[by Ken Hunt, London] Record shops held a particular status in the cultural to-and-fro of earlier times in ways that would be impossible to explain in the internet age. It was pretty much in order to go to a shop with minimal cash (remember, this is pre-plastic) and listen to a whole LP with only the flimsiest justification or intention of purchasing it
9. 5. 2011 | read more...
[by Ken Hunt, London] British folk music found a top drawer brass player, arranger and composer in Howard Evans. He had an utterly pragmatic, utterly professional attitude to music making and the musician’s life and from 1997, when he joined the Musicians Union’s London headquarters, as assistant general secretary for media he revealed that over and over again. He was totally pragmatic about his art and the first to drolly prick any bubbles of pretension about making music. He brought a wider knowledge and a greater diversity of musical experiences to bear on making music than any professional musician I ever met but he never got the slightest tan from the musical limelight
14. 3. 2011 | read more...
[by Ken Hunt, London] Terry Melcher, who died of cancer on 19 November 2004, was a man of many parts and, as Doris Day’s son, doors opened for him. Her only son, he was born Terry Jorden on 8 February 1942. Taking the surname of his mother’s third husband, Martin Melcher (who legally adopted him), he helped shape a generation’s musical consciousness and define the West Coast folk-rock sound. Before that he wrote songs, for instance, with Bobby Darin and Randy Newman, for his mother and for Paul Revere and the Raiders (for whom he penned Him Or Me (What’s It Gonna Be))
21. 2. 2011 | read more...
[by Ken Hunt, London] The Bengali singer Suchitra Mitra died on 3 January 2011 at her home of many years, Swastik on Gariahat Road in Ballygunge, Kolkata. She was famed as one of the heavyweight interpreters of the defining Bengali-language song genre form called Rabindra sangeet – or Rabindrasangeet (much like the name Ravi Shankar can also be rendered Ravishankar). ‘Rabindra song’ is an eloquent, literary, light classical song form, derived from the name of the man who ‘invented’ it, Rabindranath Tagore, the winner of the 1913 Nobel Prize for Literature.
Tagore’s songs helped define Bengali and Bangladeshi culture and identity – and importantly pan-Indian culture – in the years before the dissolution of the British Raj and afterwards
31. 1. 2011 | read more...
[by Ken Hunt, London] Bengal’s popular arts lost two of its major figures on 17 January 2011.
The actress Gita Dey (1931-2011) died in north Kolkata. From her debut as a child actor in 1937 in director Dhiren Ganguly’s film Ahutee, she reportedly appeared in some 200 Bengali films and thousands of stage dramas and folk plays. A startling character actress with a presence that did not overwhelm the part, she appeared in such films as film director Ritwik Ghatak’s Meghe Dhaka Tara (1957), Satyajit Ray’s Teen Kanya and Komal Gandhar, and Tapan Sinha’s Haatey Baajarey, Jotugriha and Ekhonee. Lawrence Olivier was amongst the people who celebrated her
24. 1. 2011 | read more...
[by Ken Hunt, London] One of my fondest memories of Britain’s specialised music magazine scene of the 1980s into the 1990s is how little ego and rivalry there was for the most part. There were a couple of exceptions (no names, no pack drill) and, strange though it may seem, not a single ornery person from that bunch stayed the course within music criticism. Keith Summers wrote about music, collected it (as in, made field recordings of such as Jumbo Brightwell, the Lings of Blaxhall, Cyril Poacher and Percy Webb as well as later contributing to Topic’s multi-volume series Voice of the People) and published magazines about it. He had the fall-back trade of accountant that funded his passions.
In 1983 Summers launched an excellent magazine called Musical Traditions
16. 1. 2011 | read more...
[by Ken Hunt, London] The Polish revue artist, singer and actress Irena Anders, born Irena Renata Jarosiewicz on 12 May 1920 in Bruntál, in what is nowadays the Czech Republic, went under the stage name of Renata Bogdańska. Her father was a Rutherian pastor while her mother came from the Polish gentry. She studied music formally at the National Academy of Music in Lviv. The invasion of Poland in September 1939 put paid to her studies and over the next few years the tides of war and the various fortunes of Poland, its citizens and army determined her own life’s course.
Her first husband, Gwidon Borucki, led a morale-boosting troupe entertaining Polish forces fighting on the side of the Allies.
19. 12. 2010 | read more...
[by Ken Hunt, London] “Ten years ago on a cold dark night/Someone was killed ‘neath the town hall lights./There were few at the scene, but they all did agree/that the man who ran looked a lot like me.”
When those renegades from Canadian justice, The Band made their début album Music From Big Pink in 1968, they included a timeless-sounding song called Long Black Veil that they had learned from Leftie Frizzell, on whose 1959 version Marijohn Wilkin played piano. It had an eerie, old-time, murder ballad guilt to it and many people thought it was traditional. Marijohn Wilkin, the woman who set Danny Dill’s lyrics to music, to produce Long Black Veil died, aged 86, on 28 October 2006.
22. 11. 2010 | read more...
[by Ken Hunt, London] People’s appreciation of American folk music did not commence with the folk scare of the 1960s and the likes of the Kingston Trio, Peter, Paul and Mary, Joan Baez, Odetta, Buffy Sainte-Marie and Bob Dylan. A generation before them another folk revival, that similarly had no truck with segregation along racial lines, had been under way. Its crop of performers included progressives such as Josh White, Woody Guthrie, Huddie ‘Leadbelly’ Ledbetter and Pete Seeger. Like the next generation, the earlier one wrote new songs in various folk idioms, frequently darts with left-leaning barbs, dosed with class consciousness and social awareness
13. 9. 2010 | read more...
[by Ken Hunt, London] The Scots Gaelic song tradition had a relatively hard time of it during the twentieth century what with a diminishing mother-tongue population, a massive decline in Gaelic literacy and the steady encroachment of Scots and English. Seonag NicCoinnich, that is, Joan MacKenzie in the English, was one of four daughters born into a community where Gaelic was the first language – in Point on the Isle of Lewis in the Western Isles on 2 September 1929.
The spoken and sung language was strong and it was here that she developed her taste and love for Gaelic song. She and her sisters studied in Stornoway where she made her public singing debut as a schoolgirl. She went off to Glasgow to study to become a primary school teacher
30. 8. 2010 | read more...