Author Archive
[by Ken Hunt, London] The cult filmmaker Perry Henzell’s The Harder They Come (1972) was, and shall ever remain, iconic. Mind you, in Jamaica and in Britain both, the film had a hard start. In Jamaica, it caused riots when frustrated audiences couldn’t get into cinemas to see it. In Britain, when it was first screened, it met with apathy even in Brixton in London, SW9, the spiritual heartland of the expat Jamaican community. It took word-of-mouth recommendations for Henzell’s fictional story combining reggae studio hard knocks, hard times in Kingston and righteous criminality of a post-Robin Hood kind to take off. It hit the spirit of the times head-on
8. 11. 2007 |
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[by Ken Hunt, London] On 16 October 2007, the powerful singer-songwriter Lucky Dube was murdered in cold blood in Johannesburg, South Africa, shot dead in what had all the hallmarks of a botched carjacking, in what many commentators portrayed as the current crime-wave. Lucky Dube had had two careers in music. Initially he had risen to become a major mbaqanga musician. Mbaqanga, he told me in one of our interviews, was “Zulu soul music”. Although his definition may have lacked musicological precision, it captured the music’s essence. Then, in a switch of careers, he changed his focus to reggae – Afro-reggae, as it was often called – and had an even more successful career in music, this time on the international stage
8. 11. 2007 |
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[by Ken Hunt, London] There can be little doubt about the impact the Indian subcontinent’s music has had abroad. Indeed, the tale is too big for one book, even Peter Lavezzoli’s remarkable Dawn of Indian Music in the West – Bhairavi. He names the usual, vital suspects like Ravi Shankar, Ali Akbar Khan, John Coltrane, John McLaughlin, Trilok Gurtu, Yehudi Mehuhin, David Crosby, Roger McGuinn, George Harrison, Mickey Hart and Zakir Hussain.
Wisely, the author steers well clear of the far-from-plain tales of Raj-era India and its influences on the Western mind through music and philosophy, as illustrated by certain compositions by, say, John Foulds and Gustav Holst in Britain. In a
21. 10. 2007 |
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[by Ken Hunt, Prague] It’s a home truth that the more you understand your own culture, the better equipped you will be potentially to understand other cultures in this brave new (ever re-inventing itself) world. The television composer Ronnie Hazelhurst, who died in St. Peter Port on Guernsey in the Channel Islands on 1 October 2007, is a name most of Britain’s population – connoisseurs of screen credits excluded – would hesitate over. But to be British was to be able to name that tune of his in a trice. As Christopher Hawtree wrote in Hazelhurst’s obituary in The Guardian, “The fate of most television composers is to be heard by millions and unknown by all
21. 10. 2007 |
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[By Ken Hunt, London] The papers and paraphernalia on the songwriter, guitarist, bandleader, novelist and occasional record producer John B. Spencer’s desk spoke volumes about his life and interests. Constructed out of recovered Victorian hardwood floorboards, his desk would be strewn with the debris of recent conversations and idea-swapping about crime and mystery fiction, the stuff of allotment keeping and that season’s seed catalogue from Marshalls (“The Fenland Vegetable Seed Company”)
17. 10. 2007 |
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[by Ken Hunt, London] Lal Waterson, who died in September 1998 aged 55, was a founding member of the Watersons, the Hull-based folk group. Elaine, to use her proper name, was the youngest of the three siblings that eventually lent their name to one of the English Folk Revival’s most influential and utterly inimitable voice-based groups. People called her the Quiet One. And there was a sliver of truth to that. Leastways while her defences were up and she was sounding you out, getting your measure. Still, without getting into the realms of cod-psychology about youngest children and their chatterbox tendencies, she had few problems when it came to talking, just difficulties whilst under the spotlight and getting asked to talk about herself and her songs
8. 10. 2007 |
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“It said more about pop than a year of Top of the Pops.” – Observer, 1968 television review
[by Ken Hunt, London] The 1960s were a peculiar time for popular music in Britain. On the one hand, there was this enormous explosion of pop music (that was increasingly being called rock music) with a phenomenal coverage in periodicals and on the radio – especially pirate radio. On the other hand, British television barely bothered to cover the phenomenon, making at most feeble attempts to treat what was happening as worthy of serious treatment on television. It was a world of pop dominated by weekly programmes like Top of the Pops and Ready, Steady, Go
24. 9. 2007 |
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[by Ken Hunt, London] Their marital relationship hitting the buffers by the beginning of the next decade was years away when Richard and Linda Thompson made these live recordings. Hindsight of that nature adds nothing to the frissons that In Concert 1975 delivers. After all, living a year of your life in no way compares to the way a year or three gets ‘telescoped’ for the purposes of biography. And in any case between 1974 and 1982 the couple released a sequence of jointly credited duo albums that count amongst the finest to come out of Britain during the period in terms of songcraft and performance. This is them at their peak, though they were soon to duck out of this life to pursue other, non-musical paths in a Sufi community
14. 9. 2007 |
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Queen Elizabeth Hall, London 22 July 2007
[by Ken Hunt, London] Transformative is probably the most appropriate word to describe the influential Northern Indian rhythmist, composer and teacher, Alla Rakha Qureshi, and how his music affected people. Ustad in the concert’s title is the Muslim counterpart of Hinduism´s more familiar words pandit and guru. Certainly, Alla Rakha educated many, many people. The default-standard tale is that the West turned on to Indian music through the sitar. There is no denying the inherent truth, if hackneyed, of that proposition. But it was never the whole story, never the truth, the whole truth.
13. 8. 2007 |
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15-29 July 2007, Krems, Austria
Krems is a beautiful and peaceful town on the river Danube in Austria, known for its Riesling wines and – in past years – also for the Glatt und Verkehrt festival. The name literally means a knitting style that changes between two types of stitches, the “smooth” and “inverted”. This is actually a good definition of the programming, which includes some well known local traditions in an unusual setting, like the Indian guitarist extraordinaire Amit Chatterjee performing with the Austrian yodelers Broadlahn, an idea which dates back to times when Amit was a regular member of Joe Zawinul’s syndicate.
Or imagine a “voices triangle” from three very different corners of world
12. 8. 2007 |
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