Reviewed Saturday 7th June 2014
Kim Smith is a regular visitor to the Adelaide Cabaret Festival, and we just can't enough of his style of cabaret. His latest show is
Nova Noir, referring to his recently released CD,
Nova. He is touring Australia after his appearances at this Festival and also launching his new EP,
Tease. His stage persona brings us a dry, wry wit, with the darkness and subversive approach of pre-war German Kabarett, in which sexual politics and political incorrectness feature strongly, and gender is flexible. The Nazis hated the people involved in Kabarett, many of them Jewish and/or homosexual, which was a problem for them to eradicate, as high ranking officers also enjoyed attending the cabarets.
Kim Smith brilliantly recreates this atmosphere, not by simply singing the songs of the era, but by also reinventing songs of today in the style one would have encountered in Weimar Kabarett, and through his clever use of words, facial expressions, and stances. He almost seems to have independent control over each muscle in his face, and a tiny change of expression conveys so much. A tilt or a slight turn of the head, a sideways glance, a gesture, every carefully considered movement, is designed to convey a thought or feeling.
Smith is ably assisted in recreating and reinventing Kabarett by his
Music Director/Accordionist, Benjamin Ickies, and the other members of the backing quartet, Alana Dawes, bass, back from New York especially to play for some of the shows in this Festival, Enrico Mick Morena, drums, and Brett Stafford, guitar. The superb arrangements, played with great skill and understanding, are responsible for so much of creating the appropriate atmosphere and taking modern songs into the past.
Beginning by entering through the audience as he sings
Pirate Jenny, from
The Threepenny Opera, by
Bertolt Brecht and
Kurt Weill, Smith takes us instantly right back to Berlin before the war. Some humorous dialogue and then a southern American medley followed, featuring
Billie Holiday's powerful and accusatory,
Strange Fruit, to end with
Summertime, from the Gershwin opera,
Porgy and Bess. Prejudice, hatred, murder, and discrimination were not limited to the rise of the Nazis.
His performance of
You Keep Me Hanging On is about as far from the version by the Supremes as it could get. The range of numbers that get reworked is remarkable, from
Nature Boy, made famous by Nat King Cole, to
Bang Bang (You Shot Me Down), and
Edith Piaf's
Padam. he makes them all seem new and fresh again.
Kim Smith is a consummate artist, with a very solid understanding of German Kabarett behind his performances, and a voice and presentation style that would find him fitting in easily if suddenly whisked back in time to Berlin between the wars.
Details of
Kim Smith's Australian tour and his debut album,
Nova, can be found on his web site,
here. These coming appearances are sure to sell out, so book now. His new EP,
Tease, contains some sensational songs, impeccably sung and played, so add both of these, and his other recordings, to your collection.
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