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First Leonard Cohen takes Toronto, then he takes...
2008-06-05
Singer Leonard Cohen on Friday kicks off his first world tour in 15 years with a Toronto gig, marking the return of the poet who converted to Buddhism during his absence from the limelight. An apostle of love in praise of the wandering spirit, Cohen has serenaded generations of music lovers with his haunting voice in songs such as "Suzanne," "Hallelujah," "First We Take Manhattan" and "I'm Your Man." After four shows in Toronto, the 73-year-old heads to Ireland, Britain and continental Europe. At the end of June, the Montreal native is expected to return briefly to his birthplace to play three shows, followed by a concert in his honor at the Montreal Jazz Festival with various artists performing his songs. The entire tour will stop in 14 countries over three months, including music festivals in Nice and Lyon in France, as well as the Glastonbury Festival in Britain, billed as the largest greenfield music festival in the world. Since May, Cohen, who according to his record label Sony will not give media interviews during this tour, has been warming up his vocal chords at sold-out concerts in tiny venues in Atlantic Canada with seats for 700 or less. "Onstage more than two and a half hours, Cohen certainly looked his age, a little stooped, but dapper in a double-breasted suit and a fedora, which he removed to take a bow after each song," said the Globe and Mail newspaper. He played two sets of eight songs, and four encores, but added no new songs to the lineup, the daily said. Since departing the scene in the early 1990s, Cohen has lived ascetically at a monastery in Mount Baldy in California, where he was ordained a Rinzai Zen Buddhist monk and took the name Jikhan, meaning "silence." "I was just a kid of 60 with crazy dreams," he quipped onstage in Fredericton in reference to his last shows immortalized in a "live" pop album before fleeing fame and fortune in 1993 for peace and serenity. "Leonard Cohen did not want to deny his Jewish roots. He wanted to escape himself, to mask the identity of Leonard," his French translator Michel Garneau explained some years ago. Born in the tiny English-speaking quarter of Montreal, Cohen published books of poetry before embarking on a singing career with his smash debut album "Songs of Leonard Cohen" in 1967. He has inspired countless artists and among more than 1,000 renditions of his work are versions recorded by R.E.M., Elton John, Joe Cocker, Willie Nelson, k.d. Lang, Tory Amos, Nina Simone and Peter Gabriel. His music also has been used in dozens of movie soundtracks such as "Natural Born Killers" and "Shrek." Cohen has been inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame and is a companion of the Order of Canada, the nation's highest civilian honor. In March he also entered the American Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with a speech by Lou Reed describing him as "without question one of the most important and influential songwriters of our time -- a figure whose body of work achieves greater mystery and depth as time goes on."
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