Best of 2024
30. 12. 2024 | Categories: Articles,Best of Year
[Ken Hunt, London] 2023 into 2024 felt like bursting smiling after being under one of the darkest clouds imaginable. In July 2024 I went back to the Rudolstadt Festival. The 2023 Festival had been really important. Santosh and I arrived there a month after being discharged from hospital and six weeks after major surgery. I guess I really needed to get there. I finished dressing and sterilising my operation wound in Berlin-Kreuzberg. Kreuzberg was the first Kiez (‘neighbourhood’) of Berlin where I felt totally at home in and I first visited West Berlin in 1970.
[by Ken Hunt, London] For many years I was a newspaper obituarist writing for The Guardian, The Independent, The Scotsman, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Times. In addition, I wrote obituaries for many folk magazines. A sample would be Folker in Germany, the EFDSS Journal in the UK, Penguin Eggs in Canada and Sing Out! in the USA.
[by Ken Hunt, London] Traditional folk tunes have long leached into classical composition. In Central Europe in the times before many nations gained independence, music stoked senses of cultural identity and aspirations of nationhood. The polyvalent artist Iva Bittová came out of the Communist-era, Czechoslovak alternative theatre scene. 
[Petr Dorùžka, Krems, Austria] Music enterpreneur Ankur Malhotra explains: The reason is favoritism and classism. There are millions spent by billionaires on weddings rather than be used to support the musicians via grant systems. Malhotra represents some of the best Indian folk and roots musicians who perform on major festivals worldwide. Barmer Boys play spiritual Hindi and Muslim songs from the Rajasthani desert. 77-year-old Lakha Khan is the last living sarangi violin master. His music ranges from ragas to Sufi chants and epic chants.
[Petr Dorůžka, Praha] After 42 years and 14 albums, Lo’Jo still sound like a group of visionaries from another world. Their roots go back to the punk rock era, but you can’t hear it in their music. Also, Lo’Jo is untouched by French musical stereotypes. If you hear a chanson track, it’s shifted into a distorted Tom Waits perspective. 
[Petr Dorůžka, Praha] In Finland, tradition is practiced as a living process and not as a museum exhibit, due to many dozens of creative musicians and educators. One of the first entrepreneurs to bring Finnish music to the world stage was Phillip Page. Already charmed by Finnish LPs as a DJ and record shop manager in the US, he moved from Texas to Helsinki in 1987. Since that time, he worked with artists such as JPP, Maria Kalaniemi, Värttinä, Kimmo Pohjonen and others, introducing them to audiences around the world. 
[Petr Dorůžka, Los Angeles, California] Lecture and screening on Frank Zappa and Prague at the Czech Consulate in Los Angeles, 10 May 2024. You might find it strange, that a person from a faraway, non English speaking country, talks about Frank Zappa in his home city Los Angeles. So – I should explain a few things in the next hour, with a help of a documentary film about Zappa’s visit to Prague and his meeting with president Havel. 
[Petr Dorůžka, Praha] How would collectors like Béla Bartók or Leoš Janáček work if they lived today? Endangered traditions that they managed to capture have definitely disappeared in some regions, but they still live elsewhere. Hiram Salsano was born in Agropoli, a seaside resort 120 km south of Naples. Since 2005, she has been visiting rural farms in the interior and recording the songs of the oldest living witnesses.
[Petr Dorůžka, Praha] The ud, one of the most common instruments in the Middle East, is considered to be the forerunner of a whole host of stringed instruments, including the European guitar. Unlike the guitar, it does not have frets and therefore is not limited by European scales. Besides Arab countries, a number of excellent players live in Turkey, Israel or Armenia and, thanks to the migration in recent decades, also in Europe. The instrument has gained respect in jazz thanks to musicians as Anouar Brahem from Tunisia, who records for ECM, or Rabih Abou-Khalil from Lebanon.
[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. 
