Author Archive
[by Ken Hunt, London] What a year for music! The number of events of 2011 on this list is greedy by most annual polls’ standards. One of the continual difficulties for me is that, because I am writing in a variety of periodicals and newspapers across a variety of musical genres for a number of territories, wonderful stuff just gets continually squeezed out. I mean, in this brave new world of world music, nobody wants ten roots-based Czech or Hungarian albums or Indian classical or English or even European folk albums…
2011 was marked by losses in the world of music. It started off with the deaths of the singers Bhimsen Joshi and Suchitra Mitra
31. 12. 2011 |
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[by Ken Hunt, London] Back in New York, Seeger enthused about what he had seen and heard. Broadside, a publication with a tiny circulation – using, as Sis Cunningham recalled, a hand-cranked mimeo machine “we had inherited when the American Labor Party branch closed in our neighbourhood” – became a vital conduit for song. Originally published fortnightly, very soon monthly, topicality was a major goal. It published its first issue in February 1962 and folded in 1988. By comparison Sing was launched on May Day 1954 and Sing Out! had first appeared in 1950. Unlike Sing Out! or Sing, Broadside did not interleaf traditional songs with its songs of struggle, diatribes on themes of social justice or political squibs
19. 12. 2011 |
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[by Ken Hunt, London] The one has a lot to do with thinking about loss and renewal, life and the end of life. The music is provided by Anoushka Shankar, David Crosby, Jayanti Kumaresh, Judy Collins, Chumbawamba, Franz Josef Degenhardt, Sultan Khan and Manju Mehta, Ági Szalóki and Gergő Borlai, Davy Graham and Federico García Lorca.
Bulería con Ricardo – Anoushka Shankar
This comes from Anoushka Shankar’s debut for Deutsche Grammophon, a fusion affair that travels the continents from modern-day north-west of the Indo-Pakistani subcontinent to the Iberian peninsula. Anoushka Shankar plays sitar, Pedro Ricardo Mieo piano, Juan Ruiz adds unspecified “Spanish percussion” and Bobote and El Eléctrico palmas (hand claps). It’s
5. 12. 2011 |
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[by Ken Hunt, London] It’s 2001. You open the paper at an article about the underground strike. Par for the course, the same old politicians are lip-synching the party line. Substitute the specific till the capitalist or metropolitanist becomes local to you. The London Underground is being turned into another public-private partnership. The workers are striking about compulsory redundancies, fears over safety, etc. You get incensed. Another sodding disruption. Another sodding protest. Another sodding privatisation gussied up, as London’s transport commissioner Bob Kiley – remember him, New Yorkers? – decries, to generate “the least expensive product or service at the highest price
4. 12. 2011 |
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[by Ken Hunt, Prague] Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941, Rabindranath Thákur for my Czech readers) was the all-original singer-songwriter – before the term existed – with the folk poetry touch, a poet-bard who in Scots would be called a makar. He had melody purloining skills to make Woody Guthrie blush. In an era of luxury liners and Pullman trains, he travelled probably about as widely as was possible in that pre-David Attenborough era. He set lyrics to ragas, traditional airs, Baul songs, Ganges boatmen’s work songs and melodies, like Auld Lang Syne (!), heard on his travels. Where he differs from most song-makers is the enduring popularity, relevance and cultural penetration of his work.
14. 11. 2011 |
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[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.
Nottamun Town – Bert Jansch
No apologies for returning to Bert Jansch’s 1966 album once again. It was playing as the news broke on the morning of 5 October 2011 that he had died in the wee small hours. I have known and extolled Jack Orion since the year of its release. It had depths and darknesses unlike any of his two previous solo releases, in part because of his embracing of traditional material
1. 11. 2011 |
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[by Ken Hunt, London] There are many reasons for pulling faces and putting on accents. And Dudley Moore excelled in doing both. 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.
He subjects material such as his own hamming-about novelty Madrigal, the souped-up Lieder duet of Die Flabbergast and, naturally, his and Cook’s valedictory song Goodbyee to various forms of falsetto screech
17. 10. 2011 |
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[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. Without getting rheumy-eyed, it’s like great river junction at Prayaga – Hinduism’s Allahabad – where the Ganges and Jamuna meet the invisible Sarasvati. Like Prayaga, they are where the seen and the spiritual meet in a great confluence
17. 10. 2011 |
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[by Ken Hunt, London] The Lovin’ Spoonful was a band that, in the most cool of manners, took its name from a Mississippi John Hurt recording. They made a music that brought together jug band (skiffle) music, folk and folk-blues with an added pop into rock sensibility around 1966 when nobody knew exactly what was going on and definitely nobody knew where it was all going to go.
Born in Toronto on 19 December 1944, Zalman ‘Zal’ or ‘Zally’ Yanovsky (bottom left on the album sleeve in yellow and orange stripes, next to John Sebastian’s orange and white stripes) died days short of his 57th birthday on 13 December 2002
10. 10. 2011 |
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[by Ken Hunt, Gaienhofen am Bodensee] Purposeful drifting might conjure images of lying on a lilo – one of those air mattresses – on a 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…
3. 10. 2011 |
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