[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] 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] 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...
[by Ken Hunt, London] One of the most life-changing discoveries of my life was being handed a linguistic skeleton key in the spring of 1971. Turning 20 working in the print on the German-Danish border, every day it was Hochdeutsch to management and Plattdütsch or Low German to nearly everybody else. Plattdütsch is a working-class language that straddles the Schleswig-Holstein boundary between Germany and Denmark.
13. 12. 2016 | read more...
[by Ken Hunt, London] “How unseemly it is to follow anyone slavishly,” was ECM’s press release’s free (one suspects) translation for the title track in 2013. Performing Muhlis Akarsu’s Kula Kulluk Yakýîir Mý therefore could be perceived as a pointed choice since he died in a firebombing in 1993 aged 45 or so.
30. 11. 2015 | read more...
[by Ken Hunt, London] Back in New York, Seeger enthused about what he had seen and heard. Broadside, a publication with a tiny circulation – using, as Cunningham recalled, a hand-cranked mimeo machine “we had inherited when the American Labor Party branch closed in our neighbourhood” – became a vital conduit for song. Originally published fortnightly, very soon monthly, topicality was a major goal. It published its first issue in February 1962 and folded in 1988.
12. 5. 2013 | read more...
[by Ken Hunt, London] Originally written on the eve of London’s post-Valentine Peace March on 15 February 2003, this with little taken out or added.
Ace’s catalogue is a growing and contracting – call it pulsating – reminder to reinforce why I decided to specialise and limit my listening and writing habits for sanity’s sake.
16. 4. 2012 | read more...
[by Ken Hunt, London] Originally written on the eve of London’s post-Valentine Peace March on 15 February 2003 with little taken out or added.
Ace’s catalogue is a reminder why I decided to specialise and limit my listening but especially writing habits for sanity’s sake. Not all the people I wrote about in this piece are still alive, notably Ali Akbar Khan, one of my hugest musical influences.
2. 4. 2012 | read more...
[by Ken Hunt, London] It’s 2001. You open the paper at an article about the underground strike. Par for the course, the same old politicians are lip-synching the party line. Substitute the specific till the capitalist or metropolitanist becomes local to you. The London Underground is being turned into another public-private partnership. The workers are striking about compulsory redundancies, fears over safety, etc. You get incensed.
4. 12. 2011 | read more...