31. 12. 2017 | Categories: Articles,Giant Donut Discs
[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.
11. 12. 2017 | Categories: Articles,Giant Donut Discs
[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.
29. 8. 2017 | Categories: Articles,CD reviews
[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.
25. 8. 2017 | Categories: Articles,Live reviews
[by Ken Hunt, London] Regardless which of the nine Mousai (Greek mythology’s Muses of the arts), their descendants or their modern-day mutant offspring anyone evokes, the ways of presenting Art remain ever-changing and ever-evolving. That’s the nerve the German Jewish philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin exposed. It is in live performance and especially ones with extemporisation that a special kind of magic can occur. A cultural and multi-media extravaganza, “I Exist” – nach Rajasthan (‘.to(wards) Rajasthan’), as the cliché goes, it ticks many boxes.
19. 6. 2017 | Categories: Articles,Interviews
by Ken Hunt, London] This interview with David Harrington of the Kronos Quartet took place on 11 July 2014 – long before Folk Songs (released by Nonesuch Records in June 2017) was even conceived. It is published for the historian-minded. This sliver ends with talking about Ukrainian composer-musician Mariana Sadovska.
11. 3. 2017 | Categories: Articles,Lives
[by Ken Hunt, London and Jalandhar] Visiting Nek Chand’s life’s work known as the Rock Garden of Chandigar – the union capital of the Indian states of Haryana and Punjab – must have once felt like being somewhere in a gigantic a work in progress. Since his death on 12 June 2015 at the age of 90 – and speaking more romantically – his Rock Garden of Chandigarh entered another phase.
31. 12. 2016 | Categories: Articles,Best of Year,Feature
[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.
13. 12. 2016 | Categories: Articles,CD reviews
[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.
9. 11. 2016 | Categories: Articles,Live reviews
[by Ken Hunt, London] The Sage is the hub of so much arts-related activity on Tyneside and the north-east England region. It was meet and right for the venue to host this much anticipated project. Its promotional literature described Eliza Carthy bringing together second-generation folk artists, like herself, from across Europe. Her accomplices were the genre-stretching Czech vocalist-violinist Iva Bittová, the Greek singer and lute player Martha Mavroidi,
9. 8. 2016 | Categories: Articles
[by Ken Hunt, London] In April 1981 I walked into the anteroom of hotel round the corner from Green Park tube station in Central London to do the first of a series of booked interviews with members of the Grateful Dead. A hirsute gentleman, actually an aureole of hair with a splash of face, eyed me up and crossed the room to talk to me.
