Book reviews
Balkan brass bands, hitmaker Goran Bregović, nostalgia for Yugoslavia, the Roma music of Eastern Europe, the Serbian mega-festival Guča, Bosnian Sevdalinka ballads, and nationalist-tinged Turbofolk – all of these are partial streams of a complex trend that has lasted for over 30 years. The starting point is considered to be the film Underground by director Emir Kusturica with soundtrack by Goran Bregović, inspired by the Yugoslav war. This list alone suggests that this is more than a musical phenomenon, and that a whole team of well-founded authors will be needed to map it. And that is exactly what the book that was presented at the Womex trade fair last year is about.
28. 4. 2026 |
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Jean R. Freedman
University of Illinois Press
978-0-252-04075-7
[by Ken Hunt, London] Peggy Seeger wrote an autobiographical self-portrait in song overnight between Sheffield and London in 1973. In the booklet notes to her CD, The Folkways Years 1955-1982, she clarified: “It was intended to answer those people who come up during the interval or after a concert, those who interview you on radio or want to do write-ups. It is an answer to the question about why a middle-class female from a comfortable background sings about working-class people and revolution.” In one discussion of ours – interviews have evolved into day-long or weekend-long conversations on occasion -, she expanded, “I get sick of it
1. 9. 2018 |
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Scott Barretta (editor)
Scarecrow Press
ISBN 978-0-8108-8308-6
[by Ken Hunt, Berlin] This fascinating gathering of writings from Israel G. Young appeared in 2013. The elder of two sons born to Polish Jewish parents in March 1928 on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, he reveals himself as a clear-sighted and sometimes curmudgeonly commentator, catalyst and chronicler of the New York folk scene. (California and Europe barely get walk-on parts.) Izzy Young gravitated to New York’s nascent folk music scene via the square dances of the left-leaning American Dance Group. He attended his first dance during the winter of 1944/45 and soon joined http://www.viagragenericoes24.com/venta-viagra the American Square Dance Group under the sway of its leader Margot Mayo
6. 1. 2016 |
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[by Ken Hunt, London] More music for a balmy life on the fictional desert island. April’s selections come courtesy of Christy Moore with Declan Sinnott, Madeleine Peyroux, Gangubai Hangal, Janis Joplin, Santana, The Spook of the Thirteenth Lock, Chumbawamba, Sheila Smith, the Grateful Dead and The Animals. Lots of Irish thoughts and thoughts about Ireland ripple through this month’s selections.
Gortatagort – Christy Moore with Declan Sinnott
John Spillane wrote Gortatagort (The Farm) about the place in Bantry, Co. Cork where his mother came from. Christy More imparts a real sense of presence to this song, though it took me seeing him perform it in concert for the song’s fuller magic to be uncorked
23. 4. 2012 |
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[by Ken Hunt, London] Now, it’s only personal opinion. Still, hear out my theory. Every movement has its share of before-and-after benchmarks or epiphanies. They divide people who experienced them first-hand from those who got the experience passed down. On 1 June 1980, a date that shall forever remain hallowed in the annals of what we laughingly call England’s Folk Revival, Topic Records released a twelve-inch, nine-track masterwork known as 12TS411 in the trade and as Penguin Eggs to the punters that snaffled it up. It is no exaggeration to say that it took the folk scene by storm, much as Dick Gaughan’s Handful of Earth did the following year
26. 9. 2011 |
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[by Ken Hunt, London] “The painting is from a 1984 album I did for Line Records in Germany called “Lose It Tonight”. A song I performed – the first and only time I ever lip-synched a TV show – on Germany’s #1 Pop music program of the 80’s called “MusicLaden”. It was great I met Pat Boone and showed him the way out.” – George Frayne’s lateral thoughts emanating from the Lose It Tonight cover.
Long before he grew pianistic wings with Commander Cody & His Lost Planet Airmen, George Frayne had what looked like a promising life ahead of him as a painter including, like Alton Kelley, a sideline in car art, sculptor and, heavens forbloodyfend (tmesis rears not only its ugly head but shows off its potty mouth), even a Teaching Fellow in Fine Art at the University of Michigan (1966-68)
14. 10. 2010 |
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[by Ken Hunt, London] The German protest movement, in which song was a mightily important element, first truly broached my consciousness in 1971. Formative experiences included attending anti-nuclear protests of the ring-around-the-plant kind and sitting at trestle tables with beer, bread and Bockwurst and with old (well, they looked old to me) comrades singing Kampflieder (‘songs of struggle’) and spouting Kampfsprüche (‘jingles’) at rallies that seemed to last for days. But all that was politics and protesting often in almost a carnival atmosphere, despite the constant presence of the camera-wallahs busily snapping away. Next steps, log car registration plates, match face to identity card and so on – quite enough to take you out of the paradoxical.
27. 5. 2008 |
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[by Ken Hunt, London] In a hoary old quote that pops up in Patrick Humphries’ The Many Lives of Tom Waits, Waits, that lovable whey-faced geezer in black with a pork-pie hat, quips, “Marcel Marceau gets more airplay than I do!” Things may have improved marginally in the meantime – Marceau dying in 2007 will have given Waits a chance to cut in – but Waits has proved tenacious when it comes to avoiding anything so vulgar as a whiffette of becoming a popular singing star. Waits is a man of many threads. He has regaled us with many mythologies, mostly hand-woven and threadbare enough for the unwary dupe to be taken in and buy him that figurative drink out of pity.
Suckers! To call Waits a singer-songwriter would be like damning him with faint praise
27. 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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