The 9 Secrets

Even for someone like Ute Lemper, whose output has encompassed cabaret, jazz, rock, and more, this is an unprecedented project. Lemper put music to passages from Brazilian novelist Paulo Coelho’s famed *Manuscript Found in Accra*, singing in Portuguese, English, French, and her native German, and combining Brazilian and Eastern flavors with jazz. From the bossa nova vibe of “Beauty” and “Success” to the exotic Middle Eastern tinge of “Sex,” Lemper frames Coelho’s epigrammatic wisdom with a dizzying fantasia as intoxicating as it is eclectic.