Maja Posavec & Ivan Kapec

Maja Posavec

An Evening with Cohen is a way for singer Maja Posavec and guitarist Ivan Kapec to pay homage to this never-forgotten and forever-loved Canadian “singer-songwriter of love and death”. The concept has been extremely popular with audiences both in Croatia and abroad, so after sold-out concerts at different venues in Zagreb and Rijeka, the duo held sold-out concerts in Sarajevo and Mostar as well.

An Evening with Cohen is more of an interpretation than a standard concert, largely inspired by Famous Blue Raincoat, an album by Jennifer Warnes, who covered Cohen’s songs in her own, specific way in 1987, after singing the backing vocals for him during the 1970s and 1980s.This time Maja and Ivan will be supported by an entire band, consisting of well-known jazz musicians Mario Bočić, Borko Rupena and Luka Veselinović, in their interpretation of all other timeless hits by Cohen. Maja reciting Cohen’s lyrics in Croatian takes the whole experiences to a new level.

Early this year, An Evening with Cohen became an album, which made it among the best-selling Croatian production very soon.This is what Damir Šodan, a great expert on Cohen’s work and its translator, wrote about the album:

“Finally, this unique album comes as yet another testimony of the longevity and topicality of Cohen’s songs, co-signed by two prominent Croatian musicians – a versatile jazz and fusion guitarist, Ivan Kapec, and a young singer-songwriter with a distinctive and suggestive voice, Maja Posavec. Mind you, they are musicians who were not even born when Cohen’s first album – Songs of Leonard Cohen – was published in 1967! Perhaps more than anything else, this is a proof of the exceptional level of their sensibility and skill, because regardless of the time and space gap and despite the stylistic versatility of Cohen’s body of work (rooted in north-American folk, French chanson, and Andalusian flamenco) they succeed in getting to the core of the Cohen canon…”