On Tuesday, OCTOBER 17, 2023, I'll be returning to Rose Hall at Lincoln Center for the opening night of the Mabel Mercer Cabaret Convention and our enticing evening honoring a German-American master composer in, "Speak Low: The Music of Kurt Weill." Stay tuned for details about my newest arrangement of Weill's classic Bilbao Song (with lyrics by Bertholt Brecht). [...]
Karen Kohler's prose piece, Songs, Psychedelics & Seizures: A One-Woman Flow, has been published in the 2023 edition of Harmony Magazine of the University of Arizona's Medical Humanities Department. This piece is an adaptation of the 40-minute monologue she presented at the Science of Consciousness Conference at the University of Arizona at Tucson in April 2022. [...]
Welcome to my newest guided meditation, Body As Instrument. Our body is an instrument. How we tune it, use it and care for it, what we put into it and everything we incorporate becomes part of our life story. In our practice today, we bring awareness to the body as it stands in service to art. Being comfortable in [...]
I'm honored to present my monologue, "Songs, Psychedelics and Seizures: A One-Woman Flow" at the Science of Consciousness Conference 2022. Sponsored by the University of Arizona in Tucson (my alma mater), this year's program includes such consciousness studies leaders as Roger Penrose, Dennis McKenna, Robin Carhart-Harris, Katrin Preller, Christof Koch, Elizabeth Krasnoff and Deepak Chopra. I've chosen a topic, Flow, [...]
It's always been my pleasure to model for Japanese-born photographer Takako Suzuki Harkness whom I first met when she was snapping shots of our nightlife scene of New York City and offering her unique perspective and careful eye for the details. Now she teams with Japanese fashion designer Mieko Mintz to showcase Mintz' unique designs and I was again [...]
Welcome to my newest guided meditation, At Home in the Transition. Home is in-born, it's instinct. It's a place, a memory, a feeling, a whiff of belonging that can grow into a real longing for one's own, for one's people, for people period. Inside this pandemic, we haven't had the reflections of the "home" that's inside us and that [...]
On this Holocaust Remembrance Day, Noa Levy and I offer Deutschlandlied-Hatikvah, our reimagining of the German and Israeli National Anthems performed acapella as the closing piece of our show "The Home I Love." Our concert was sponsored by the German Consulate of San Francisco and presented at Temple Emanuel-El on June 7, 2017. One day we'll sing it live for you [...]
As a new year dawns, I share with you this sentiment which is as true as ever and boy do I love singing it! There's a change in the weather, a change in the sea From now on there'll be a change in me My walk will be different, my talk and my name Nuthin' about me is goin' [...]
SURABAYA SANTA from yours truly, Mrs. Claus at the North Pole. HAPPY HOLIDAYS, one and All! Surabaya Santa Karen Kohler, voice Doug Oberhamer, piano Gregory Chudzik, bass Recorded live at Feinstein's, NYC music/lyrics by Jason Robert Brown
Having chosen this path, we get kicked in the stomach on a regular basis. It's just the way it is when you take the chance of asking for something where you may be turned down or coldly rejected. If we didn't know what those things felt like, then your singing and my writing wouldn't be worth very much. ~ [...]
