Toronto celebrating great music at Soulpepper this summer

TORONTO: The Soulpepper Theatre in Toronto is offering two most sumptuous and unique music concerts this summer: one, The 27 Club, and the other, The Secret Chord: A Leonard Cohen Experience.

For anyone – and that means really everyone – who loves music and poetry and their hypnotic impact on one’s heart and soul, both of these concerts are truly a great gift.

Both concerts are being presented by an ensemble of musicians, singers and performers – Mike Ross, Alana Bridgewater, Beau Dixon, Sara Farb, Evangelia Kambites and Cyrus Lane – and musicians, all of whom are immensely gifted, and who work with imagination and creativity with each other.

Each concert is 90 minutes long, and every minute of it is deeply moving.

The 27 Club refers to the most unusual group of very gifted musicians who all died at the age of 27: Jimi Hendrix to Janis Joplin, Amy Winehouse to Kurt Cobain, Jim Morrison to Rudy Lewis.

The list is long and most intriguing. It was in 1994, after the death of Kurt Cobain, that this phenomenon began to be catalogued, though it was between 1969 and 1971, Jones, Hendrix, Joplin and Morrison had died at the age of 27, due to drug abuse, suicide or asphyxiation.

They were not only outstanding musicians; they were ‘icon’ in the bourgeoning world of new music.

This concert presents their songs and their life stories, and it leaves you touched to the core of your heart.

Such songs as “Piece of My Heart’ by Janis Joplin, `Light My Fire,’ The Doors (Jim Morrison), `Some Kind of Wonderful’, The Drifters (Rudy Lewis), `Turn On Your Love Light,’ The Grateful Dead (Ron McKernan), `On The Road Again,’ Canned Heat (Alan “Blind Owl” Wilson), `All Along the Watchtower,’ Jimmy Hendrix, and many more, create a most haunting presence of these great musicians who defined an age.

The most receptive audience lapped every moment of it.

The second concert, on another evening, presents The Secret Chord: A Leonard Cohen Experience.

The most loved of Canadian poets and singers, Leonard Cohen, fortunately lived a long and prolific life. The concert presents 15 of Cohen’s most memorable songs: I’m Your Man (1988), Dance me to the End of Love (1984), If it be your Will (1984), So Long, Marianne (1967), Take this Waltz (1988), Halleluiah (1984), and many more, for an audience that loved Leonard Cohen, and his words, his songs. And his life.

One wished it to go on for ever, and ever.

Unlike the Indians or the Persians, the Canadians are not known to be great lovers of poetry. Leonard Cohen was somewhat of an exception. As a romantic, bohemian poet, he chose to live in Greece for years. And then he relinquished it all and became a Buddhist monk. And then he came back to the life of the poet and singer until his death at the age of 80.

What is it about poets that they live a life of chaotic innocence that is often touched by compassion that sometimes borders on the unreal, even the insane?  It was in 1955 when American poet Allen Ginsberg wrote his poem ‘Howl’. The opening lines are as scathing as any written by anyone wreathing in pain:

“I saw the best minds of my generation

destroyed by madness,

starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets

at dawn looking for an angry fix;

Angel-headed hipsters burning

for the ancient heavenly connection

to the starry dynamo

in the machinery of night.”

And it was the great Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, who at the age of 39 drank himself to death, singing to the last:

And death shall have no dominion.
No more may gulls cry at their ears
Or waves break loud on the seashores;
Where blew a flower may a flower no more
Lift its head to the blows of the rain;
Though they be mad and dead as nails,
Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;
Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,
And death shall have no dominion.

Albert Einstein once observed that wars come and go but a mathematical equation lives forever.

Perhaps it could be said about some poems as well.

That is how Leonard Cohen touches on immortality.

(Prof. Sehdev Kumar lectures on “International Cinema and the Human Condition” at the University of Toronto. He is author of The Vision of Kabir, about the great 15^th century mystic-poet)

ALSO BY PROF SEHDEV KUMAR: Lightning from behind the thick clouds