York’s iconic Studio 54.

An exhaustive schedule of dates continues through the year, including performances of her theatrical and deeply personal, ‘Rendezvous with Marlene’, inspired by a long, and long ago, telephone call with her fellow German diva. Lemper is visibly moved as she describes performing her homage to Dietrich in Berlin’s Deutsches Theater, 33 years to the day after her funeral, when a planned tribute in the theatre was cancelled amid fears of protest by right wing radicals.

In April, Lemper also starred in Tanztheater Wuppertal’s revival of Pina Bausch’s mesmerizing production of ‘The Seven Deadly Sins’, which premiered in 1976. It is a two-part programme featuring first the ‘Ballet Chanté’ itself, followed by collage of Brecht and Weill’s most celebrated songs. It remains a milestone in the work of the late choreographer, Bausch, a fellow German icon. Lemper also mentioned plans, so far sadly unconfirmed, to bring the work, one of her personal favourites, to London’s Sadler’s Wells.

Ute Lemper Sings Kurt Weill at Cadogan Hall – Friday 13 June 2025, 7.30pm

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