[by Ken Hunt, London] With any selection of new Richard Thompson songs, there’s no knowing in whose company and in what straits listeners will be plunged. There might be a long-awaited cheap-suited estate agent or the borderline apocalyptic.
7. 8. 2018 | read more...
[by Ken Hunt, London] Much of Shelter was composed, if not conceived, in the relative seclusion of a cottage on the North Yorkshire Moors. Its accent is on self-written songs. Like the songs here, the artwork photos capture rural English scenes, Roman antiquities – as if reflecting her Florence (Firenze) birthplace (and the song Roman Holiday) – and, as with the visual backdrop to A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, a smidgeon of citified ways.
7. 8. 2018 | read more...
[by Ken Hunt, London] John Barlow became a cyber-guru and free speech advocate but when I first got to know him some – thanks to Eileen Law in the Grateful Dead office in the early 1980s, he was the second lyricist for San Francisco’s Grateful Dead. He wouldn’t have bleated about that that.
30. 7. 2018 | read more...
[by Ken Hunt, London] This is an adapted article, based on an interview with Zoe and Idris Rahman that we did yards away from the Royal Festival Hall on London’s Southbank in 2008 for Jazzwise. The focus was the newly released Where Rivers Meet. O, River also titled O nodi re opens Zoe and Idris Rahman’s Where Rivers Meet. It starts with a water ripple of piano
11. 2. 2018 | read more...
[by Ken Hunt, London] This column brings together Najma Akhtar, Iva Bittová & Čikori, The Byrds, DAgADAnA, Dillard & Clark, Dick Gaughan, Rhiannon Giddens, Kaia Kater, Eddie Reader and Wilson & Swarbrick.
10. 2. 2018 | read more...
[by Ken Hunt, London] David Crosby is a musician whose influence is paramount to the way my musical tastes developed. Directly or indirectly. This interview snippet is drawn from a far longer one conducted in September 2012 for an article in R2 that appeared at the time of the release of the 2012 DVD set. Here we discuss, among other subjects, a range of possibilities to do with writing songs and the influence of the Nubian oud player Hamza El Din.
25. 1. 2018 | read more...
[by Ken Hunt, London] The music I love music best tends to be music that needs to be played live, the better for it to evolve, blossom, thrive and survive. Music you know or suspect is never going to be performed exactly that way again. In Britain, compared to the Indo-Pakistani subcontinent’s music, concert-goers get relatively few chances to see Persian classical music reveal its merits and mysteries.
31. 12. 2017 | read more...
[by Ken Hunt, London] This column brings together Maniucha Bikont and Ksawery Wójcinski, Jackson Browne, Olivia Chaney, Tracy Chapman, B.J. Cole/Emily Burridge, Sandy Denny, Johnny Hallyday, Kaia Kater, Helena Matuszewska & Marta Solek and, take a deep breath, Lars Moller & Aarhus Jazz Orchestra featuring The Danish Sinfonietta & Abhijit Banerjee. Now exhale.
31. 12. 2017 | read more...
[by Ken Hunt, Venice and London] So much has been happening that it would be very hard and very boring to explain, let alone to know where to start. This column began and was concluded in London. Much of it was written during time in Venice on the outermost fringe of Cannaregio, a quiet part of the sestiere (as Venetian districts are called) remote enough to be away from the hustle and bustle of the tourist traipses.
11. 12. 2017 | read more...
[by Ken Hunt, London] These are five influential LPs of Indian classical music that captured the imagination of listeners in the early years of the post-war boom.
29. 8. 2017 | read more...