Leonard Cohen's best songs rooted in American tradition: Norm Ravvin

By Sarah Binder

A Department of Religion series on Jewish themes ended its second season March 10 on a high note — well, as high as Leonard Cohen songs go.

The poet-author-singer was the subject of a presentation by Norman Ravvin, Chair of the Institute for Canadian Jewish Studies, who entertained an overflow audience with scholarly wit and musical interludes.

Under the “provocative” title of The Rise and Fall of Leonard Cohen, Ravvin held the receptive audience in thrall as he traced the evolution from poet/author imbued with Jewish and Quebec culture to singer/songwriter rooted in American musical traditions.

But during question period there was some good-natured protestation against Ravvin’s claim that 1974’s New Skin for the Old Ceremony was Cohen’s last great work. Listeners countered, what about The Future, his 1992 hit, or 1988’s I’m Your Man?

Ravvin kept his talk light, playing a few bars of Bird on a Wire on his guitar to illustrate a simple six-chord folk style used by Cohen, drawing attention to his song styles with CD samples, and using handouts of an early Cohen songbook as context.

Ravvin said Cohen’s career divides, in terms of its influence and focus, along national lines, “his early literary pursuits and successes marked by his Montreal Jewish upbringing, his McGill education, and certain senior figures, like [poets] Irving Layton and A.M. Klein.”

The transition to the second, American-rooted phase came shortly after the publication in 1966 of Beautiful Losers, “his explosive, career-making novel.”

Cohen joined the downtown New York scene, where in the 1960s musicians “mined the stock of traditional music, along with the work of influential figures like Woody Guthrie and Phil Ochs,” Ravvin said, citing Bob Dylan’s recent autobiography.

“Cohen’s roots in the American music revival are leaner and meaner than Dylan’s, but he shares a number of key formative influences: the blues; country and western waltzes and the Nashville sound; and the leftist folk tradition of union rabble-rousing, anti-war and campfire songs.”

Ravvin considers Cohen’s earliest recordings his best: The Songs of Leonard Cohen (1968), Songs from a Room (1969), Songs of Love and Hate (1971), New Skin for the Old Ceremony (1974). It’s been downhill since then, “with the exception of the much-maligned 1979 album Death of a Ladies Man, rooted in the proto-rock bandstand hits of pre-Elvis dance halls.”

Some of Cohen’s later recordings may have been critical or popular successes “but they lacked the kind of rootedness of the earlier music, culminating in the recent disasters Ten New Songs and Dear Heather.”

Asked about the influence of Buddhism on Cohen’s work — he was a Zen monk for several years in California — Ravvin said it was a complicated factor and he had “no smart answer.”

Advertised widely, Ravvin’s talk drew a mostly adult general public audience, including many seniors. A few Concordia students did manage to squeeze into the small hall at the Religion annex on Mackay St. but several left due to the lack of space.

“We need a bigger venue,” said Josa Alley, a Religion major and student coordinator of the series. It was meant to widen the array of Jewish issues on campus and attract students through alternative forms of learning.

Alley said a talk on the mystical tradition of Kabbalah also drew a packed house. The series, a brainchild of Ravvin’s Institute and students, has also brought in guest speakers on women and on gender stereotyping.

Editor: Tomorrow night, CBC Radio 1 (88.5) is airing a program at 9 p.m. about a worldwide campaign to nominate Leonard Cohen for a Nobel Prize.