Blood & Feathers: Live at the Cafe Carlyle
Blood and Featherswas Ute Lemper's 2005 cabaret show at New York's Café Carlyle.  It's a partial survey of her career, nodding to, among other things, her affinity withKurt Weill("Pirate Jenny") and her Sally Bowles role in (aCabaretmedley).  She incorporates more Weill ("Bilbao Song," "Moon Over Alabama") into a "Moon Medley" that includes Van Morrison's "Moon Dance," Sting's "Moon Over Bourbon Street," Joni Mitchell's "Moon at the Window," the standard "It's Only a Paper Moon," and Tom Waits's "Grapefruit Moon." Lemper also tosses in Sondheim's "The Ladies Who Lunch" and a tribute to fellow German chanteuses Marlene Dietrich and Edith Piaf, and even delivers some of her patter in German and French. To call it an eclectic mix would be an understatement, and she's brash, she's bold, and she leaves it all out there--not your normal honey-voiced cabaret singer.  But that also meansBlood and Feathersisn't like the last hundred smooth, generic-sounding cabaret recordings you've heard.  That's definitely a good thing.--David Horiuchi