LEONARD COHEN
Montréal, Québec, Canada - (Dunn's Birdland Progressive Jazz Parlour)
April 8, 1958



1. Gift (poem)

+ short interview

_________________

(1 known recording)


[lc580408-1]

source:
audience
length: 2 minutes (partial)
details: oldest known live recording.


comments
:
Poetry reading with Maury Kaye on piano.

"I was working with a pianist and an arranger, Maury Kaye. I did a few weeks with him. We worked together at a place called Dunn's Birdland, which was a room on top of Dunn's delicatessen on St. Catherine Street in Montreal. He used to write big band arrangements. He had about a 12 or 15 piece band and this little stage, and it was his gig. I'd come on at midnight, and I kind of improvised while he played. Sometimes he was playing the piano by himself and sometimes doing parts of arrangements or tunes played in a somewhat subdued way while I took my own riffs. Or sometimes I'd do set pieces, like a poem from Let Us Compare Mythologies. We did that off and on for a month, and then I worked with a great jazz guitarist from Winnipeg by the name of Lenny Breau. So, I was doing that in those years, I guess it was '57, '58." (Leonard Cohen, interviewed by Martin BEEK, in "I Left A Woman Waiting", Goldmine, Feb. 19, 1993).

 


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