Author Archive
[by Ken Hunt, London] Uriel Jones was one of the largely unsung heroes of popular music. His drumming added the muscle and sinew to many of the great hits that came out of his birthplace and hometown, Detroit, for he was a leading member of the Motown house-band, the Funk Brothers. He played on sessions that became international hits including Marvin Gaye’s I Heard It Through The Grapevine, Stevie Wonder’s For Once In My Life, the Temptations Ain’t To Proud To Beg, I Can’t Get Next To You and Cloud Nine, Marvyn Gaye & Tammy Terrell’s Ain’t No Mountain High Enough and Smokey Robinson & The Miracles’ I Second That Emotion during a period when Motown was an essential element in the soundtrack to people’s lives
1. 4. 2009 |
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[by Kate Hickson, Berriew, Wales] In the 1980s Swing 51 magazine would occasionally receive small packages from the United States containing cassette tapes merely identified as ‘Citizen Kafka’. It felt like the sort of deception the musical prankster Hank Bradley might perpetrate. However, Bradley’s looked and sounded different. Infuriatingly, the sender’s mailing address was missing and the US postal service was clearly in on the wheeze because every postmark came smudged to illegibility by bureaucracy. It felt a bit like a twofold conspiracy at the time. Prague folk might call it bonus Kafka-esque.
Citizen Kafka, it finally emerged, was an alias of one Richard Shulberg. He also rejoiced in the noms de télégraphie – wireless or radio aliases – Sid Kafka and The Citizen.
22. 3. 2009 |
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[by Ken Hunt, London] Lest we forget, Hungary was directly responsible for the ultimate Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and, likewise, lest we forget, Hungary’s strong and vibrant folk and roots music scenes have had a huge influence on Europe’s folk and world music scenes for longer still. My first brushes with Hungarian music came through having my ears turned and recalibrated by LPs on the Soviet-era state record company Hungaroton and UK releases on Joe Boyd’s Hannibal label. Things have got continually better. With musicians of the calibre of Szilvia Bognár in the vanguard of developments and consolidations, it is no wonder that Hungary’s roots music scene is in such fine fettle. Szilvia Bognár’s Semmicske énekek is what Hungary sounds like right now and it is spectacular.
22. 3. 2009 |
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[by Ken Hunt, London] One of the great European jazz musicians of the Twentieth Century died at the age of 81 on 20 February 2009 in Hoei (Huy in French) in the western Belgian province of Luik (Liege). The Belgian multi-instrumentalist, arranger and composer Sadi, actually Sadi Lallemand (he took Sadi as his name because he didn’t like something about the sound of his surname), linked many post-war developments in jazz and popular music.
Born in Ardenne in the northwestern Belgian province of Namen on 23 October 1927, he was drawn to jazz through hearing Louis Armstrong on record as a boy circa 1938 and, his musicality stirred, he took up the vibraphone, the instrument with which he was particularly associated, in 1941
12. 3. 2009 |
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[by Ken Hunt, London] Oh, he was a one!
“Jamie, come try me,
Jamie, come try me,
If thou would be my love
Jamie, if thou would kiss me love
Wha [who] could deny thee
If thou would be my love, Jamie?”
Wilily the writer is putting his words onto a woman’s tongue, the woman he wishes to get to know better. Or, in plainer talk, seduce. Thus when Eddi Reader flirts entreating the man – the very author of the words pulsating on her lips – to try her, there is a delicious, besotted undercurrent of contrary sensuality in flow. That is Eddie Reader and Robert Burns for you.
On Eddie Reader’s lips – even with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, as on The Songs of Robert Burns blasting away in support – that song, Jamie, Come Try Me, is a song of sensuality, seduction and ambiguity
12. 3. 2009 |
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[by Ken Hunt, London] Wherever there is a successful film industry, like the penumbra to the klieg lights, film magazines will mushroom in order to feed people’s apparently insatiable appetite for news – planted or otherwise – and tittle-tattle. In the Anglophone world, from Picture Show (when ‘picture’ was the British Empire equivalent of ‘movie’) to the “Hollywood girls and gags!” of Movie Humor, cinema was well served from the silent era onwards. But India’s was, is and shall ever remain a special case.
India has long been home to the world’s biggest film industry. Numerically and in terms of cultural penetration it outstrips Hollywood. Yet it is more than Bollywood
3. 3. 2009 |
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[by Ken Hunt, London] One of high-flyingest jugalbandis (duets) in Indian music it has ever been my utter pleasure to witness took place on 25 December 2008. It occurred on the opening day of the 133rd Harballabh Sangeet Sammelan in Jalandhar City in the northwest Indian state of Punjab. It was a North-South jugalbandi. The North was represented by the transverse bamboo flute or bansuri maestro Ronu Majumdar and the tabla virtuoso Ram Das Palsule. The South was represented by the alto saxophonist Kadri Gopalnath and Hari Kumar on the South’s double-headed barrel drum, mridangam. The whole performance was a concatenation of revelations that told the rag’s story marvellously
24. 2. 2009 |
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[by Ken Hunt, London] Chancing upon the final-cut premiere of Alex Reuben’s film Routes was kismet. Alex Reuben is a DJ and filmmaker – British out of Ukrainian Jewish stock – with shorts like Big Hair (2001) and A Prayer From The Living (2002) to his credit. “I was a DJ so that’s how I started making films,” he tells me in Prague “Through the money I made DJing, that’s how I made films. All of the films are related to DJing in some way. More in the method I make them, though.”
Routes is the eye-catching offspring of Harry Smith and Les Blank. Picaresque, without spoken commentary, it is a fly-on-the-wall, fly-on-the-windscreen road movie about dance encountered on a journey through the Southern States of America
14. 2. 2009 |
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[by Ken Hunt, London] It is October and the time of the season that has nothing of the Zombie or indeed Golem about it. Sitting in U Zavěšenýho, one of Prague’s minor miracles of a watering hole a stone’s throw from the castle, I am writing up notes about Prague’s MOFFOM (Music on Film Film on Music) festival. Loquacious as ever, I get into conversation with a French student from Grenoble. She is studying cinema in the city and studying film in this city makes total sense. Learning that I am working at the festival, we exchange viewing plans. Half an hour vanishes just talking about film and Prague’s cinemas. Her boyfriend has come from France to partake too. I
14. 2. 2009 |
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[by Ken Hunt, London] Bang On A Can (BOAC) is an ensemble that blurs the boundaries between rock, the avant-garde and contemporary composition. Their concert in the Blauwe Zaal (‘Blue Room’) at DeSingel – a modernistic complex, founded, so to speak, on the deal that art is the basis and concrete of a culture – featured in its second half the headlining Czech vocalist-violinist Iva Bittová on her own or performing with BOAC. Note the hyphen because she does both at once and sometimes creates a third voice from the two elements in a manner that has to be seen in order to believe.
30. 1. 2009 |
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