Best of 2025
27. 1. 2026 | Categories: Best of Year
[Ken Hunt, London] Let's say goodbye to 2025 with an anniversary. At the very beginning of 2010 I pitched the idea for a regular column to Sean McGhee, the editor of RnR (after its original name Rock'n'Reel. My idea was to write about a socially engaged or political song or piece of music. I had approached another, since deceased magazine the previous autumn, eventually to be told "nobody's interested in political song". Sean welcomed the idea with alacrity and chose RPM as the column's name. The column has now passed its fifteenth year.
In January 2009 I had seen the Plastic People of the Universe with my old Czech friend Jana Oršulíková at the Plastics' London concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. That October, thanks to Petr Dorůžka, I was at Prague's MOFFOM (Music on Film Film on [...]
[by Ken Hunt, London] The English playwright and film and television scriptwriter, Keith Dewhurst (1931-2025) died on 11 January 2025. He was responsible for a number of important plays performed in the National Theatre. He brought Flora Thompson's trilogy Lark Rise to life for the stage as Lark Rise and Candleford, performed as promenade plays in the Cottesloe (now Dorfman) Theatre. Directed by Bill Bryden and Sebastian Graham-Jones, the plays were a feat of the playwright's skills because his source material was mainly description and very short on dialogue. Dewhurst developed a seasonal cycle from the books. One device he used to get round the lack of dialogue was by employing folksong and country dance music. The music directors were Ashley Hutchings and John Tams. The Albion Band [...]
[Ken Hunt, London] 2023 into 2024 felt like bursting smiling into sunshine 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. Kreuzberg is the first multicultural district of Berlin I've encountered and I've been going there since the 1990s.
The 2024 Festival was immeasurably better. Shit journey from Prague with delays and missed trains. [...]
"Such a long, long time to be gone
And a short time to be there." - 'Box of Rain', Phil Lesh (1940-2024)
[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.
Since Oxford University Press took over what from 2004 became the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, I have written music-related biographical essays, mainly folk-related, for that massive reference work. I have added more folk-related entries than any individual contributor in the work's history, including contributors from 1885 to OUP taking [...]
[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. She is a violin-vocal virtuosa, a Bachelor of Music, and an acclaimed film actor. She is of mixed Moravian, Slovak, Hungarian and Roma stock. The Mucha Quartet came together at the Conservatory in Bratislava, the capital of the Slovak Republic, in 2003.
This bespoke Rudolstadt Festival performance took place in the Stadtkirche, the town's baroque church and the programme of mixed Moravian and Slovak folksongs for voice and string quartet. It transported. [...]
[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. Decades ago, the virtuoso violinist Yehudi Menuhin was one of the first Western supporters of Indian music. He declared that the dark and hypnotic tone of the sarangi is "the very soul of Indian feeling and thought".
Indian music has been explored [...]
Denis Péan is the guiding spirit of the French group Lo'Jo. In October, the band presents their new album Feuilles Fauves on tour, including a Prague concert.
[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. Musically, Lo'Jo was inspired by trumpeter Don Cherry, psychedelia, experimental music by groups like Magma, African genres, but these influences are more ideological than stylistic. The group's sound cannot be described using routine clichés, everything here works differently. But one thing grabs you [...]
A long talk with Phillip Page, who took Värttinä, JPP and Kimmo Pohjonen around the globe.
[Petr Dorůžka, Praha] Finland is musically one of the most diverse regions of Europe. The country of five and a half million offers tricky rhythms from Karelia, Sami joik, high energy dance tunes of pelimanni fiddlers, Finnish tango, runo songs from the Kalevala epic and of course music of Finland's two national instruments, accordion and kantele. In Finland, tradition is practiced as a living process and not as a museum exhibit, due to many dozens of creative musicians and educators. The crucial move in updating Finnish folk music to modern times was made in 1983, when Heikki Laitinen (* 1943) started the Folk Music Department at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki. One of the first entrepreneurs to [...]
Lecture and screening on Frank Zappa and Prague at the Czech Consulate in Los Angeles, 10 May 2024.
[Petr Dorůžka, Los Angeles, California] You might find it strange, that a person from a far away, 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.
The main points are:
-- how Frank Zappa managed to gain such a strong following in my home country, former Czechoslovakia,
-- how his music broke through all European cultural and language barriers,
-- and also, how one of his songs inspired the name of the most celebrated local underground band, the Plastic People of Universe.
There is actually a book on [...]
