Author Archive
[by Ken Hunt, London] Planning a trip to England, Scotland and/or Wales? Hoping your visit coincides with some musical adventures? The highly recommended Spiral Earth guide is the ideal place to start planning your time and trip.
In addition to major fixtures such as Cropredy, Whitby Folk Week, Towersey and Glastonbury, expect to uncover the unexpected – such as the Pipe and Tabor Weekend, Morpeth Northumbrian Gathering and the Sunrise Celebration.
The guide details UK folk, roots and alternative festivals by month and geography with a map to click on
20. 2. 2011 |
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[by Ken Hunt, London] East German rock music, nowadays known as Ost-Rock (Ost means east), has never had a champion outside the old East. Sure, Julian Cope got wiggy and witty with Krautrock in all its Can, Kraftwerk and Ohr-ishness. But aside from, say, coverage in the Hamburg-based magazine Sounds in the 1980s and Tamara Danz (1952-1996) – and Silly’s lead singer’s fleeting appearance in the last edition of Donald Clarke’s Penguin Encyclopedia of Popular Music – Ost-Rock got short shrift outside its place of origin, the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Götz Hintze’s Rocklexikon der DDR (2000) and Alexander Osang’s Tamara Danz (1997) biography have redressed the balance somewhat. But Hintze and Osang wrote accounts in German.
14. 2. 2011 |
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[by Ken Hunt, London] More travellers’ tales, aka GDDs, from the faraway island – this time from Bryan MacLean, June Tabor, The Everly Brothers, June Tabor, The United States of America, Eddie Reader, The McPeake Family, Clara Rockmore, Shujaat Khan, Artie Shaw and Christy Moore with Declan Sinnott. The strangest thing happened this month. Just like the S.S. Politician going down off Eriskay in the Outer Hebrides in 1941 and the 1949 Ealing comedy Whisky Galore, all these bottles of single malt whisky washed ashore in time for Burns’ Night. Nobody was more surprised than me…
Old Man – Bryan MacLean
Bryan MacLean’s songs were one of the multifarious delights that made up Love’s Forever Changes, one of the great visionary albums of 1967
6. 2. 2011 |
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[by Ken Hunt, London] The Bengali singer Suchitra Mitra died on 3 January 2011 at her home of many years, Swastik on Gariahat Road in Ballygunge, Kolkata. She was famed as one of the heavyweight interpreters of the defining Bengali-language song genre form called Rabindra sangeet – or Rabindrasangeet (much like the name Ravi Shankar can also be rendered Ravishankar). ‘Rabindra song’ is an eloquent, literary, light classical song form, derived from the name of the man who ‘invented’ it, Rabindranath Tagore, the winner of the 1913 Nobel Prize for Literature.
Tagore’s songs helped define Bengali and Bangladeshi culture and identity – and importantly pan-Indian culture – in the years before the dissolution of the British Raj and afterwards
31. 1. 2011 |
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[by Ken Hunt, London] Bengal’s popular arts lost two of its major figures on 17 January 2011.
The actress Gita Dey (1931-2011) died in north Kolkata. From her debut as a child actor in 1937 in director Dhiren Ganguly’s film Ahutee, she reportedly appeared in some 200 Bengali films and thousands of stage dramas and folk plays. A startling character actress with a presence that did not overwhelm the part, she appeared in such films as film director Ritwik Ghatak’s Meghe Dhaka Tara (1957), Satyajit Ray’s Teen Kanya and Komal Gandhar, and Tapan Sinha’s Haatey Baajarey, Jotugriha and Ekhonee. Lawrence Olivier was amongst the people who celebrated her
24. 1. 2011 |
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[by Ken Hunt, London] One of my fondest memories of Britain’s specialised music magazine scene of the 1980s into the 1990s is how little ego and rivalry there was for the most part. There were a couple of exceptions (no names, no pack drill) and, strange though it may seem, not a single ornery person from that bunch stayed the course within music criticism. Keith Summers wrote about music, collected it (as in, made field recordings of such as Jumbo Brightwell, the Lings of Blaxhall, Cyril Poacher and Percy Webb as well as later contributing to Topic’s multi-volume series Voice of the People) and published magazines about it. He had the fall-back trade of accountant that funded his passions.
In 1983 Summers launched an excellent magazine called Musical Traditions
16. 1. 2011 |
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[by Ken Hunt, London] Winter draws on in London but on the fictitious tropical island the sun is shining. Helping to banish gloom this month is a rather fine selection of music. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, this month’s haul of traveller’s tales embraces Martin Simpson, Ella Ward, Yardbirds, Shashank, Don Van Vliet, David Lindley & El Rayo-X, Rickie Lee Jones, Swamy Haridhos & Party, Cyril Tawney and Anne Briggs.
The Swastika Song – Martin Simpson
I never lived through a European war. Many people I loved and love did. I only knew the survivors. I have lived and worked with people of many nationalities who did survive wars. Some were fascist. Some were unrepentant and boasted
10. 1. 2011 |
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[by Aparna Banerji, Jalandhar City] My delightful 10 this month are Canned Heat, Aarti Ankalikar, Raghubir Yadav and Bahdwai Village Mandali, Javed Ali and Chinmayi, Satinder Sartaaj, Farida Khanum, Silk Route, Udit Narayan and Alka Yagnik, Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia and, lastly, Pandit Birju Maharaj, Kavita Subramanium and Madhuri Dixit.
On The Road Again – Canned Heat
Much of the trickle of American popular music I have fell in my lap by default. Except for the few glitzy pop icons that MTV and Channel V introduced me to, I just stumbled upon most of the other guys through compilations by record labels that I picked up, on impulse, at local music stores. I had my share of disasters and disappointments, but chancing upon gems like this has made my life
3. 1. 2011 |
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[by Ken Hunt, London] An Evening of Political Song, explained the Southbank literature, “drew upon a rich history of political song” before, sigh, spoiling things slightly by lamely billing this night in Richard Thompson’s Meltdown as “a night of songs in the key of revolution and protest”. Still, mustn’t grumble, ‘political song’, as dictionary definitions go, is about as precise as ‘folk song’ in its handy one-size-fits-all solution to issues that just won’t go away.
The night provided a blast of political song designed to engage and stimulate – or even to provoke to the point of offending – while avoiding any why-oh-why? breast-beating material. This though isn’t a concert review
20. 12. 2010 |
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[by Ken Hunt, London] The Polish revue artist, singer and actress Irena Anders, born Irena Renata Jarosiewicz on 12 May 1920 in Bruntál, in what is nowadays the Czech Republic, went under the stage name of Renata Bogdańska. Her father was a Rutherian pastor while her mother came from the Polish gentry. She studied music formally at the National Academy of Music in Lviv. The invasion of Poland in September 1939 put paid to her studies and over the next few years the tides of war and the various fortunes of Poland, its citizens and army determined her own life’s course.
Her first husband, Gwidon Borucki, led a morale-boosting troupe entertaining Polish forces fighting on the side of the Allies.
19. 12. 2010 |
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