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.
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.”
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.
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
