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Arts / Kate’s whole lotta love

Jazz musician Paul Grabowsky and singer Kate Ceberano… the simplest songs are often the best.
Jazz musician Paul Grabowsky and singer Kate Ceberano… the simplest songs are often the best.

SELF-styled “professional minstrel and showgirl” Kate Ceberano and trailblazing jazz musician Paul Grabowsky have been working together for years on and off, but the show they’re bringing to The Street Theatre soon is one they first cooked up in 1991.

Egged on by family and friends, including film director Fred Schepisi, they knocked up a Valentine’s Day set-list of unabashed love songs – like those we’ll be hearing at The Street.

That was at the old Continental Café in Prahran, Melbourne, home to semi-acoustic gigs that saw a veritable honour roll of top Aussie performers, in what Ceberano calls “ramshackle gorgeous events”, on their nights off.

Ceberano says, by phone from her Melbourne home, that apart from protest songs and songs she describes “self-help therapy”, most of the “greats” are the classic love songs that can take listeners to a particular time and place.

Top of the list will be Burt Bacharach’s “What the World Needs Now is Love”, but there’ll also be a few enigmatic Leonard Cohen numbers and lots of popular covers. Both Ceberano and Grabowsky, in compiling their set-list, have borne in mind that the simplest songs are often the best.

Grabowsky has written 30 or more film soundtracks and so, in a nod to French cinema, they’ve included a French medley that Ceberano believes is “sublime”. There’ll be some of the moody, ubiquitous Eric Satie music and a tribute to the 1964 movie “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg”, songs by Michel Legrand.

“Paul and I are just cogs in a great big machine, he’s a professor of music and I’m a professional minstrel and showgirl, but we’re both highly prolific,” she says. Occasionally the two things come together and she recently did some masterclasses with his Monash students.

Ceberano is a proud ambassador for pop music and points out that there are many different styles within the genre. She acknowledges her debt to the work of Cilla Black, Bacharach and Dionne Warwick, and harbours a sneaking suspicion that she has the perfect Bacharach voice – move over, Dionne.

But generationally, she fits right into the Blondie and Michael Jackson era, describing them as “perfect pop artists, equal to anyone in their music”.

Constantly mindful of her audience’s needs, Ceberano describes a “beautiful” feature of their Brisbane Powerhouse gig that took place on the same day as the Grand Final. Aware that the auditorium included some young men she suspected would have preferred to be at the Big Game, she arranged for a timekeeper to come on stage with the scores.

When Ceberano takes time to chat with “CityNews” she’s deep in the very private life she combines with touring – that of being a mum. Her daughter Gypsy will be 13 in January and, as Ceberano says: “I’m trying to inhale that last breath of her youth, I just want to do things with her”.

“Love Songs: Kate Ceberano & Paul Grabowsky” at The Street Theatre, 4pm and 7.30pm, Sunday, October 23, bookings to thestreet.org.au or 6247 1223.

 

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Helen Musa

Helen Musa

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