Live reviews
[by Phil Wilson, London] Dr. Ralph Stanley – as he’s proud to be called these days – isn’t someone you’d necessarily describe as ’82 years young’, but he’s still in great form. There was a precautionary chair on stage at the Barbican, but he only draped his jacket over it, and even for the band members’ solo numbers and the instrumentals he remained standing and merely stepped back to allow them the spotlight.
Most of the musicians – Dewey Brown on fiddle, Steve Sparkman on banjo and James Shelton on guitar/vocals – have been with Stanley for at least 15 years, so there’s a camaraderie on stage that softens any well-oiled routines. Long-time bass-player Jack Cooke was absent with pneumonia but Audey Ratliff slotted in nicely although Ralph was also clearly missing the presence of his guitar-playing grandson Nathan Stanley on the trip.
The band came fresh from their annual Bluegrass festival at the old Stanley homeplace in Virginia, so Ralph apologised for the slight hoarseness of his own voice after three days’ constant singing but his choice of material more than compensated.
All of the musicians are useful singers and Stanley’s penchant for gospel (about one third of his recorded repertoire) is natural. They included old favourites like I’ll Fly Away, Angel Band and a wonderful version of Amazing Grace. The last was done as a vocal quartet in what he explained was “lining out” style – based on a preacher/congregation responsorial style – where the leader sings the line quickly and the singers repeat it in harmony at normal tempo.
Their set opened and closed with the classic instrumentals, Lee Highway Blues and an excellently fiddled Orange Blossom Special – but it was Ralph’s solo performance of the Dock Boggs classic O Death and the inclusion of many old time mountain songs and ballads that made this evening special. Not only Man Of Constant Sorrow, which he introduced as having been good to him over the years (and which he said he’d first heard his father sing at around 12 or 13), but also personal favourites like Little Maggie and Pretty Polly. Wonderful stuff.
5. 6. 2009 |
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“Folk returns to East Dulwich – but not as you knew it!”
[by Ken Hunt, London] Brass Monkey was a band that unfurled before my eyes. Or so it seemed. From their varied beginnings consolidating in the trio of Martin Carthy, Howard Evans and John Kirkpatrick that performed from January to December 1980 to the establishment of the powerhouse acoustic quintet, Brass Monkey proper, in January 1981 of Carthy, Evans and Kirkpatrick with Martin Brinsford and Roger Williams, their impact was never less than revelatory.
For one thing the Metal Monkey’s instrumental alchemy was like no other band’s on the English folk scene. They summoned wood and wire (Martin Carthy), squeeze and button instruments (John Kirkpatrick), brass (Howard Evans and Roger Williams) and, thanks to Martin Brinsford, near-brass – saxophone and harmonica – and percussion elements. Above all, they created surprises, as if to the manor born.
There would be trombonist fluctuations but the core of the group remained intact. In March 2006, however, Howard Evans died and on 27 March 2006 Martin Brinsford, Martin Carthy, John Kirkpatrick and Roger Williams played their band mate home. It was a good send-off. At The Goose Is Out! folk club, off Dog Kennel Hill in East Dulwich (towards the back of Sainsbury’s car park, now you ask) Brass Monkey’s new line-up, circa 2009, opened with The Old Grenadier – a military march that Evans had brought to the band at its inception and they had sent him off with.
The new line-up comprises Paul Archibald (trumpets, cornets), Martin Brinsford (C-melody saxophone, mouth-organ, percussion), Martin Carthy (vocals, guitar, flatback mandolin), John Kirkpatrick (Anglo-concertina and button accordion) and Roger Williams (trombones and euphonium). If the very mention of those names and the combination of those instruments in one sentence sounds scary, imagine what they unleash. And they were touring a new album Head of Steam though their performance came with nods to their past. In remembrance of Howard, they kicked off with The Old Grenadier – one of the key early pieces he brought to the band.
The main focus, however, remained fixedly on Head of Steam‘s repertoire, as it had to be. Paul Archibald may be playing Howard Evans lines on older material such as the final encore Waterman’s Hornpipe or Maid of Australia but he is definitely here to add a new chapter. For example, fluegelhorn didn’t figure in the set but he did add pointillist piccolo trumpet and, like Roger Williams and his trombone mutes, a greater variety of mutes than Howard Evans ever used. In other words, similar but different.
Given the nature of the music business, albums get recorded and then acts tour the album. Two months into touring this material and then recording it would have created, musically speaking, a far meatier beast. So it goes. The new material – the likes of The Moldavian Schottische/The Snowdrop Polka and Lichfield Tattoo/The Radstock Jig/The Quickstep From The Battle of Prague – actually worked better live than on the album.
This, however, isn’t a Head of Steam album review and one of the advantages of Brass Monkey’s unique creativity derives from them being an occasional assembly of talent – a sideshow, without being demeaning, beside their primary income streams. Brass Monkey is one vigorous offshoot.
There were several outstanding performances. One was the Martin Brinsford tour-de-force Happy Hours during which he blew double mouth-organ and Roger Williams puffed into one of largest trombone mutes – the so-called ‘bucket mute’ – known to organology and science. Lower-key was Maid of Australia from 2004’s Flame of Fire which Carthy delivered wholly without Peter Bellamy’s knowing wink or leer – Bellamy being a factor in Brass Monkey’s take-up of the song. On the basis of The Goose Is Out! performance there could be no disputing Brass Monkey’s prowess. When, as their first encore, they played the incest ballad Maid And The Palmer – one of the ten greatest English folk revivalist interpretations ever and a desert island disc choice – they reminded why life lived without Brass Monkey is no life at all.
Further information:
Head of Steam Topic TSCD575 (2009)
The Goose Is Out!
www.thegooseisout.com
Ken Hunt’s obituary of Howard Evans from The Independent is at http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/howard-evans-470889.html
All photos (c) Santosh Sidhu/Swing51 Archives
18. 5. 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. It also revealed the frankly heroic breath control techniques of the two wind players
The two principal musicians played Rag Hansadhwani, a rag (or more felicitously put a ragam) originally from the South Indian tradition. Like the better known Kirwani, Hansadhwani is a flagship Karnatic ragam that has found its niche – or nest – within the Hindustani repertoire. Its thematic content crosses the continents as well as the subcontinent, for it takes as its leitmotif the flight of the swan. The swan triggers art and symbol in every culture’s folklore and folkways wherever they live. Hansadhwani is but one Indian example. If this is a swan it is a whooping swan.
Evocation, recorded at the Saptak Festival, Ahmedabad in the Indian state of Gujarat in 2007, predates the Harballabh Sangeet Sammelan by a year. Even though in the final analysis the Harballabh performance eclipsed it, the Saptak Hansadhwani is truly a magnificent flight of the imagination. Accompanying them on this recording are Abhijit Banerjee on tabla, Patri Satish Kumar on mridangam and Rajshekar on moorsing, an instrument elevated from plain old Jew’s harp to a solo percussionist’s lead instrument in South Indian culture. If calling Jew’s harp a percussion instrument sounds foolish, lend your ears to the moorsing tracks on Dr. L. Subramaniam’s never-beaten introduction to Karnatic music, the peerless An Anthology of South Indian Classical Music (Ocora C591001/2/3/4, originally 1990).
What really sets Evocation aside from the pack is the hyper-alertness of the two duettists to each other. The call and response playing during the second track (see track information below) is frankly electrifying and so far beyond the norm that even if you have never heard a single Indian classical record in your life you will instinctively know that you are in the presence of something extraordinary. Imagine what it sounded like to hear John Coltrane and Miles Davis together way back. However hard you may wish to deny it – and I tried to wean myself off such hyperbole, ultimately without success – Evolution will shake the ground on which you stand. I denied the evidence of my own ears for fear of hyping this album. If scales can also fall William Tyndale-style from the ears, Evolution is the best example I can recall of musical truths revealed in a decade. A masterpiece.
Photographs from Harballabh Sangeet Sammelan: (c) 2009 Santosh Sidhu and Ken Hunt, Swing 51 Archives
Kadri Gopalnath and Ronu Majumdar Evolution (Sense World Music 101, 2008)
Tracks: Rag Hamsadhwani alap (18:14); jor and jhalla (6:34); Hansadhwani/Pilu gat in addha taal (25;09); percussion solo 17:16.
www.senseworldmusic.com
24. 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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[by Ken Hunt, London] India has a long tradition of music festivals of the classical kind – often called music conferences – to compare with few places on the planet. Harballabh Sangeet Sammelan showed off everything that is typical and revealing about Indian audiences’ attitudes, including their waywardness, to its art music traditions. The December 2008 festival was its 133rd gathering in an unbroken sequence since 1875. The annual festival takes place in deepest winter. There were few concessions to comfort and that sense of musical austerity works brilliantly for a festival grounded in dhrupad – one of the more austere forms of Hindustani art music. People come wrapped in shawls, untold layers of clothing and carrying snacks. Tellingly, it is still a free festival.
Over the course of its life since it was first held, Harballabh Sangeet Sammelan has grown considerably. As the musician and writer Sheila Dhar explained once upon a time, it is something along the lines of “the musical promised land, the ultimate criterion of true worth in music, a synonym for commitment and purity”. For years it has been a badge of honour to perform at the festival.
The standard of the music-making was frankly astonishing. Too good to pick at anything less than, if you get my drift, targeted random. Faiyaz Wasifuddin Dagar set the bar high with his recital of dhrupad music on Christmas Day, the first day of the gathering, The second day delivered an exceptional vocal recital by Sangeeta Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay (pictured). The third produced a North-South jugalbandi (duet) between the santoor player Satish Vyas and bamboo flute player Shashank. The final day was hallmarked by a wondrous sitar recital by Manju Mehta (pictured), a senior disciple of Ravi Shankar (and sister to Shashi Mohan Bhatt and Vishwa Mohan Bhatt). Her playing is totally stamped in the Maihar school of playing but she totally ‘sang’ in her own voice. On a blown-away Richter scale however, the first day’s duet between Ronu Majumdar on bamboo flutes and Kadri Gopalnath on alto saxophone seared itself into the brain, far outstripping their Sense World Music album. That said, there wasn’t one bad performance that I witnessed. Musicians were clearly on their mettle.
The one galling sadness revolved around the disruptions and distractions caused by the inappropriate, ill-timed, inconsiderate admission of dignitaries, sponsors and sundry VIPs. They were admitted without any sort of acknowledgement that anything special was happening on stage. At its worst – when Punjab’s Chief Minister popped in – it created a media circus with camera crews vying to do their business. It betokened a disrespect that would not be countenanced in Europe or North America.
Above all it was the music that remains lodged in the cranium. That and the opportunities Harballabh Sangeet Sammelan granted to listen to world-class musicians who will probably never reach Europe and the next generation of musicians bringing new hope to the continuity of old traditions. If you are going to throw yourself into the pool, dive into the deep end with four days of music like this. With the likes of vocalist Ajoy Chakrabarty, tabla maestro Pooran Maharaj and singer Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay in attendance, this was everything that hard-core classical music is about. Sublime. In a word.
See also Aparna Banerji’s piece from The Tribune at http://www.tribuneindia.com/2009/20090102/jplus1.htm
30. 1. 2009 |
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H’ART Festival, Centre of Contemporary Art, Glasgow, Scotland, 8 November 2008
[by Ken Hunt, London] Szilvia Bognár, Ágnes Herczku and Ági Szalóki’s album Szájról szájra – first released in Hungary in 2007 but invisible to the outside world until early in 2008 – ranks as one of the benchmark albums to emerge from the pan-European folk scene this decade. It is a master-class in the subtlety and power of interwoven voices as well as being a torrent of lessons on how to draw on traditional folk music and make it both now and timeless. But the wondrousness of Szájról szájra only really comes across in live performance when you match lips to sound. Revealing how they do it was nothing less than awe-inspiring in the way that seeing the Watersons – when Lal Waterson was with them – brought home the otherness of talent and intuitiveness. Furthermore, Szájról szájra‘s UK premiere at the H’Art Festival – subtitled ‘Celebrating Hungarian Culture in Scotland’ – revealed how it was almost as much a visual work as a musical one.
Szájról szájra translates as ‘From mouth to mouth’. The H’ART Festival translated it as ‘hearsay’ – inappropriately to this mind (with its sub-primitive Hungarian leanings) because, instinctively, the sense beyond the literal words is all to do with passing something on from voice to voice. Or if big words help, the ‘oral process’.
In the trio’s case they draw primarily, but not exclusively, on regional Hungarian and Transylvanian music. However, in their repertoire and singing, as Ági Herczku mentioned afterwards in conversation, they have taken a dictum of Béla Bartók’s to heart, namely how by drawing on a continuum of neighbouring folk cultures one comes to appreciate and understand one’s own native folkways better. Like some Bartókian field expedition, the Szájról szájra project touches on Bulgarian music while instrumentally, under its musical director Gábor Juhász’s watch, it delves into Hungarian folk music, jazz and Eurocentric folk roots.
Now, Hungarian is a gnarly language. For outsiders, where Hungarian is concerned sense goes out the window – or, pardon the Czech image, gets defenestrated. Bognár, Herczku and Szalóki create such a heady concoction of sound that no knowledge of the language is needed. It is enough to luxuriate in Szájról szájra‘s sound and glory.
The concert order in Glasgow departed from the album’s track order beginning instead with Sem eső/No Rain Falls. Once Ági Herczku came in on Sem eső, it was clear straightaway that the concert performance was bound to outshine the ‘artefact’. László Mester’s viola took on a greater prominence in the mix; Mester’s brácsa was bedded in Hungarian village music but it strayed – proof that infidelity can have good results. Miles more relaxed and lived in than the album’s renditions, it was plain from the off that, though the ensemble might be re-presenting the album that this was going to be a performance with impromptu touches, not a faithful rehash of the album. Sem eső laid out the rules. As on the album, Juhász played a delicious solo guitar bridge that linked Sem eső to Tűzugrás/Fire Jumping. As with most of the material that followed, they kept close to the album arrangements but the ensemble’s playing and the trio’s singing eclipsed the studio versions.
Touring the material, it was evident, had made the performances both tauter and tighter, looser and more limber. A lot of air and space had entered the arrangements. Somogyindia (it gets no translation on the album) was a case in point with its full-strength unison and overlapping vocal onslaught and hand-clapped rhythmicality. And keeping to the project’s folk-jazz spirit, bassist Zoltán Kovács and drummer/percussionist András Dés each had opportunities to solo towards the end.
What became plain was how powerful its suites – or mini-symphonies – were. Betlehem/Bethlehem, with its prominent nylon-strung guitar from Juhász and gadulka (bagpipes) from Nikola Parov, emerged as an ace in the Szájról szájra band’s hand. Compared to the concentration required to sing the interwoven vocal pyrotechnics that is Lidlidli (the bagpipe song that followed Betlehem), Betlehem seemed like a sea of tranquillity and contemplation. They held back its counterpart religious piece Paradicsom/Paradise until the very end and then as their only encore. The Szájról szájra repertoire is not easy to sing or accompany. One pre-gig pálinka for the nerves and the whole thing could unravel.
What remains uppermost in my mind is how Szilvia Bognár, Ágnes Herczku and Ági Szalóki construct their vocal parts. While one of them might be singing the lyric, the other two might be adding nothing whatsoever vocally or contributing tight-knit vocal parts that constituted little more than stressing a syllable or adding a vocal shiver, effect or embellishment. Herczku’s final sigh on Édes kicsi galambon/Sweetest Little Dove of Mine, for example, was pure theatricality. It worked much better than on the album, proving that practice makes perfect. Szilvia Bognár’s singing on the introduction to the knee-knotting Elmegyel/I’m Leaving reminded why she has the consummate touch. Similarly, Ági Szalóki showed how commanding she is vocally on Jólesik/It Feels Good. Uppermost in the mind must remain how, in my experience, when they join forces the trio can create vocal fireworks quite unlike any ensemble on the planet.
The eighth of November was a great day for music in Glasgow. That afternoon five kilted bagpipers busked at the other end of Sauchiehall Street and did a bagpipe version of ‘'Okey Cokey complete with moves and movements, with skirls and twirls that was nothing less than a street music sensation. That evening Aztec Camera’s Roddy Frame had a sold-out concert at Òran Mór on the Great Western Road; the Wolfetones were at Barrowland at Gallowgate; and, a hop, skip and a jump downhill from the Centre of Contemporary Art on Sauchiehall Street, the Fleet Foxes were at the ABC. But Szilvia Bognár, Ágnes Herczku and Ági Szalóki’s concert was where the creative juices really flowed. It was a privilege to witness something so inspirational.
Photograph: c 2008 Ken Hunt
Further listening:
Szilvia Bognár, Ágnes Herczku and Ági Szalóki: Szájról Szájra FolkEurópa Kladó FECD035 (2007)
Szilvia Bognár:
Enek őrzi az időt/Song preserves the heartbeat of time Gryllus GCD 057 (2006)
Szilvia Bognár and István Kónya: Rutafának sok szép ága (2008)
Ágnes Herczku: Arany és kék szavakkal/In gold and blue Fonó (2003)
Ági Szalóki: Hallgató / Lament FolkEurópa FECD020 (2005)
13. 11. 2008 |
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[by Ken Hunt, London] To declare an interest, Tom Constanten and I are addicts of bilingual punning and are old friends. Indeed we started our correspondence when I lived in Sutton, a town that I have no reason to return to in many years. As opener for Jefferson Starship, the audience got a magic show of multivalenced allusion, illusion and wordplay from the former keyboardist of the Grateful Dead during their wonderful experimental period as a septet in the late 1960s that produced Anthem of the Sun, Aoxomoxoa and Live Dead.
His curtain raiser was Jorma Kaukonen’s Embryonic Journey which dissolved into Bonnie Dobson’s anti-/post-nuclear holocaust hymn Morning Dew before finishing on a sight-gag piece of theatre with his right hand falling off the keyboard whilst reaching for the non-existent ‘last note’. In a parallel musical universe Constanten developed a variant of Humphrey Lyttelton’s radio panel game ‘One song sung to the tune of another’ into something infinitely spaceier.
The audience got his syphilis-to-salvation take on Amazing Grace to the tune of House of the Rising Sun topped with Robert Burns’ Auld Lang Syne. Another was Dylan’s All Along The Watchtower sung to the tune of Warren Zevon’s Werewolves of London. And indeed the wind began to howl. Friends of the Devils got a Mountains of the Moon into Dark Star segueing into the Doors’ People Are Strange – as a sung entity – into his take on the Dead’s Turn On Your Lovelight, the vehicle for his old friend Ron ‘Pigpen’ McKernan. One day Dose Hermanos – his sometime duo with Bob Bralove – will tour in Europe and then we will see what happens when musical and visual spontaneities go bilingual as the music feeds on the visual and vice versa.
4. 11. 2008 |
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[by Ken Hunt, London] The sixth London Mela returned to its spiritual homeland on the borders of Hounslow and Ealing to the west of London once again and once again it was a celebration cum fair, which is all mela means in several of the subcontinent’s languages. The blurb on the front of the programme proclaimed: “Eight zones with urban, classical and experimental music, DJs, circus, dance, visual arts, comedy, children’s area, food from around the world and a giant funfair.”
The clarinettist Arun Ghosh closed proceedings on the Indo Electronica stage with a set drawing mainly on his Northern Namaste (Camoci Records, 2008) album. This time he fronted a quartet with Pat Illingsworth on kit drums, Liran Donin on string bass and Nilesh Gulhane on tabla. Ghosh, a highly physical player, shouldered all of the melodic parts and most of the solos. The weather immediately turned foully British with drizzle turning to rain (it being August). The quartet began with Aurora, a tune too good to leave the world without having heard. It got the dancers dancing in front of the stage despite the rain. The set stuck close to Northern Namaste‘s material but it was no replication of the performances on the CD. Variations aplenty occurred. At one point, Singing In The Rain emerged as a melodic figure. Early on, Ghosh and his black liquorice stick had jumped off the stage to freshen up in the rain.
The performances expanded upon the recorded versions with, for example, an excellent percussion duet emerging during Come Closer. As the weather improved and the rain let up, the quartet pulled out a non-Northern Namaste plum or two. Ghosh’s lightly swung clarinet on Mongo Santamaria’s Afro Blue (popularised by John Coltrane), for example, mined rich new seams. Having run well over their allotted time and having been called back again and again for more, their visibly weary bandleader called their last number. He announced they were playing Aurora for those people who hadn’t been there at the beginning of their gig. The quartet actually eclipsed its opening version. It was a gig that confirmed Arun Ghosh as one of the most charismatic and imaginative performers on the British jazz scene. And he has the melodies to prove it. Aurora and Afro Blue are compositions to mention in the same breath and that is no journalistic hyperbole.
All photographs: Ken Hunt and Santosh Sidhu/Swing 51 Archives
15. 8. 2008 |
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[by Ken Hunt, London] “There’s a lot of dancing in her music,” I say to the Hungarian dancer sitting next to me when the concert finishes. My observation about the performance has nothing to do with Beáta Palya as a dancer, little to do with her swaying or rockin’ in rhythm as she sings and everything to do with the way she sings. In a manner of speaking, Bea Palya sings from the haunches and the hips an awful lot. And what and how she sings is exceptional. The music she makes is Hungarian folk-crossed jazz or Hungarian jazz-crossed folk with other elements stirred in – chanson, for example, befitting her role in Tony Gatlif’s film Transylvania in which she plays the part of the cabaret chanteuse – that’s chantoozie in American-English.
The Palya Bea Quintet set at the Linbury Studio Theatre drew largely from her Adieu Les Complexes album. (Or inverted to English usage the Bea Palya Quintet.) Four of her seven accompanists on the album were on the stage with her at the Royal Opera House – they being András Dés (kit drums and percussion), Balázs Szokolay Dongó (soprano and sopranino sax, kavals and bagpipes), Miklós Lukács (cimbalom) and Csaba Novák (double-bass).
The concert itself was a blank canvas because Adieu Les Complexes was so new, even in Hungary, for the compositions to be unknown quantities. It was the first of two performances that members of the band did for the ‘Voices Across The World’ concert season. This one with its post-concert ‘Meet the Artist’ session – Palya and Peter Mills – was followed the next afternoon with a live soundtrack (“new music created and performed live”) session for writer-director Zoltán Fábri’s Körhinta (1956). The film’s title means ‘roundabout’ – as in magic (for those of a certain age) or A bűvös körhinta (for those who speak Hungarian) – or ‘merry-go-round’.
The Quintet opened with Adieu Les Complexes’ opening track – Hold (‘Moon’). In live performance its arrangement serves to introduce the instrumentalists sequentially. Hold is a wonderful vehicle for cimbalom in its combination role, much like piano, as melody and percussion instrument. At one stage Lukács took the ends of his two strikers and rubbed them on the strings to create some blink-and-you’ll-miss-it fleeting yet telling sonic variations. The magic is so often a combination of the visual and the musical in live performance. Clearly the night was unlikely to be a night of album replication. Hoppá became an audience participation song in ways that built on and outstripped the studio version with her cuing the audience to interject “Hoppá!”
Over the course of the set, she rarely left the new, non-Adieu Les Complexes repertoire. When she did it was spellbinding too. The Quintet delivered what might be called a mini-suite lifted from her Sándor Weöres-inspired album Psyché (2005). It consisted of Akrostichon, Minutes volantes III and Egy lovász fihoz. The last segment included a rip-roaring cimbalom solo. While the literary qualities of Weöres’ words about, she announced, the “life of a Hungarian woman”, were lost on me – his pieces appear in any number of Hungarian folk acts’ repertoire – the musicianship could not fail to deliver.
It was a case of trusting to feeling and instinct even though the literal truth soared and roared over one’s head. (As she announced in English, when introducing to Sometimes I’m Happy, “Emotion is international.”) Physically, she used her hands to chop and cut the air as she sang the Psyché song suite. And, after all, musical theatre at a venue such as the Royal Opera House is hardly going to go amiss. Like much of her performance the suite switched tempo and mood – soft and gentle to full-throated – with turn-on-a-forint timing and dexterity. The spaces in the suite’s arrangement with its telling ‘unsounded notes’ – rather like a khali or ’empty note’ in Hindustani tabla playing – and instrumental dropouts made for a remarkable ensemble performance. In a similar vein the bagpipe-driven Észoztó nagy szájhód (‘Big Mouth’) ended on an unplayed final note.
Her osmotic retelling of Lover Man started its journey as a Transylvanian folk melody before emerging as folk-jazz. She explained this in the Q&A talk and it was a light-bulb moment that good interviews achieve. It was one of those ‘Now I understand’ illuminations. Áll a kapun (‘My Prince Will Come?’) “about getting a husband – or not” began laconic and barely off lachrymose before hitting higher emotional registers. The Linbury Studio Theatre was one of those sorts of concert. Even the only piece that I had known beforehand, Pey-Dabadi – it’s only onomatopoeia but we like it – from her 2003 Ágról-ágra/Tradition in motion album was transformed. Its melding of Roma vocal rhythmicality in a ‘half-remembered’ Indian bols or rhythmic syllable sense was unerringly expressive and totally impressive. Put it this way: it was like a structure waiting to pounce. A remarkable concert and entrée into a remarkable album: Adieu Les Complexes. The Bea Palya Quintet delivered one of my concert highlights for 2008.
Further listening: Adieu Les Complexes Naive Sony/BMG (Hungary) 88697323112 (2008)
An interview (2007) in the Czech part of this website
Further information in Hungarian and English: www.palyabea.hu
27. 7. 2008 |
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[by Ken Hunt, London] Don’t you just love the thrill of unpublicised gigs? So long, that is, that the act delivers music worthy of the buzz and you attend. This nicely semi-secret Green Ray gig ticked all the boxes and more. The Dog House announcement just promised “psychedelic West Coast sounds” and an unnamed “special guest guitarist – all the way from San Francisco, the man who played Monterrey and Wood Stock Festivals”. Yup, two spelling mistakes in 18 printed words. The Green Ray are still improvising and pursuing that ol’ psychedelic Grail. Were they an American band they’d probably get saddled with the description ‘jam band’.
To say that the gig was unpublicised is bending the truth. A little. Its ‘publicity’ had a word-of-mouth or -email samizdat feel to it, worthy of the Plastic People of the Universe in their publicity-avoidance days. The A4-sized announcements downstairs in the Dog House were nicely grainy in a degraded photocopy way. Before the gig, scheduled for a civilised five in the afternoon, began and the upstairs room filled, the aforementioned “special guest guitarist” chortled in conversation how this one was “unannounced and unpaid”. And since this is the internet crawled over by search engines, let’s drop mystery and mystique into the compost bin of time. The guest was Barry Melton.
Thwarting expectations, two singer-songwriters opened with a calling-card set apiece. David Ferrard and his guitar opened the afternoon’s proceedings. Like Kim Beggs who followed, he was an unknown quantity for me. That unknown quantity quality extended to his speaking and singing voice, though his clarifications about his family background, life lived in Scotland and the USA and more explained his accent. Anyway, his accent is American and he took his set from his Broken Sky (2008) album. His opening song was Visions of Our Youth. It was – indeed is – an observational reflection on activism and, while one may smile and nod along in agreement, it is not a song to leave the venue singing. Sets such as this are snapshots. One Hell of a Ride, the concluder, felt little more than a rhyme scheme lassoing a melody, the stuff, without being too uncharitable, that fills out sets. Hills of Virginia may have an unmemorable title but the subject matter renders it second cousin to Utah Phillips’ Green Rolling Hills of West Virginia. In Utah’s song the miner looks back to what once was. In Ferrard’s song “the hills of Virginia” are a counterpoint to a tour of duty in Iraq. The tour gets extended – prompting the ironical money-line: “But then we were told/’Some of you here will be here for years/Better treat it like home.'” (A live version of the song is also on the Stop The War Coalition’s Not In Our Name in the good company of performances from Dick Gaughan, Robb Johnson, Amy Martin, Leon Rosselson and David Rovics and specially recorded, exclusive stuff from Roy Bailey & Martin Simpson and Jim Page.) The song that stuck the most was Dmitri’s Pocket Radio, a tale of an illegal immigrant to England turned asylum seeker. It even has a happy ending outro, the only part of the song that didn’t work for me.
Kim Beggs’ speaking and singing voice is decidedly Canadian. Stylistically speaking, her music falls between Canadian folk and country – a wide, vast territory that Ian & Sylvie first opened my ears to. Statistically speaking, most of her set came from Wanderer’s Paean (2006) though she also road-tested a song for her next album. She opened with Bucko – “C’mon Bucko/What I really want to do/Is two-step with you” being its limpet-on-your-brain refrain. Unlike her Wanderer’s Paean versions with their splashes of pedal steel, mandolin, basses, banjo and fiddle, here she was on her own and a long way from the Yukon. Walking Down To The Station, Lay It All Down and Ain’t Gonna Work from Wanderer’s Paean are all songs that would fit sweetly in the really early repertoire of k.d. lang. Maybe even Mama’s Dress too – which Beggs also did. The one that lodged was I Can’t Drive Slow Yodel about being stopped for speeding by “the handsome man with the golden shoulders” – that is, a speed cop, sheriff or whatever they’re called in Royal Canadian Mounted Police territory – and coughing to the offence (“I ain’t havin’ a baby” being one mea culpa). As she announced in the preamble to the song, she sweet-talked her way out of getting a ticket. It figured. Sort of, if only because there is a gift of the gab about her. She finished with a jaunty, upbeat trad. arr. song called Ain’t Gonna Work that Bambi-eyed charges of apparent work-shy tendencies with the disarming “I ain’t gonna work tomorrow/I ain’t gonna work today/I ain’t gonna work tomorrow/For that is my wedding day”. There may have been a ‘Lord’ before the last line, but I’m a humanist and we don’t hold with that stuff on Sundays or any other day. Two fine starts to a lazy Sunday afternoon with no time to worry. Or a “drift into a Sunday”, as Ken Whaley put it, perhaps summoning the same Small Faces song.
Quite what informed The Green Ray’s choice of name is a subject that invites speculation. The name is presumably an allusion to the rare optical phenomenon variously known as the green ray or green flash. It happens around sunrise and sunset when a green light burst becomes visible. Maybe it also evokes Jules Verne’s Le Rayon vert in an Alan Garner and Red Shift way or, riffing off that idea, even a comic book Green Lantern sort of way. Musically speaking, what is plain is that The Green Ray – the band – is a lineal descendant of Help Yourself and Man.
The Green Ray are Simon Haspeck on guitar and vocals, Ken Whaley on electric bass and vocals, Simon Whaley on drums and Richard Treece on guitar and vocals. Now, the only difficulty with that “vocals” inclusion was that there was still only one vocal microphone to go around, meaning no real chance for doo-wop harmonies, polyphony and all that folk jazz. This was rough and ready and in the spirit of improvised music and improvising equipment alike. Which made the presence of Barry Melton all the better. After all, he was once of Country Joe & The Fish (ergo the Monterey and Woodstock references). He is one of the San Francisco Bay Area greats and has been both the complicit and steadying hand on the shoulders of Mickey Hart’s waywardness. (He had played the previous weekend with Hart.) He once, take a deep breath, crawled on his back up an isle whilst playing an electric guitar solo (as the support act for Commander Cody & His Lost Planet Airmen) at the Hammersmith Odeon. He is a folkie turned rock guitarist turned public defender. And around the time he ‘did’ Hammersmith would have been around that time that Melton first worked with the Help Yourself-Man axis, come to think of it.
Ken Whaley got to ‘hog’ the microphone for the opening Before The Fall and it set the tone and pattern for the rest of The Green Ray’s performance. Babble On with Treece wailing on guitar from his seated position and Melton singing and hitting the slide was psychedelicised pub rock in the fine old tradition of entertainment. The Treece-Melton exchanges and passages were some of the best moments from the set as a whole. They followed Babble On with Running Down Deep, again with trademark fluid Meltonesque guitar. The rest of the set went to many different places with All My Tears, Swedish Detective Movie and a return to the stage for Kim Beggs in order to tell a story about – and I hope this is in the right order and no calumny – a low-down, beer-suckin’ cigarette smoker. (Melton sat out and smiled approvingly from rear of the stage.) The stage set-up and sound system were as basic as basic can be. The sound was raw, inflexible and unyielding. But between them these three acts painted a blank canvas with splashes of colour in so many unexpected ways. Don’t you just love the unexpected things that unpublicised gigs deliver?
Where next to go:
David Ferrard – Broken Sky (Flamingo West Records flam010), 2008 – www.davidferrad.com – and Not In Our Name (Songs For Change, no number) – www.songsforchange.com
Kim Beggs – Wanderer’s Paean (Out of a Paper Bag Productions CRCD024, 2006) – www.kimbeggs.com
The Green Ray and Barry Melton – www.senzatempo.co.uk
With thanks to two UK-based music writers that span the generations, span psychedelia and punk, and have probably never met: Nigel Cross and Alex Ogg.
26. 6. 2008 |
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