Author Archive
[by Ken Hunt, London] The US record producer, engineer and mixer Greg Ladanyi, who worked with, amongst others, Jackson Browne, Fleetwood Mac, Jeff Healey, Don Henley, Los Jaguares, David Lindley and Warren Zevon, died on Cyprus on 29 September 2009. He died of the consequence of an accident on stage whilst touring with the Greek Cypriot singer Anna Vissi whose album Apagorevmeno (2008) he had co-produced.
Ladanyi won a Grammy Award for ‘Best Engineered Recording – Non-Classical’ with his co-engineered Toto IV in 1982 – a period that found the session musician spin-off band Toto at a peak of their critical and commercial success
7. 10. 2009 |
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Ken Hunt looks back on a month’s listening reflecting music influenced by work, travel and returning home. The moments are supplied this time by Cass Meurig and Nial Cain, Angelika Weiz & GVO, Ravi Shankar, Judee Sill, the Velvet Underground, the Young Tradition, Johnny Jones, Roy Nathanson, Asha Bhosle and Rahul Dev Burman and Ewan MacColl. As ever, the ten selections are in no particular order. Their only link is that over the month none of them did a bunk
28. 9. 2009 |
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Ken Hunt looks back on a wonderful month in music, advanced somewhat because of travel, provided by Amira Medunjanin and Merima Ključo, Bea Palya, Mike Seeger, Sachal Studios Orchestra, Tim Buckley, Faustus, Martina Musters-Musters, Johanna Huygens-Musters and Suzanna de Vos-Musters, Fernhill, Bai Hong and David Crosby. As ever, the ten selections are in no particular order and the only link is that none of them would go away.
Karanfil Se Na Put Sprema – Amira Medunjanin and Merima Ključo
Amira’s London debut in 2007 at the Barbican was memorable. “Amira was born at a time when the popularity of traditional music in the former Yugoslavia was at high tide,” it says on her website. On this recording – Zumra means ‘Emerald’ – the mood is largely sombre.
26. 8. 2009 |
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[by Ken Hunt, London] Neil Young once stated, “The great Canadian dream is to get out.” It was certainly what three fifths of Buffalo Springfield did when they joined the California-based rock group’s US contingent, Stephen Stills and Richie Furay. In 1966 Young and Bruce Palmer – the band’s original bassist – had headed south in a 1953 Pontiac hearse with Ontario plates. Minds set on forming a rock group and already working up Young’s Nowadays Clancy Can’t Even Sing, Furay and Stills famously spotted the Canadians driving in the opposite direction on Sunset Boulevard. (Stills had already met Young in Thunder Bay, Ontario and had been taken.) Furay executed some nifty pursuit-chase driving and caught up with them before they hit the highway to head home
25. 8. 2009 |
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[by Ken Hunt and Peter Bellamy: London] In 1986 after one of his concerts the English folksinger Pete Bellamy and I formulated the idea of Giant Donut Discs ®. It came out of a conversation about the wish to create a mutant version of Roy Plomley’s Desert Island Discs BBC radio programme – http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qnmr – for the magazine Swing 51.
Instead of the stranded person coming up with tracks to take to the proverbial desert island, Pete and I wanted something capricious, totally of the moment, something that was ten pieces of music that were filling people’s heads right then and now – not the considered weightiness of someone stranded on the BBC’s desert island.
The principle was first thoughts, best thoughts – the old Beat adage.
24. 8. 2009 |
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[by Ken Hunt, London] The Dutch counter-culture poet, writer and painter Simon Vinkenoog died in Amsterdam on Saturday, 12 July 2009, a few days before his 81st birthday. Born on 18 July 1928 in Amsterdam, Vinkenoog was the child of a lone parent family raised in the De Pijp part of Amsterdam’s Oud-Zuid (Old South) district.
As a writer, he became part of the Netherlands’ post-war flowering of small literary titles, editing the short-lived magazine Blurb followed by the bloemlezing (anthology) Atonaal – a manifesto of intent of the literary collective self-styled ‘atonal poets’ known as the Vijftigers (50ers)
7. 8. 2009 |
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Ken Hunt’s month in music – the stuff in no particular order that either wouldn’t let go or wouldn’t go away
31. 7. 2009 |
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[by Ken Hunt, London] Forty years or so ago, Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger released their most recondite project, the two-volume Paper Stage. It was reconstructions of the first Elizabethan Age’s theatre for the second Elizabethan Age. The original peddlers of these more unauthorised than guerrilla playlets in song left few traces and fewer fingerprints. All that survived was the printed page. Theirs was street theatre, the equivalent of graffiti artist Banksy’s Mona Lisa with a rocket launcher, or that Banksy rat sawing a getaway hole to freedom through the pavement
29. 7. 2009 |
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The golden-throated bird on the Hogarthian wire
[by Ken Hunt, London] Say you woke up one morning and the smell wasn’t coffee but the stench of something having gone off. What would you do? It happened to Leonard Cohen while he was on retreat at the Mount Baldy Zen Center in southern California’s San Gabriel Mountains. With a sheaf of law suits behind him, Cohen’s remedy was to hit the road, drumming up new interest by touring and giving audiences what they wanted. He picked himself up, brushed himself down and started all over again – sensibly chronicling the process with the revenue-injecting CD and DVD Live in London from the O2 venue in London in July 2008
19. 7. 2009 |
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[by Ken Hunt, London] Even by repute, people who have never been to Rajasthan and only ever saw photographs or artwork, view Rajasthan popularly as a region saturated with colour. In its Great Thar Desert, soil, sand and salt lakes offer a palette of yellows, browns and reds. In its deciduous woodlands dhok and dhak – the tree known as the ‘flame of the forest’ – provide the seasonal mosaics of the forest canopy and forest floor and then there is the vibrancy of bougainvillea everywhere whether on the highways or streets. In its street markets full of chillies, mangoes, bananas and spinach, Rajasthan offers an abundance of saturated colours – and watery contrasts
6. 7. 2009 |
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