Lives
[by Ken Hunt, London] In January 1963 Bob Dylan was in Europe, flitting between London and Rome, bankrolled by an appearance as a folksinger in the BBC television drama, Madhouse on Castle Street. In London he fell into the company of, amongst others, the British folksingers Martin Carthy, Bob Davenport and Rory McEwen – like Eric von Schmidt, another exceptional painter, notably in McEwen’s case of botanical subjects – and was reunited with some compatriots, the songwriter and novelist Richard Fariña, Ethan Signer of the Charles Valley River Boys, and the musician and illustrator Eric von Schmidt.
23. 8. 2010 |
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[by Ken Hunt, London] “When I met him,” says Mike Heron of the Incredible String Band of Nazir Ali Jairazbhoy, “he was working at the School of Oriental and African Studies, I think. He was teaching there. How I came across him was that [Elektra record producer] Joe Boyd introduced us to odd songs and things and Robin [Williamson] suggested we might have a sitar player on Mad Hatter’s Song. He actually played on Mad Hatter’s Song credited as ‘Soma’ because he asked not to have his name used, I don’t really know why. He probably had some contractual thing going. It says sitar by Soma but it’s actually him.”
N.A. Jairazbhoy’s nom de sitar – Soma – on the Incredibles’ 5000 Spirits or The Layers of the Onion (1967) derives from a Hindu holy drink and a Hindu lunar deity
10. 8. 2010 |
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[by Ken Hunt, London] The Benares-style tabla artist Chandrakant Shantaram Kamat was one of the mainstays of radio and recital in Pune. Between 1956 and 1991 he was an All India Radio (Pune) staff musician and he also did 50 years’ service at the Sawai Gandharva festival. Over the course of his career, he accompanied successive generations of top-notch principal vocalist, instrumentalist and dancers
17. 7. 2010 |
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[by Ken Hunt, London] Lucy Loes, the well-known Ostend dialect folksinger and the so-called ‘Queen of the Fisherman’s Song’ (‘de Koningin van het Visserslied’) died on 17 June 2010 in Bredene in the Belgian province of West Flanders at the age of 82. She was born on 24 January 1928 in Ostend (Oostende) on the Belgian coast where she grew up imbibing the local songs sung in the local dialect. The region had yet to become the hub of the tourism or a major Channel ferry port with fishing as a major local industry
21. 6. 2010 |
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[by Ken Hunt, London] Folk music everywhere goes through changes of style and presentation. Little is immune to change. That applies whether we are considering traditional or revivalist forms. After all, everything starts from somewhere before going somewhere else. Very little is fixed in a stone. The US folksinger Susan Reed, who died on 25 April 2010 in Long Island, New York State, had a relatively short-lived but important part to play in the East Coast folk scene of the second half of the 1940s into the 1950s.
Born Susan Catherine Reed in Columbia, South Carolina on 11 January 1926, she grew up in a theatrical family. Her father, Daniel was in the film industry while her mother, Isadora was a theatrical publicist
7. 5. 2010 |
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[by Ken Hunt, London] Vienna is a hothouse of regional musical idioms. And Trude Mally, who died on 4 June 2009, aged 81 in the Austrian capital, mastered two of the Vienna region’s three principal indigenous and typically Viennese folk forms. She sang Weanalieder (Wienerlieder in standard German, literally ‘Viennese Songs’ or songs sung in Viennese dialect) and Dudler, namely, the Viennese variant of yodelling. The third form, incidentally, is Schrammelmusik, an instrumental and vocal form named after the family that originated it.
She was born Gertrud Barbara Mally on 21 January 1928 in Neukettenhof – nowadays absorbed into Vienna’s southeastern suburban sprawl – and took to singing and playing the piano whilst still a child
25. 1. 2010 |
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The “greatest sarod maker” – sarod maestro Amjad Ali Khan
[by Ken Hunt, London] The Indian instrument maker and repairer Hemendra Chandra Sen died at his south Kolkata (Calcutta) home on 2 January 2009 at the age of 87. From apprentice to master craftsman, over the course of more than sixty years he made tanpuras, sitars and sarods for many of the most illustrious Hindustani instrumentalists of the age. He also bridged the generations. Although a sitar player himself, he became especially associated with the sarod, the short-necked, fretted lute
12. 1. 2010 |
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[by Ken Hunt, London] In 1959 the impresario Albert Grossman told the journalist Robert Shelton, “The American public is like Sleeping Beauty, waiting to be kissed awake by the prince of folk music.” Who he meant if not himself is moot. That year the black folk-blues artist Josh White terminated his management contract with Grossman. Bob Dylan, whom he managed from 1962, was still stuck in Minnesota with the Minneapolis blues, yet Grossman was set on changing things in the folk business. A few years on, Grossman had his fingers stuck in many pies, folk, blues and beyond.
Months before contractually adding Peter, Paul and Mary – Peter Yarrow, Noel ‘Stook’ Stookey and Mary Travis – to his roster in January 1962, he predicted they were going to be “one of the top commercial groups”
3. 12. 2009 |
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[by Ken Hunt, London] On 6 October 2009 Punjab’s Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal announced that the State Government would pay for the medical expenses of the Punjabi poet, lyricist, singer and man of letters Inderjit Singh Hassanpuri. It is a feature of the Indian state’s policy of recognising people who have made outstanding contributions towards the promotion of Punjabi culture. In Hassanpuri’s case, it was for his contributions to language and literature in particular. Two days later, on 8 October 2009, he died in the Ludhiana hospital to which he had been admitted
2. 11. 2009 |
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“When a society is afraid of its poets, it is afraid of itself. A society afraid of itself stands as another definition of hell.” – Lenore Kandel
[by Ken Hunt, London] The Beat poet and counter-culture activist Lenore Kandel died on 18 October 2009 aged 77 in her adopted home town of San Francisco. There is a lazy default setting to think of the Beat movement as being primarily a male preserve. Yet women were also actively involved not only as muses but also as writers and activists. Kandel was doubly important in that regard because she was part of California’s Beat movement and its hippie movement.
She was born in New York City on 14 January 1932; she was taken as a babe-in-arms to California where her writer father busied himself writing fiction and Hollywood screenplays
2. 11. 2009 |
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