EXCEPTIONAL LIVE RECORDING FROM LEONARD COHEN IN ZURICH 1993 Leonard Cohen s 1993 world tour may well have been the man s last had he not discovered in 2004 that his manager had been embezzling his earnings - leaving him with little from his long career in music and publishing to assist in providing a comfortable retirement. After a protracted legal battle, he once again took to the stage, at the age of 73, for his first tour in 15 years. The shows undertaken were of course magnificent, but it would be rather heartless to suggest this made the whole sordid affair any less contemptable. This latter day touring has resulted in a slew of live releases from his record company, Columbia. Tours for I m Your Man and The Future were not served anything like so well however, with a paltry single volume representing dates from both jaunts, and nothing in the way of an entire concert recording emerging. The release of this double CD changes this state of affairs however, presenting as it does Leonard s complete performance, recorded for FM Broadcast, at Zurich s Kongresshaus on 21st May 1993. A long term underground favourite among tape collectors, the perfection of the audio quality alongside a quite sublime performance make for one of the finest ever live Cohen albums.

Leonard Cohen (1934 - 2016) was een Canadese singer-songwriter en dichter. Tot zijn bekendste nummers horen "Hallelujah", "Suzanne" en "So Long, Marianne". Hij breekt door in de jaren zestig en hij blijft met zijn muziek steeds weer nieuwe generaties fans aanspreken en jonge muzikanten beïnvloeden. In 2016 brengt hij zijn veertiende en laatste studioalbum You Want It Darker uit. Negentien dagen na de release overlijdt Cohen op 82-jarige leeftijd in zijn woonplaats Los Angeles.

Leonard Cohen seems singularly determined to document his adventures in live performances which began when he returned to the concert stage in 2008, and Live in Dublin is the third live album Cohen has released in just five years.

On 13th October 1979, Leonard Cohen began his most extensive tour to date in support of his sixth studio album, 'Recent Songs', with a concert in Gothenburg, Sweden. Entitled 'The Smokey Life Tour', this 48-concert European leg of what would eventually become a world tour (ultimately encompassing too Australia, the USA, and in November 1980, Israel) progressed through Sweden, Norway, Denmark, France, Holland, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, England and Ireland. This concert, from Bonn's prestigious 2,000 capacity Beethovenhalle, was recorded towards the end of the European extravaganza on 3rd December, and, as is evident, the cast were performing superbly by this juncture.

You Want It Darker is the fourteenth and final studio album by Canadian singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen, released on October 16, 2016, by Columbia Records, nineteen days before Cohen's death. The album was created towards the end of his life and focuses on death, God, and humor. It was released to critical acclaim. The title track was awarded a Grammy Award for Best Rock Performance in January 2018. After touring extensively between 2008 and 2013, Leonard Cohen began to suffer "multiple fractures of the spine" among other physical problems, according to his son Adam Cohen. Due to Leonard Cohen's mobility issues, You Want It Darker was recorded in the living room of his home in Mid-Wilshire, Los Angeles and then sent by e-mail to his musical collaborators.

Performed across two nights at the Royal Dramaten Theatre in Stockholm in March of 2017, Who By Fire is a theatrical staging of Leonard Cohen’s songs, poems and letters. Conceived and anchored by First Aid Kit, the band are joined by an array of guest artists, two actors, an 8 member band and strings and on two songs a 20 strong choir. An incredibly ambitious undertaking, they selected and sequenced all of the material performed and collaborated with the theatre and their music director to stage and orchestrate the show.

SUPERB 1976 PERFORMANCE FROM COHEN WHILE ON HIS NEW SKINS TOUR This magisterial concert by the inimitable Canadian singer-songwriter and poet, Leonard Cohen, was broadcast live from Montreux, Switzerland, towards the end of his 55-date European tour of 1976. By this stage in his career, the 41-year old Cohen had released four studio albums, debuting with the outstanding Songs Of Leonard Cohen for CBS Records in 1967. Six of that superb record s best songs are presented this evening: Hey, That s No Way to Say Goodbye, One Of Us Cannot Be Wrong, Sisters Of Mercy, The Stranger Song and So Long, Marianne. The latter, in particular, is a spell-binding performance, a gorgeous homage to Cohen s lover and muse Marianne Ihlen (1935-2016), and a song which many fans consider was given its most entrancing performance at this very show. Cohen s 1969 sophomore album, the stark Songs From A Room , supplies seven songs to the set, including the classic and probably best known cut from the entire Cohen canon, Bird On The Wire, which is also given the singular honour of being performed twice, and is accompanied by You Know Who I Am, The Partisan (Cohen s moving adaptation of the wartime French resistance anthem Le Chant Des Partisans), the bleak Story Of Isaac, The Butcher, Lady Midnight and Tonight Will Be Fine.

Leonard Cohen, has always possessed a droll, self-effacing sense of humor. He expresses it on the opening track of Old Ideas in the third person: "I love to speak with Leonard/He's a sportsman and a shepherd/He's a lazy bastard/Living in a suit…." It's just of the typical Cohen topical standards on offer here: spiritual yearning, struggle, love, loss, lust, and mortality are all in abundance, offered with the poet's insight. He is surrounded by friends on Old Ideas. Patrick Leonard, Dino Soldo, and Anjani Thomas get production and co-writing credits. Sharon Robinson, Dana Glover, Jennifer Warnes, and the Webb Sisters all appear on backing vocals. Cohen mixes up the musical forms more than he has in the past. The loungey electronic keyboards on "Going Home" are balanced by Glover's female backing chorale, an acoustic piano, and Bela Santelli's violin…

A stunningly sophisticated leap into modern musical textures, I'm Your Man re-establishes Leonard Cohen's mastery. Against a backdrop of keyboards and propulsive rhythms, Cohen surveys the global landscape with a precise, unflinching eye: the opening "First We Take Manhattan" is an ominous fantasy of commercial success bundled in crypto-fascist imagery, while the remarkable "Everybody Knows" is a cynical catalog of the land mines littering the surface of love in the age of AIDS.

This 1991 tribute album reveals the broad range of Cohen's talent as composer in its dazzling variety of voices and styles. Following the prayer Who By Fire by House of Love, Ian McCulloch soars through Hey That's No Way To Say Goodbye, adding his own melancholy twist to the song's sublime sadness; The Pixies storm through I Can't Forget at their characteristic fast pace, whilst That Petrol Emotion poignantly render Stories Of The Street and James perform a meandering but moving So Long Marianne. Stephen Duffy of The Lilac Time gently caresses Bird On A Wire, followed by the Ugandan singer Geoffrey Oryema whose Suzanne, embellished by flute and a trio of guitars, fades out on a click-filled chorus. Quite brutal is David McComb's exploration of the sleazy Don't Go Home With Your Hard-on which shakes, rattles and rolls along with the best of the psychotic beats, while Dead Famous People, produced by Serge Gainsbourg, make a surprising success of a bubblegum singalong rendition of True Love Leaves No Traces. The star of the show is John Cale as he paints a truly great soundscape with only voice and piano in Hallelujah, a classic which would have remained buried in Cohen's own rather monotone version.

Leonard Cohen's Popular Problems is an uncharacteristically quick follow-up to 2012's Old Ideas. That record, cut in the aftermath of a multi-year tour, revitalized him as a recording artist. Producer Patrick Leonard (Madonna, Bryan Ferry) serves as co-writer on all but one tune on Popular Problems. While Cohen's sound has revolved around keyboards since 1988's I'm Your Man, Leonard gets that the real power in the songwriter's lyrics are best relayed through his own own simple melodies. Everything here – keys, female backing chorus, acoustic instrumentation, etc. – is in their service. As always, Cohen's songs – delivered in his deepest earth rasp – offer protagonists who are ambivalent spiritual seekers, lusty, commitment-phobic lovers, and jaded, untrusting/untrustworthy world citizens.

The Best of Leonard Cohen is a greatest hits album by Leonard Cohen, released in 1975. In some countries from Europe, it was released under the title Greatest Hits. This alternative title was used for the original vinyl release and for CD reissues from the 1980s onwards. The album was not a hit in the United States but did well in Europe, Cohen's major market at the time. He toured in support of the album in 1976, beginning in Berlin on April 22 and ending in London on July 7. The front cover photograph was taken in 1968 in a Milan hotel room, according to Cohen's liner notes.

Songs of Leonard Cohen is the debut album by Canadian folk singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen, released in December 1967 on Columbia Records. Less successful in the US than in Europe, Songs of Leonard Cohen foreshadowed the kind of chart success Cohen would go on to achieve. It reached number 83 on the Billboard 200 and achieving gold status in the US only in 1989, but peaked at number 13 on the UK Albums Chart, and spent nearly a year and a half on it. Songs of Leonard Cohen was released on CD in 1989, while a digipak edition was released in some European countries in 2003. A remastered version, with the bonus tracks "Store Room" and "Blessed is the Memory," was released in the United States on April 24, 2007.

Songs from a Room is the second album by Canadian musician Leonard Cohen, released in 1969. It reached No. 63 on the US Billboard Top LPs and No. 2 on the UK charts. In 2007, Songs from a Room was given a remastered reissue by Sony/BMG as part of a revamping of Cohen's back catalog. The new edition includes two bonus tracks, early versions of "Bird on a Wire" and "You Know Who I Am," which were produced by David Crosby. While he might seem an unlikely studio partner for Cohen, the results are better suited to Cohen's talents than what Johnston brought to the songs, and one wonders how the album might have turned out with Crosby at the controls. The reissue has been given a handsome book-style package with plenty of archival photos, song lyrics and new liner notes from Anthony DeCurtis.

A stunningly sophisticated leap into modern musical textures, I'm Your Man re-establishes Leonard Cohen's mastery. Against a backdrop of keyboards and propulsive rhythms, Cohen surveys the global landscape with a precise, unflinching eye: the opening "First We Take Manhattan" is an ominous fantasy of commercial success bundled in crypto-fascist imagery, while the remarkable "Everybody Knows" is a cynical catalog of the land mines littering the surface of love in the age of AIDS.