[by Ken Hunt, London] This month’s batch has a lot to do with thinking about rhymes, rhythms, mythologies and conversations. Bert Jansch, Hedy West, La Piva Dal Carner, Grateful Dead, Jagjit Singh & Chitra Singh, Laura Marling, Marvin Gaye, Rapunzel & Sedayne, David Lindley y Wally Ingram, and Ali Akbar Khan supply this month’s inspirations.
1. 11. 2011 | read more...
[by Ken Hunt, London] There are many reasons for pulling faces and putting on accents. Dudley Moore both knew and excelled in many. In this hour-long, black-and-white, Australian Broadcasting Corporation show, first shown in 1971, Moore runs through a gamut of facial contortions and thespian gazes and a range of ‘his voices’. He brings his Pete & Dud voice – reminding that even when continents separated them physically, Peter Cook was beside him in spirit – to the piano.
17. 10. 2011 | read more...
[by Ken Hunt, London] Let’s start metaphorical. Maybe poetical and ecological too. Counter-culture in the 1960s was like alternative now, like spring-water welling to the surface and forming rivulets. Streams and rivers form, few with fixed shapes. Currents change unpredictably. Some silt or dry up or form ox-bow lakes. Others keep on flowing and joining up. Counter-culture and alternative have something else going for them.
17. 10. 2011 | read more...
[by Ken Hunt, London] The Lovin’ Spoonful – a band that for the day and in the most cool of manners took its name from a Mississippi John Hurt recording – made a music that brought together jug band (skiffle) music, folk, folk-blues and pop into rock sensibility. They did it at a point circa 1966 when nobody knew exactly what was going on and definitely where what was going to go. And Zal Yanovsky was playing the electric guitar that propelled the Lovin’ Spoonful.
10. 10. 2011 | read more...
[by Ken Hunt, Gaienhofen am Bodensee] Purposeful drifting might conjure images of lying on a lilo on the lake, floating where the breeze, current or tide take you but that would be well wrong, John. These driftings all link up, even if the connections may not cry out. Ten selections from the Bosnian vocalist Amira, the Welsh group Fernhill, the largely forgotten British faux-folk slash singer-songwriter Mick Softley, the never-to-be-forgotten singer and guitarist Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, the maestro of Hindustani maestros Ali Akbar Khan, the Karnatic vina maestro Balachander, the koto player Nakahsahi Gyōmu, the Kinks who turned office workers into heroes of the everyday, Cilla Fisher and Artie Trezise, the Gaelic singer Alyth McCormack… Louring over this batch of music and jumble of emotions was the death of Ray Fisher.
3. 10. 2011 | read more...
[by Ken Hunt, London] Now, it’s only personal opinion. Still, hear out my theory. Every movement has its share of before-and-after benchmarks or epiphanies. They divide people who experienced them first-hand from those who got the experience passed down. On 1 June 1980, a date that shall forever remain hallowed in the annals of what we laughingly call England’s Folk Revival, Topic Records released a twelve-inch, nine-track masterwork known as 12TS411 in the trade and as Penguin Eggs to the punters that snaffled it up. It is no exaggeration to say that it took the folk scene by storm, much as Dick Gaughan’s Handful of Earth did the following year.
26. 9. 2011 | read more...
[by Ken Hunt, London] The Scottish folksinger Ray Fisher once told me that she had a series of scheduled performances in Czechoslovakia that were abruptly cancelled when the Soviet bloc forces had the bad manners to invade in 1968. The following year, rescheduled concerts finally took place. She recalled the mayor of one town greeting her. Two Soviet officers flanked him. The mood was tense…
19. 9. 2011 | read more...
[by Ken Hunt, London] The one has a lot to do with thinking about rhymes, rhythms, mythologies and conversations. The music from Panta Rhei, Ornette Coleman, Dick Gaughan, Pentangle, Traffic, Talking Heads, Márta Sebestyén, Martin Simpson (with Dick Gaughan), Steve Tilston and Aruna Sairam.
16. 9. 2011 | read more...
[by Ken Hunt, London] To be truthful, there really have been very few disc jockeys who have changed society’s attitudes to music. Tom Donahue introduced a virus to North American radio programming. Donahue’s infected the San Francisco Bay Area. By circumventing conventional playlist conventions, he wove an unconventional tapestry that enabled listeners to think beyond the commercially regulated 45 rpm format, think about LP-length tracks as a format and thus to think for themselves.
29. 8. 2011 | read more...
[by Ken Hunt, London] In July 1991, the first year that Tanz&FolkFest Rudolstadt was staged, just like the 2010 ‘edition’, it took place under blue skies in baking temperatures. The 1991 bill served up plenty of scope for serendipitous discoveries of the new kind and reacquainting oneself with familiar acts. Bernhard Hanneken’s festival programming for the 2010 festival did something similar in spades – only to surfeit degrees (let’s not talk of lampreys) – with 27 stages scattered over the town.
22. 8. 2011 | read more...