by LORRAINE CARPENTER

We've heard her expansive homages to Kurt Weill, her faithful renditions of songs sung by Marlene Dietrich and Edith Piaf, and songs composed by Bertolt Brecht, Friedrich Hollaender and Jacques Brel. We've also seen her naked, as the pregnant nude model in Robert Altman's Pret à Porter. She's European to the bone, but these days, singer, actress and modern mom Ute Lemper is a staunch New Yorker, a foreigner in a city of foreigners. To most, however, she remains quintessentially German.

Throughout two decades on the musical stage, in film, on record, singing alongside small bands and vast symphonies around the globe, Lemper has become a delegate of a vibrant era, celebrating a small but exceptional avenue of cultural history that arguably gave birth to the liberal, libertine pop culture we know today.

"Those songs that are spiced up with the broken taboos of the Weimar Republic all seem very contemporary, even though they were written 80 years ago," says Lemper, on the line from a London hotel last month. "Abortion, homosexuality, freedom of speech, emancipation, fascism, war - it's all there in those wicked, comedic songs."

After years of revitalizing classic Berlin cabaret on stage and creating painstakingly authentic recordings to document the music of that era, Lemper forged a contemporary tangent, an area with extra elbow room for creativity and space to build on her beloved music of the past.

"For the album Punishing Kiss [1998], I had these wonderful alternative rock guys writing songs for me," says Lemper. "Elvis Costello, Tom Waits, Nick Cave - it was so much fun to interpret contemporary music that I thought, okay, now I just need to go all the way."

And so she's gone on her most recent album, But One Day, featuring four self-penned songs that slide easily into the mix of Weill, Brel, Brecht, Astor Piazzolla and Hanns Eisler.

"It was very natural," says Lemper of the songwriting process. "I'm so used to improvising with my musicians, and there's always re-writing involved when I interpret other songs, so it was not too far from finding my own music."

The album was recorded live in NYC and London with small packs of musicians, including a string quartet to suggest the "dark, beautiful orchestrations from the last century." Lemper credits her friends Todd Turkisher and Robert Ziegler with working hard to consolidate the sound of the original songs and covers.

Deutsch, nicht deutsch

But Lemper's most vocal cheerleaders are her children Max and Stella, aged eight and six respectively. They sing her tunes around the house and assist when she needs to learn new material, playing percussion in a recent cramming session of Joni Mitchell songs, which Lemper later sang at a tribute concert. But the kids can't escape some musical training of their own.

"I make them listen to everything," says mom. "They don't like Stravinsky and Schoenberg, I must admit, it's getting very boring to them. My son has a natural attraction to hard rock. He shakes his head and puts on a leather bracelet for his 20-minute hard rock session at home. And the Britney Spears fad only lasted for a year with my daughter. The teenage idols went so far into this sexist thing that the little ones are not buying it anymore. But it was very weird for a while, with the bellybutton sticking out and moving the hips back and forth. Stella was five, imitating this completely sexual behaviour, but I let her do it, she had fun."

Lemper muses over her kids' favourite song from But One Day, "Lena," a sad number about the daughter of Holocaust survivors. She has yet to explain the basis of the lyrics to her kids, but Nazi Germany is a topic Lemper never tires of discussing in interviews, whether through the story of Weill's exile or her personal reasons for leaving Germany.

"I'm out there in the world being the ambassador to Germany, singing Kurt Weill and Weimar Republic music. Everywhere I go, all over the world, I talk about these things. But the post-war generation, those who went straight back to work after the war with anti-Semitism still in their veins, had no regret, no grief about the tragedies of the Holocaust. Everybody needed to deal with being German in the century of this crime and my family never did. But," she says, despite a troubled reunification, "Germany is a very educated, diverse and politically healthy country now, with a great crowd of young people. I'm very proud of that."

At Place Des Arts' Theatre Maisonneuve
on Sunday, April 27, 8pm, $38-$50

>> Music Listings