[by Ken Hunt, London] Medical stuff prevented me working on Martin Carthy’s biography, Prince Heathen as much as I’d hoped in 2023. In July the first, post-surgery turning-point was getting to experience the Rudolstadt Festival for the first time since Petr Dorùžka and I went together in 2019. The next in late November was Peggy Seeger and me talking as part of the MOTH Club’s all-day event Celebrating 75 Years of Folkways Records.
29. 12. 2023 | read more...
Intensive treatment for cancer prevented me working much on Prince Heathen – The Age of Carthy and England’s Folksong Revival for most of 2022. I resume work on Martin Carthy’s biography in 2023. The upside was spending much of the year thinking about and challenging what I had already written.
25. 12. 2022 | read more...
[by Ken Hunt, London] Another strange year spent thinking, living, breathing and writing about Martin Carthy for Prince Heathen. All I shall say to the subject is Alan Garner’s Treacle Walker came out in 2021 after a fair few years of writing. A quote of Alan’ll probably appear in Prince Heathen as a watchword. Little of the 2021 assembly sounds on the face of it as if it ostensibly anything to do with Martin. Wait. (Much of it doesn’t much of it does.)
1. 1. 2022 | read more...
[by Ken Hunt, London] 2020 will go down as the first year of Covid-19. It was the strangest year for making music..
31. 12. 2020 | read more...
[by Ken Hunt, London] Another year of writing, though ever fewer outlets didn’t bother me unduly. 2019 still meant masses of musical discoveries, reaffirmations and new historic explorations.
9. 1. 2020 | read more...
[by Ken Hunt, London] The year went very well indeed with masses of musical discoveries and reaffirmations. For decades I have written in U Zavěšenýho Kafe (‘At the Hanging Coffee’) in Prague 1. The image is of me at its previous site when it was on Úvoz with Jakub ‘Kuba’ Krejčí’s mural of Czechoslovak historical and literary figures behind me. Now at Loretánská 13 I still write and hold meetings there.
31. 12. 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] 2016 proved to be a particularly good year for the roses. Well, the artistic ones at least. (In England the garden roses and the garden as a whole suffered somewhat thanks to the English climate’s vagaries of rain and sunshine.). Nevertheless, it truly was a year to remember musically. That was assisted by chance musical encounters that made me stop and stare and listen.
31. 12. 2016 | read more...
[by Ken Hunt, London] As years go, 2015 was one that over and over again plucked some remarkable rabbits out the magician’s hat. That’s what keeps me keeping on. A note on the process when it comes to these decisions. Part of it is to do with whittling.
31. 12. 2015 | read more...
[by Ken Hunt, London]Like some misbegotten mantra, I usually say that the year started slow. Happens year after year after year after blooming year. For 2014 that applied particularly in terms of live performances. In the annual polls to which I contribute I am fully aware that what my bread-and-butter music diet is will never register in anything anywhere apart from here.
31. 12. 2014 | read more...