Publication: EIN Presswire
By: Andrew Gesner
Date: May 28, 2024

Legendary Ute Lemper is back with her new adventurous single “Permanently Confused”

GERMANY, May 28, 2024 /EINPresswire.com/ — It might seem funny to liken an undisputed legend to an incendiary artist breaking into the business of making records. But Ute Lemper is an unusual figure even among the greats of international song and theater. She’s never played by anyone’s rules but hers — and Time Traveler, her 2023 full-length, feels like the work of an artist just getting started. Here is a rare thing: a set aesthetically hungry, experimental, confessional, genre-defiant, and brave. Longtime fans and newcomers counted it among the best of the year.

As incredible as it may seem about a musician who has accomplished so much, Ute Lemper is entering her prime. Time Traveler demonstrates that she knows exactly how to get a recording work, how hard and far to push, how daring to be, and how best to apply the lessons of a lifetime in music to the task of making a song sound simultaneously contemporary and timeless. She can make sophisticated jazz feel approachable, make pop feel grown-up, and impart a delicious undercurrent of tension and intrigue to the most beautiful ballad. Most of all, she knows how to tell a story — and brings it to life.

There’s so much fans might expect from the award-winning singer and actress, her high profile, and more experimental projects such as collaborations with Roger Waters on The Wall, Elvis Costello, Nick Cave, and other rock auteurs who admired her work as an imaginative interpreter. Yet the startling thing about Ute Lemper is her unquenchable ambition. Less than a year after astonishing listeners with Time Traveler, she’s back with a deluxe edition of the set that appends some of the most adventurous music she’s ever recorded to its running order. “Permanently Confused” is one of those tracks, and in its absolute candor, passion, and intelligence, it’s both an extension and refinement of the experiments that made Time Traveler an irresistible proposition.

In “Permanently Confused” viewers speed through Ute’s memories of life and get an inside view. It is elegiac, satirical, and reflective as Ute Lemper sings about what she’s lost in this world and discovered along the way. The video for the track is similarly dynamic. The star evokes her childhood, and the childhood of her offspring, the constant evolution of everyone and everything. The audience speeds through memories of many years on the most beautiful stages of the world. Transitions are told with great humour often in visuals that are sped up in time. Images of her hometown New York, the drummers in a subway car, the summer of the lockdown in 2020, and the” black lives matter” movement at the same time, all imbedded into the grove of her music. While there’s plenty of footage of Lemper onstage, most of the time, the camera catches the star in a meadow on the verge of the forest, singing under the midday sun. There she exudes a quiet confidence — and readiness for whatever comes next.

More Ute Lemper at HIP Video Promo
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Andrew Gesner
HIP Video Promo
+1 732-613-1779
info@hipvideopromo.com

It seems like we are all permanently confused about many aspects of life and the world we live in.
So what shall we do about it? Listen to good music.. is one way and of course enjoy, love and fight the good fight for the future generations.

Therefore, I will be online – live – on Tuesday, May 28 at 4pm – NYC time to talk about the new edition of my album, the three new songs and much more. So don’t miss out!

Click here to visit Ute’s Instagram page.

PERMANENTLY CONFUSED
“When I came home you were gone….”
A song about love and loss, growing up only to forget about the magic and innocence of childhood. With the many journeys you take and in every labor of love you come closer back to that source of origin that lives in the child’s mind.

Music and lyrics by Ute Lemper
Produced by Ute Lemper and Todd Turkisher
Published by BMG

Piano: Andy Ezrin, Ute Lemper
Drums: Todd Turkisher
Bass: Leo Traversa
Guitar: Jim Hickey

Video by Shulamit Martens

Ute ‘s performance with WDR Funkhausorchester will be live-streamed tonight.

Click here for details on the event and how to watch.

Das Konzert findet live im Funkhaus am Wallrafplatz statt und wird zusätzlich hier im Livestream übertragen.
Im Berlin der 1920er-Jahre versteht man es, ausschweifend zu leben: glamouröse Varietés, Stummfilmkinos, Cabarets und Tanzlokale, in denen bis tief in die Nacht aufgespielt wird. Grande Dame Ute Lemper und das WDR Funkhausorchester holen den glanzvollen Sound der “Wilden Zwanziger” in den Konzertsaal. Von Kurt Weill bis Hanns Eisler – ein Abend für Nachtschwärmer mit Retro-Herz!
Ute Lemper, Gesang
WDR Funkhausorchester
Enrico Delamboye, Leitung

Publication: thelatest.co.uk
By: Andrew Kay
Date: April 26, 2024

To witness the brilliance of perhaps the greatest living chanteuse in the world in the intimate surroundings of The Old Market in Hove will remain one of my most cherished experiences of all time. First aware of her work back in my early twenties when I was fascinated by the arts of the Weimar Republic and in particular Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, I came across her voice on CDs. Little did I know that her early recordings of those songs would spark wider public interest in them, but I was soon to find out far more about how those recordings and her career.

The Time Traveller is far more than a simple concert, it is a theatrical journey, Lemper’s life in both theatre and in song, and it is a lavish tale told with passion and with skill. Her early life, her home life, her student days and her travels.Travel is the key that the evening is sung in, looking down, with some disdain, from her seat in economy, at the waves in the ocean below and comparing them to the wrinkles on the back of her hands, she is constantly on the move, from ancient Europe to new Europe and modern Europe before finally returning to her adopted Manhattan home.

The journey take in her time in Paris playing Peter Pan and the joy of flying on stage, then Sally Bowles in Cabaret, a role she does not dwell on or sing more than a few bars of. Then on to being cast as Velma Kelly in Kander and Ebb’s brilliant Chicago. Here she does pause and sing, and tells how the rigours of Bob Fosse’s choreography have impacted on her physical well-being. Lemper can deliver humour with a wry smile and do it well.

There’s a fabulous section devoted to Weill and Brecht and to my total joy a long passage from Die Dreigroschenoper, where she slides from English to guttural German with great dramatic effect. And drama is the second key in which she delivers the evening, she is without doubt a great actress.

A passage dedicated to a previous show, Rendezvous With Marlene, is both fascinating and hilarious, a conversation, three hours by telephone with Dietrich is recounted, in short, and to great effect. And with equal openness she talks of her failed relationship with her mother and about her own attitude to motherhood and her much loved family.

She is also a woman fired by passion and politics, stories of feeling isolated while living in West Berlin and of course her work in creating songs from the poetry of concentration camp victims and survivors. The songs she delivers from her Songs For Eternity project are deeply moving but equally so are her more contemporary compositions from her new album. And in researching her life and work there are few composers she has not worked with or sung, it is a catalogue so catholic in it’s breadth that it is hard to imaging how she has fitted it all in, but she has, clearly a very dedicated performer.

So finally on to the voice, yes a long time in coming but so much more to this woman than simply song. The voice is extraordinary, the range vast, the tone even wider, slipping with ease from gentle and soothing, sweet even, to rasping and filled with anger and perhaps venom. There is abundant evidence of the classical but it is interlaced with jazz. Few singers can really deliver that scat phenomenon, but Ute scatters the stage with notes, soaring riffs and scales, blasts of horns, searing trills, it’s a universe of sound but one that never ever loses touch with the original melody, the heart of a song.

Lemper is accompanied throughout by the brilliant pianist Vana Gierig and bassist Giuseppe Bassi who not only deliver the songs but delicately colour the narrative.

I was lucky enough to see her play Velma Kelly in the West End, but luckier still to have now seen and heard the true expanse of this sensational woman’s talent.

Andrew Kay

The Old Market
26 April

Rating:

Click here to read the review on The Latest.