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Left to right: Vito DiEterle, Eben Levy, Ethan Lipton, Vito DiEterle (Photo: Marco Werman)
There’s a singer in Brooklyn who seems to be loved by nearly everyone who hears him. The problem is that not many people hear him. Ethan Lipton is a singer and songwriter but his live performance, a large part of who he is, is rooted in European cabaret. And that kind of show calls for an audience that’s willing to do more than just listen. The World’s Marco Werman has today’s Global Hit. Download MP3
Songs in today’s GloHit:
1. Aus der Dreigroschenoper, overture
2. Sweet and Understanding
3. Little Container
4. Greedy Grabber
5. We Would Have Never Met
6. When You Die
Read the Transcript
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LISA MULLINS: There’s a singer in Brooklyn who seems to be loved by nearly everybody who hears him. Problem is, not that many people hear him. Ethan Lipton is a singer and songwriter. But his live performance is rooted in European cabaret. And as The World’s Marco Werman reports, that kind of show calls for an audience to do more than just listen.
MARCO WERMAN: When we think cabaret, we’re drawn to another time and another place. But cabaret does live on, if you know where to look, even here in the US. Ethan Lipton and his three-man band are on stage. In typical Lipton-esque absurdity, he refers to his trio as his orchestra. A sweet sax solo sets a loungey mood. The lights in the club are low. And the twenty people in the room kind of know what to expect with this very-brief Ethan Lipton classic. “Sweet and Understanding” always makes old and new Ethan Lipton fans laugh. It crystallizes who Ethan Lipton is. A singer with the cynicism and heart of Serge Gainsbourg, and the observant mind of a standup comic. This song’s brevity, it’s less than a minute long, catches people off guard, like the perfect punch line. And like a haiku, says Ethan Lipton, the words are deeper than the song’s length would suggest.
ETHAN LIPTON: We do like to do very very short songs some time. And you would think that they might be super easy to write because they’re so short, but most short ideas don’t feel like short songs, so you have to do a little searching before you hit on the right one. “Little Container” is – it’s sort of one of the things that we like to do is take something that is mundane, and kind of simple, and take it really seriously, and put this groovy beat behind it. How can we take this strange oddity and make it into a polished little gem?
WERMAN: The short songs are one aspect of an Ethan Lipton show. Those performances are usually a series of tunes that, like the best cabaret, work as stories, ballads and opinion pieces for the current time. That makes sense. Lipton’s own background is in theater.
LIPTON: My inspiration? I think a lot of Sid and Marty Kroft, a lot of HR Pufnstuf, and Sigmund and the Sea Monsters. And then I think a big inspiration for me was Kurt Weill and early German cabaret, but also Ionesco, playwrights, Beckett, and then later people like Tom Waits and Laurie Anderson. People who really sort of play with that story-teller perspective and kind of invite the audience to share that.
WERMAN: “Greedy Grabber” is a tune Lipton composed last year. He says he was thinking about the greed and corruption in the corporate world. And then the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded last spring, BP was all over the news, and Ethan Lipton shared “Greedy Grabber” with the band. The song is now a part of their repertoire. When he writes, Lipton carefully selects the narrator in his songs. It’s an important factor he says in establishing the tension during a performance.
LIPTON: When I started performing in New York, I was doing it actually in sort of the renewed burlesque circuit. You couldn’t take our songs as like a recipe for living. The point of view changes from song to song. And I think that’s a lot of what those cabarets have always done. Which is, there’s the political, there’s the risque, there’s the irreverent, there’s also like a very romantic thing. And those changes aren’t always announced to the audience. And I think the experience for the audience, hopefully if it’s a good one, invites you as the audience to figure out what’s going on and decide for yourself whether that protagonist is the guy singing it, or whether that is some horrible bigot, or some long lost romantic.
WERMAN: Is it hard to make a living as kind of a cabaret singer in the Kurt Weill tradition meets Ionesco, Gainsbourg, Jerry Seinfeld, here in the United States?
LIPTON: Yes, Marco, it is. It is, but you know, you just sort of do the thing that feels close to your heart, and trust that the living part will take care of itself.
WERMAN: So far so good on the living part. Just in case that doesn’t work out, Ethan Lipton also has a song called “When You Die.” For The World, I’m Marco Werman.
MULLINS: At TheWorld.org, you can see a video that Marco shot of Ethan Lipton and his orchestra performing “Little Container.” From the Nan and Bill Harris Studios at WGBH, I’m Lisa Mullins.
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