Mack attack

A mixed tribute to Kurt Weill

by Charles Taylor

Given that the three best interpreters of Kurt Weill's music are Lotte Lenya, Lotte Lenya, and Lotte Lenya (Teresa Stratas comes in a superlative fourth), a Weill tribute record is a chancy project. And the results on September Songs: The Music of Kurt Weill (Sony Classical) are hit or miss. These versions of Weill old and new (including a performance by Lenya) are taken from a film by Larry Weinstein. To produce the recordings of the performances, Weinstein brought in Hal Wilner, among whose previous tribute records was another Weill outing, 1986's Lost in the Stars.

Weill's collaborations with Bertolt Brecht, with their jarring shifts of mood and rhythm, can get interpreters hung up on the dramatist's famed (and frequently misunderstood) "alienation effect." The Brechtian approach becomes equated with being detached from the performance or winking at the audience, when it's more like a way of presenting your material in quotations while maintaining a perfect deadpan. It's no surprise that the best performances here are Lenya's peerless "Pirate Jenny" (from The Threepenny Opera) and Stratas's "Youkali Tango" and "Surabaya Johnny" (from Happy End).

The opening track, Nick Cave's version of "Mack the Knife," is a textbook lesson in how to get it wrong. Cave, as in touch with his dark side as Anita Bryant was with the Florida Sunshine Tree, growls his way through the verses of murder and dark doings as if the more malevolent he sounded, the scarier it would be. But artists who flaunt their dark side are usually more impressed with it than anyone else is. The result here may be the easiest version of the song to slough off, ever. (Fortunately, Brecht's 1930 version is included on the disc as well.) I don't know about you, but I find Bobby Darin's swinging and snapping his fingers while singing about bodies weighed down with cement a hell of a lot more disturbing.

David Johansen's version of "Alabama Song" is a failure of another sort, the result of the bigness of the performer's heart. Johansen's method is to pour everything he has into a number. I've seen him, as Buster Poindexter, sing "There Is Nothing like a Dame" as if he were trying to rouse the home team to come from behind in the second half. His sodden heartiness is too much for this song's irony to bear.

Elsewhere there are disastrous efforts from Mary Margaret O'Hara ("Don't Be Afraid"), an honorable one from PJ Harvey ("The Ballad of the Soldier's Wife," which still pales next to Marianne Faithfull's searing version), and Betty Carter's version of "Lonely House" from Street Scene (with lyrics by Langston Hughes) that would be fine if Carter didn't make her technique the subject of her performance, as she always does.

One of the best new things on September Songs is the version of "Speak Low," which features Charlie Haden's bass set against a recording of Weill himself singing and playing the piano. Weill's voice is light, charming, and balanced perfectly by the rounded, resonant notes that Haden plucks from the melody.

Lou Reed's traversal of that heartbreaking old chestnut "September Song" (by Weill and Maxwell Anderson) isn't going to replace the version done by actor Walter Huston in the hearts of anyone lucky enough to have heard it. At first, Reed's Noo Yawk delivery hardly seems to have any emotion in it at all. As it goes on, though, maybe because of the simple, evocative backing, it suggests a man trying to recall a '50s soul ballad he used to love. The emotion here is dry-eyed but fond, and it links up to what Reed did with the Drifters' "This Magic Moment" on the Doc Pomus tribute album a few years back. Reed has acquired the sound of a man who still regards early rock with a true believer's zeal, and a determination to save it from nostalgia.

But it's Elvis Costello, performing "Lost in the Stars" (the title song from Weill and Anderson's musical version of Alan Paton's Cry the Beloved Country), who walks off with the whole album in his pocket. This is a song sung by a father trying to retain his faith in God, in life itself, after his son has done something that stands contrary to everything he believes in. Backed by the Brodsky Quartet, Costello sings of the stars running through God's fingers like grains of sand, as the emotion pours just as exquisitely out of him. He has reached a point where the notes he doesn't quite get as his voice swells to reach them are far sweeter than the ones most singers hit effortlessly.

This version also offers a shock in the lines "I've been walking through the night and the day/Till my head grows weary and my hair turns gray." The shock isn't that, 20 years after he first appeared, Costello is singing better than ever. It's that he's going to be one of those artists who grant us the privilege of seeing how their art deepens as they mature. I consider that prospect one of the greatest gifts pop music has offered me in my lifetime.