[Dixielandjazz] It's Time to Tour Germany

[Steve barbone]

Looks like you can go home again from the below article. The glamorous 1920s
are alive and well in Berlin. Some interesting comments about the music of
the 1920's in the below article.

Hey Wiggins, lets put a group together and play in Berlin for a month or
two. I haven't been there since 1955, BTW. (Before The Wall)

Cheers,
Steve

Keeping the Old Cabaret Alive in the Land of 'Cabaret'

By ROBERT LEVINE - November 29, 2005 - NY TIMES

BERLIN - In the grand style of performers from Germany's Weimar Republic,
Max Raabe likes to party like it's 1929. A recent concert by Mr. Raabe and
his Palast Orchester at the Leipzig Opera House included a selection of
songs from the 1920's and 30's, witty banter between numbers and the
occasional appearance of eight dancing girls in diaphanous skirts. At
various points in the show, members of the band took the stage in
traditional Bavarian dress and suits that looked tailored for Chicago
gangsters, and kneeled in their shoes to appear as if they were about four
feet tall. 

After the show, at a restaurant in the center of Leipzig, in what was once
East Germany, Mr. Raabe said simply, "I love the clichés." So, apparently,
did the audience, a few thousand mostly middle-aged Germans.

Mr. Raabe, who will perform mainly in English with a smaller entourage in
Zankel Hall in Manhattan on Nov. 30 and in Philadelphia a day later, is the
most popular cabaret-style singer in Germany, which might seem a small
distinction in a country now better known to music fans for its thriving
techno scene. But several of his albums have sold more than 100,000 copies,
and his two "Super Hits" collections of droll interpretations of pop songs
like "Oops! ... I Did It Again" have introduced his music to a wider
audience. 

Mr. Raabe draws influence and material from several sources, including
German film music and the bigger theater productions of the time. But his
over-the-top show and his stage persona, all dry wit and sardonic distance,
evoke Weimar Berlin and the decadent nightlife that was mythologized in the
musical "Cabaret." According to the newspaper Der Tagesspiegel, "Max Raabe
stands for the good old times as their archetypal ambassador."

Berlin in the 1920's is a time of enduring fascination all over the world.
But in the German imagination it looms even larger, as a cultural golden age
just before the darkness of the Nazi era and World War II. "When people hear
him, they think of the 20's and this multicultural atmosphere," Heinz Bude,
a sociology professor at the University of Kassel, said of Mr. Raabe. "That
was the time when Germany was on top of the international culture scene."

He said that for older Germans, raised in a country that was collectively
examining its role in the war, this idealized past was especially
significant.

In fact, Weimar Berlin can be seen as the good old days only compared with
what followed. Even before Hitler rose to power, unemployment was rife and
inflation rampant. The stories that provided the basis for the musical
"Cabaret," written by the English author Christopher Isherwood and based on
his experiences in Weimar-era Berlin, are darker than the show they were
made into. 

"That was not a good time for Germany," Mr. Raabe said. Onstage he makes a
point of crediting the writers of his older songs, many of whom were Jewish.
"I don't want to bring nostalgia onstage because it implies things were
better in those times. But that music does have a special quality."

To Mr. Raabe, the music he plays is timeless, a living form, and he tries to
evoke the cosmopolitan cool of another era without seeming stuck in it. The
old songs are memorable not only for their tunes, he said, but also for the
witty wordplay that went with them. "The humor of the repertory is not
dated," he said. To judge by the examples he reels off, Mr. Raabe is
something of a walking lyrical encyclopedia.

He writes new songs in the same style, with the same skewed humor. (Some of
these, like a hit song with a title that translates literally as "No Swine
Ever Calls Me," lose something in translation, but others work in English as
well.) Many of his songs comment slyly on current events, just as some of
the material he was influenced by did when it was written. In one of his
originals, "Cloning Can Be Worthwhile," Mr. Raabe sings that if a lover
leaves him he will "go out on a date/ With your duplicate."

Despite such lyrics, Mr. Raabe, 42, a slight man with slicked-back blond
hair, looks and acts as though he might have just stepped out of 20's Berlin
himself. His apartment, a spacious loft in Berlin's Mitte district, is
filled with old books and couches with pawed feet, stacks of shellac
78-r.p.m. records and a cabinet-style antique phonograph on which to play
them. A modern stereo sits on a shelf in the corner.

As a teenager growing up in Westphalia, Mr. Raabe said, he listened to
classical and big band music when his friends were discovering punk. "It was
like a drug flash for me, to listen to that music," he said in an interview
at his home. "I was never a teenager, with those attitudes. I was never
really young, and I think I will never really be old."

When he attended college in Berlin, Mr. Raabe put together the first version
of the Palast Orchester and rehearsed the group with orchestral arrangements
he found at a flea market. Songs from the Weimar Republic weren't popular,
especially with his fellow university students, and few new acts could make
a career of performing them. "We were sure that after we studied, we would
give up and work at an opera or something," Mr. Raabe said. "But we just
kept going."

Mr. Raabe is not the only artist in Germany who performs cabaret material,
although he's one of the few who play large halls. Several clubs hold
cabaret nights. And a version of the musical "Cabaret" directed by the
American choreographer Vincent Paterson is playing at the Bar Jeder
Vernunft, a theater that also books cabaret acts. "It's a viable and very
alive art form here," Mr. Paterson said. He added that he went back to Mr.
Isherwood's stories and made his version of the show a little less overtly
glamorous. 

Even the skewed humor that fascinates Mr. Raabe is a product of tough
circumstances. "Those times were so troubled that popular entertainment
tried to counteract it," said Peter Jelavich, a professor of history at
Johns Hopkins University and the author of "Berlin Cabaret." "They were
trying, especially in the first half of the 30's, to write peppy songs to
counteract the dismal realities of the day."

Even in these very different times, Mr. Raabe said, his concerts provide a
respite of sorts. "If you go to the concert, you can lose reality for two
and a half hours," he said. "That's what this music did, even in the 20's
and 30's."