[Ken Hunt, London] The satirist-songmaker and mathematician Tom Lehrer (1928-2025) was one of a kind. He died on 25 July in Cambridge Massachusetts. Born Thomas Andrew Lehrer in New York City on 9 April, musical theatre and Broadway were in his bloodstream. With his audacious wit and unerring intelligence, he was writing comic, pithy songs by the very beginning of the Fifties.
27. 1. 2026 | read more...
[by Ken Hunt, London] The English playwright and film and television scriptwriter, Keith Dewhurst (1931-2025) died on 11 January 2025. He was responsible for a number of important plays performed in the National Theatre.
27. 1. 2026 | read more...
[by Ken Hunt, London] For many years I was a newspaper obituarist writing for The Guardian, The Independent, The Scotsman, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Times. In addition, I wrote obituaries for many folk magazines. A sample would be Folker in Germany, the EFDSS Journal in the UK, Penguin Eggs in Canada and Sing Out! in the USA.
Since Oxford University Press took over what from 2004 became the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, I have written music-related biographical essays, mainly folk-related, for that massive reference work.
30. 12. 2024 | read more...
[by Ken Hunt, London] John Barlow became a cyber-guru and free speech advocate but when I first got to know him some – thanks to Eileen Law in the Grateful Dead office in the early 1980s, he was the second lyricist for San Francisco’s Grateful Dead. He wouldn’t have bleated about that that.
In late 1979 the opportunity arose to interview the Grateful Dead’s principal lyricist Robert Hunter. He was then living with Christie and their son Leroy in an apartment in a street between Earl’s Court tube station and the Troubadour on Old Brompton Road. The in-depth interview, then the longest he had ever had published, eventually stretched across three issues of the magazine Dark Star. Back in San Francisco it was received very well. It lifted the latch
30. 7. 2018 | read more...
[by Ken Hunt, London and Jalandhar] Visiting Nek Chand’s life’s work known as the Rock Garden of Chandigar – the union capital of the Indian states of Haryana and Punjab – must have once felt like being somewhere in a gigantic a work in progress. Since his death on 12 June 2015 at the age of 90 – and speaking more romantically – his Rock Garden of Chandigarh entered another phase.
It will now be a tourist attraction forever in a state of maintenance – and not in a bad sense. Even though it had long been in a state of constant maintenance – with major and minor repairs, cleaning and polishing occurring day in, day out – that won’t finish as long as people appreciate it
11. 3. 2017 | read more...
J P Bean
Faber & Faber
ISBN 978-0-572-30545-2
[by Ken Hunt, London] Britain’s folk clubs must seem strange to anyone visiting them for the first time. They are an exceedingly British institution, only found on English, Northern Irish, Scottish and Welsh soil – or, allowing for poetic licence, on foreign soils as British forces’ transplants, such as RAF Luqa’s Malta Folk Club and the British Army on the Rhine. To interject a personal observation, the folk club equivalents in Eire, Germany, the Netherlands, Germany and the USA all have altogether different characters.
It was only in the second half of the 1950s that Britain’s folk clubs started and a coherent folk scene began coalescing. Ironically the English Folk Song & Dance Society had been frantically dance-orientated
19. 2. 2016 | read more...
[by Ken Hunt, London] In 1955 North America’s modern-era fascination with Hindustani music began with the advent of jet travel and the arrival of the sarod maestro Ali Akbar Khan in New York. By then, Shamin Ahmed Khan, born in Baroda, Baroda State (modern-day Gujarat) on 10 September 1938, had already met the musician who would transform his life.
In 1951 he met Ali Akbar Khan’s brother-in-law, Ravi Shankar. Shamim Ahmed belonged to a family of hereditary musicians of the Agra Gharana. A gharana is a school and style of Hindustani classical music historically rooted in a specific place – Agra is in modern-day India’s northern state of Uttar Pradesh. A boyhood bout of typhoid destroyed his singing range. He switched to sitar
31. 10. 2015 | read more...
[by Ken Hunt, London] At the time of the inspirational illustrator Maurice Sendak’s death, obituaries concentrated on his connections with Mozart, Prokofiev, Janáček and suchlike. On the occasion of the death of the US folksinger Jean Ritchie (1922-2015), it is time to remind about his bigger sound palette connections, notably one that coloured his early art. One commission revealed other musical tastes.
Sendak illustrated one of the most important, early books of the US Folk Revival, Jean Ritchie’s Singing Family of the Cumberlands (1955).
8. 6. 2015 | read more...
[by Ken Hunt, London] It is a knee-jerk reaction when evoking Belgian song to extol Jacques Brel and his impact on Francophone chanson. But Belgium is a composite nation, with Walloon, Flemish and German populations. When it comes to articulating what it means to be Flemish, one of the giants of contemporary Flemish song and poetry was Wannes van de Velde, who for more than 40 years defined Flemish culture and defied cultural laziness
5. 4. 2015 | read more...
Lubomír Dorůžka (1924-2013)
[by Ken Hunt, London] One of Europe’s foremost jazz critics, of a status comparable to Nat Henhoff in the States, died on 16 December 2013 in Prague. Lubomír Dorůžka rose to become the preeminent Czech-language jazz historian in Czechoslovakia and, after the separation in 1993, the Czech Republic. He was a Czech musicologist, music historian and critic (not just jazz), author, literary translator (including, naturally, the Jazz Age writings of F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner, amongst others) and much more. Lubo Dorůžka had the ill-starred fortune to be a jazz aficionado under two totalitarian regimes, during periods when to call jazz dangerous was an understatement.
He was born on 18 March 1924 in what was then Czechoslovakia’s capital, Prague.
23. 6. 2014 | read more...