Publication: All  About Jazz
By: Scott Gudell
Date: April 30, 2025

Germany’s optimistic yet fragile Weimar Republic period was wedged between two brutal wars during the early 20th century. Extending from 1918 to 1933, it was proudly called the Jazz Age and the Golden Twenties and offered an abundance of free-flowing entertainment choices. It was also a time of inflation, chaos and conflict dominated by economic instability and political extremism.

Although German cabaret had its origins at the beginning of the century, its true glory days reigned during those heady years between the wars. A bawdy combination of music, dance, theater and comedy was originally presented in opulent venues but also migrated to seedy grottos and decadent clubs. Flashing from the marquees were the names of producers and composers, including Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht. Performers such as Lotte Lenya (Weill’s wife) helped personify the characters. Other chanteuses included Marlene Dietrich, Germany’s original queen of seduction, who got her start in clubs and went onto worldwide fame via song and cinema.

The mantra of the masses was grab a bottle of champagne and embrace the morbid humor, cynicism and sarcasm of the day. Although the republic was short lived, the sounds and stories successfully moved from sewers to streets to stages and endures to this day. The last few decades of the 20th century saw Marianne Faithfull, the ‘Brit It’ girl, fall under the spell of Weill and Brecht and an aging Lenya blessing the up-and-coming operatic soprano and actress Teresa Stratas.

Then there was German born Ute Lemper. She flirted with a jazz combo in the very late 1970s and embraced theater and dance in the 1980s and used her long, lean statuesque physique to its utmost advantage. She could be wide-eyed and animated like Fanny Brice or vamp things up like a regal Norma Desmond. There was always a sly nod and wink from Lemper to her audience. She eventually shimmied and sashayed her way through performances in Cats, Cabaret, Chicago and more. People noticed.

Marlene Dietrich befriended Lemper upon hearing about a Dietrich inspired Lemper performance soon followed by her full-length recording debut in the late 1980s. In keeping with the bittersweet lyrics of the 1920s and beyond, she wearily sang “I’m a poor relation,” “I work my fingers to the bone,” and “that’s not living, that’s just frustration” on the very first song of her first album. Two songs later, Lemper cooly mesmerized the listener with the macabre tale of “Mack the Knife” and revealed “there’s a dead man lying on the shore,” that “Jenny Towler was found with a knife in her chest” and concluded with “those in the dark cannot be seen.”

With Dietrich’s blessing of Lemper’s presentations, the torch had passed. Although five of Lemper’s first seven albums focused on Weill, she eventually recorded music affiliated with Edith Piaf plus works by Jacques Brel, Stephen Sondheim and more contemporary artists, such as Tom Waits. Lemper even began writing and recording her own material. Her 2025 release, Pirate Jenny, confirms that the addictive pull of Weill continues.

Track Listing

Mack The Knife; Speak Low; Surabaya Johnny; My Ship; Pirate Jenny; Le Grand Lustucru; Die Ballade Vom Ertrunkenen Madchen; Salomon Song.

Click here for All About Jazz’s review online.

Publication: LoveLondonLoveCulture.com
By: Emma Clarendon
Date: April 25, 2025

We chatted to Ute about her new album ‘Pirate Jenny’ and revisiting the work of Kurt Weill.

Photo Credit: Jim Rackete

When did you first experience Kurt Weill’s music? In the eighties I was on a mission to revive the music of Weimar, especially the music of Kurt Weill. I was a young German actress, living in West-Berlin, a divided city, surrounded by the Wall in the middle of the DDR. It was a time when Europe was still in the midst of cold war trauma and Weimar seemed simply a forgotten era that eventually facilitated through its political failures the pathway to Nazi Germany.

I had moved to Berlin in 1984 after studying and performing in Vienna, Austria and I felt that art was a lot more political in West-Berlin than in the rest of the world. The devastating face of history was written all over the walls, and my mind and heartbeat grew angrier and more rebellious. I studied the music of Weill and conceived my first concert dedicated uniquely to the composer. I wanted to tell his story to the people of my generation, and so I did, in jeans and a T-Shirt in little experimental theaters in the dark but feverish West-Berlin. Kurt Weill’s story was exemplary as a revolutionary German Jewish composer during Weimar, then persecuted by the Nazis, thrown out of the country but able to pursue and create more fascinating compositions and collaborations in exile in a new world, of course with enormous sacrifice and pain.

When I started to rerecord with UNIVERSAL/DECCA the complex songbook of Kurt Weill and the Berlin Cabaret Songs, it initiated a wave of revival and the “Dance on the Volcano” of the 20s in Berlin was back in fashion and fascinated a wave of young performers and audiences in its progressivity and exotism. Being the protagonist of all these recordings was a great privilege that came with enormous responsibility. To be a German with an international career was still a complicated affair in those years. I was confronted with stereotypes and a strangely fascinated hostility based on the stigma of the German character and language. I felt sometimes that I had to carry the horrible Nazi history on my shoulders simply by carrying the German passport. The Holocaust inflicted unbearable pain on my soul, and I wished nothing more than to run away from Germany to bring the story of the Jewish composer Kurt Weill with me to fuel a dialogue about the past. This is when the mission became heartfelt and I dedicated many years to travel the world to celebrate his music in recitals or with symphony orchestras, string quartets, or my band to sing the magical creations from Weimar, mostly with Berthold Brecht, as much as the unknown and known song books of the French and American periods.

For more than 40 years, the journey of this simple and brilliant man who died in America of a broken heart has inspired my life.

Now, the world is once again in the chaos of more cold and hot wars. The compositions, especially the ones with Berthold Brecht as the lyricist are written almost 100 years ago now, yet still breathtaking and completely unique. There is nothing like it. Rock, Pop, Cabaret and Classical artists have been inspired by his works since the nineties. The biting words meet the melancholic melody and the harmonic context evokes in a quirky way colors of Jazz, Ragtime, Schoenberg and Stravinsky. There is theater in all the stories and political, satirical commentary about morality and a corrupt society. Exotic characters tell us about their survival, risen from the ashes of racism, disadvantage, and neglect. It all sounds oh so contemporary!)

I love to sing these ballads of the truth even more 40 years later, after living through the mills of life and witnessing that history wanted to be a good teacher but it could not find any students.

This album presents another take on the songs. David Chesky said a couple of years ago to me, you should reinvent Kurt Weill, put a contemporary edge to it and bring it to the younger generations. I said …let’s do it….let’s celebrate his 125th birthday in an unusual way.

What are you most looking forward to about performing these songs at the Cadogan Hall? For the concert I will perform very pure and human a great collection of Kurt Weill Songs, only with Piano. It is impossible to bring the album on stage , unless you have many many musicians. I find it most real and touching to perform these songs just with piano. So the concert will be very different than the album. It is not reinvented , but original. I will dive into the German repertoire, the Three Penny Opera etc, the French Exile of gorgeous and melancholic compositions and the more entertaining American period of show songs . You will hear all my favourite songs from the  Pirate Jenny to the September song.

What do you hope that people will take away from the album?  It shall open up the interest of new generations. The songs are strong and work in a contemporary setting. We invented a polyphonic ,but more minimalist and very groovy arrangement. Play the album through and start all over again.. it is very viby.

You first focused on Weill’s music on a previous album – what made you want to revisit his work? It is his 125th birthday and needs to be marked…I have sung all originals in traditional ways.. now its time for something new.

By Emma Clarendon

Pirate Jenny is available to listen to now. Ute will be performing at the Cadogan Hall on the 13th June.

Read the original online article here.