Street Roots • Nov. 16-22, 2018
Culture
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P H O T O B Y PETER N IC H O L L S /R E U T E R S
B ill Murray (from left), Mira Wang and fa n Vogler perform at the Royal Festival Hall in London.
performance in 2003’s “Lost in Translation.”
But, as Murray tells it, the Christmas
special was a major confidence boost,
“I went into it thinking I was just gonna
collaborate,” h e said, “and I ended up
singing IQ songs. I felt more comfortable
each time. I’d done -The Jungle Book,’ and I
had a lot of encouragement from the (film’s
musicians). It made me feel really good, and
that I should develop i t Not develop it, but
work at it.”
While Murray’s singing is decidedly
unpolished, that’s key to its charm. Plus,
one can’t help but hear echoes of his
various film and TV roles from over the
years - and start to smile and chuckle
before he even cracks a joke. On the “New
Worlds” album and tour alike, he tackles
irreverent versions of showtunes like “Ain’t
Necessarily So,” “Moon River” and several
selections from “West Side Story,”
accompanied by a chamber trio consisting of
Vogler on cello; Chinese violinist Mira
Wang, who is married to Vogler; and
Venezuelan pianist Vanessa Perez.
As if that’s not enough, Murray recites
prose and poetry from Mark Twain, Ernest
Hemingway, Walt Whitman and others.
So how do fans of Murray’s wise-cracking
comedy take to him dabbling in the greatest
hits of American literature?
“Oh, they love the reading,” Vogler said.
“Bill is a master of reciting poetry and
literature, and of course the works are so
unbelievably great. We frame them with
music, and sometimes we put music
underneath. The texts are very, very
touching, so it’s material that carries us
through the whole show.” g
Now I have to say something nice about
(the) musicians,” Murray said with a laugh.
“It’s like you’re singing on top of, clouds.
They surround a note, and you’ve just got to
get kind of close to it. They’re doing all the
rest for you.”
It helps that M urray and Company are
open to improvising from night to night,
playing around with distinct versions and
even catering encores specifically to the
vibe of a given audience. And if you think
Murray’s singing is only for laughs, his
centrepiece rendition of Van Morrison’s
“When Will I Ever Learn to Live in God?” is
decidedly emotional, his cracked voice
radiating surrender.
Coming from such different worlds, do
Murray and Vogler have much shared taste?
“Well, there’s something much more
important than taste here,” Vogler
answered. “It’s chemistry. It’s more than
one plus one. It’s multiple times that. And
you can’t really calculate that.”
That extends to their other two
collaborators, Wang and Perez. Murray
agreed: “It’s not so much taste. It’s a
different kind of thing, where if there’s
something that doesn’t feel right, there’s a
clarity. So when we talk about how to make
a piece work, it’s in a sort of secret
language that we all understand.”
Some pieces are tougher to crack than
others, and there’s one in particular that’s
still not quite ready.
“It’s like a piece of marble,” Murray said,
“and you keep chipping away at it and
changing the way you attack it. There’s
something in these pieces that attracted us,
and we have to figure out how to get it
across.”
That flexible, instinctive approach sounds
similar to how Murray approaches his
screen roles, whether playing purely for
comedy or doing more dramatic acting in
films like “Broken Flowers” and “Razor’s
Edge.” But his dry wit is always at the
ready. When it was pointed out that you
can’t get much more distinguished than
playing Carnegie Hall and the Sydney Opera
House, he responded: “Well, we could play
the Forbidden City, I suppose.”
Courtesy o f The B ig Issue Australia / INSP.
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