[by Ken Hunt, London] With any selection of new Richard Thompson songs, there’s no knowing in whose company and in what straits listeners will be plunged. There might be a long-awaited cheap-suited estate agent or the borderline apocalyptic. 13 Rivers opens with the one of his finest recent songs, The Storm Won’t Come. He sings […]
7. 8. 2018 | read more...
[by Ken Hunt, London] Much of Shelter was composed, if not conceived, in the relative seclusion of a cottage on the North Yorkshire Moors. Its accent is on self-written songs. Like the songs here, the artwork photos capture rural English scenes, Roman antiquities – as if reflecting her Florence (Firenze) birthplace (and the song Roman […]
7. 8. 2018 | read more...
[by Ken Hunt, London] This is an adapted article, based on a joint interview with Zoe and Idris Rahman that we did yards away from the Royal Festival Hall on London’s Southbank in 2008 for Jazzwise (a magazine I’ve written for since January 2001). The focus was the newly released Where Rivers Meet. O, River […]
11. 2. 2018 | read more...
[by Ken Hunt, London] These are five influential LPs of Indian classical music that captured the imagination of listeners in the early years of the post-war boom. Ali Akbar Khan Music of India – Morning And Evening Râgas (His Master’s Voice ALPC 2, stereo, 1955) Brother-in-law to Ravi Shankar, the musician Yehudi Menuhin considered the […]
29. 8. 2017 | read more...
[by Ken Hunt, London] One of the most life-changing discoveries of my life was being handed a linguistic skeleton key in the spring of 1971. Turning 20 working in the print on the German-Danish border, every day it was Hochdeutsch to management and Plattdütsch or Low German to nearly everybody else. Plattdütsch is a working-class […]
13. 12. 2016 | read more...
[by Ken Hunt, London] “How unseemly it is to follow anyone slavishly,” was ECM’s press release’s free (one suspects) translation for the title track in 2013. Performing Muhlis Akarsu’s Kula Kulluk Yakýîir Mı therefore could be perceived as a pointed choice since he died in a firebombing in 1993 aged 45 or so. He belonged […]
30. 11. 2015 | read more...
[by Ken Hunt, London] Back in New York, Seeger enthused about what he had seen and heard. Broadside, a publication with a tiny circulation – using, as Cunningham recalled, a hand-cranked mimeo machine “we had inherited when the American Labor Party branch closed in our neighbourhood” – became a vital conduit for song. Originally published […]
12. 5. 2013 | read more...
[by Ken Hunt, London] Originally written on the eve of London’s post-Valentine Peace March on 15 February 2003, this with little taken out or added. Ace’s catalogue is a growing and contracting – call it pulsating – reminder to reinforce why I decided to specialise and limit my listening and writing habits for sanity’s sake. […]
16. 4. 2012 | read more...
[by Ken Hunt, London] Originally written on the eve of London’s post-Valentine Peace March on 15 February 2003 with little taken out or added. Ace’s catalogue is a reminder why I decided to specialise and limit my listening but especially writing habits for sanity’s sake. Not all the people I wrote about in this piece […]
2. 4. 2012 | read more...
[by Ken Hunt, London] It’s 2001. You open the paper at an article about the underground strike. Par for the course, the same old politicians are lip-synching the party line. Substitute the specific till the capitalist or metropolitanist becomes local to you. The London Underground is being turned into another public-private partnership. The workers are […]
4. 12. 2011 | read more...