- Judy Collins, Kay Meek Centre, Saturday, Nov. 18, 8 p.m. Sold out.
JUDY Collins has packed several lifetimes worth of creative achievements into her 71 years, and she's still going strong.
The renowned folk singer, author, filmmaker, businesswoman, painter and public speaker will perform a selection of songs from throughout her career in a sold-out show at the Kay Meek Centre Nov. 19 at 8 p.m.
"I'll be doing songs from my 50-year catalogue," Collins says from a tour stop in Penticton "which includes things like 'Amazing Grace' and 'Someday Soon' and more recent things like 'Wish Upon a Star' and of course new things from Bohemian, my latest album and my recent one, Paradise. I'll sing the Joan Baez song 'Diamonds and Rust' and the new Jimmy Webb song that I sang on Paradise, as well as perhaps new and unheard songs. We always like to do a surprise."
Accompanied on piano by her musical director Russell Walden, Collins is touring both in support of her new album and two recently published books: a children's book called When You Wish upon a Star, and her memoir, Sweet Judy Blue Eyes.
"It's my life in music and it covers the affairs and the career and the music and the gossip as well as the facts," she said. "We got an amazing review in the New York Times so we're pretty happy about that."
Collins has no shortage of stories to tell. Raised in a musical family in Seattle, Los Angeles and Denver, Collins trained as a classical pianist under the famous Antonia Brico. At the age of 13, Collins performed a Mozart piano concerto with a full symphony orchestra.
"I sang with school choir, opera choruses, I had my own performing group in high school. I was always performing, really, from the time I could walk," she said. Strangely enough though, it was several more years before Collins took up music professionally.
"It's funny, it should have seemed that way but when I was married and living in Boulder I was working at the university filing papers, until my husband suggested I might be better off getting a job doing something I knew how to do. I went down and auditioned at a club in Boulder called Michael's Pub and got a job singing there. That was the last time I had to audition. That was 1959."
Drawn to the storytelling and political dimension in the folk revival of the 1960s, Collins ended up living in New York, performing the songs of Pete Seeger, Woodie Guthrie, and Tom Paxton. As her profile grew, she was instrumental in launching the careers of future icons Joni Mitchell, Randy Newman and Leonard Cohen.
She was also romantically linked to Stephen Stills, of Crosby, Stills & Nash fame. His ode to her, 'Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,' is the source of her new book's title.
"I talk about that love affair and lots of other things," she says.
Over half a century of recording, Collins has released more than 30 albums, reinterpreting the work of her fellow artists, from Cohen to Dylan to the Beatles, as well as penning many, many of her own songs.
How has her sound changed over the years? "I sound more and more like Judy Collins," she laughs.
Her commercial success hasn't prevented her from winning extensive critical acclaim. Her version of Stephen Sondheim's 'Send in the Clowns' won her Song of the Year at the 1975 Grammys and her 1967 cover of Mitchell's 'Both Sides Now' has been entered into the Grammy Hall of Fame.
She's also found time to do a considerable amount of humanitarian work, write seven books, launch her own record label, and codirect an Academy Award-nominated film. The film, Antonia, A Portrait of the Woman, follows the life of her early mentor, Brico.
"She was a great pioneer. She was the first woman to conduct major orchestras around the world. A very interesting woman, and I was her student," Collins says.
All this comes on top of a busy touring schedule. While Collins is cagey about exactly what new projects are on the horizon, she is planning a concert this December at New York's Metropolitan Museum, and a tour with Arlo Guthrie in the new year. Plans for a film version of her memoir are also in the works.
"So," she says. "Lots of things going on."
