Lives
[by Ken Hunt, London] The US record producer, engineer and mixer Greg Ladanyi, who worked with, amongst others, Jackson Browne, Fleetwood Mac, Jeff Healey, Don Henley, Los Jaguares, David Lindley and Warren Zevon, died on Cyprus on 29 September 2009. He died of the consequence of an accident on stage whilst touring with the Greek Cypriot singer Anna Vissi whose album Apagorevmeno (2008) he had co-produced.
Ladanyi won a Grammy Award for ‘Best Engineered Recording – Non-Classical’ with his co-engineered Toto IV in 1982 – a period that found the session musician spin-off band Toto at a peak of their critical and commercial success
7. 10. 2009 |
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[by Ken Hunt, London] Neil Young once stated, “The great Canadian dream is to get out.” It was certainly what three fifths of Buffalo Springfield did when they joined the California-based rock group’s US contingent, Stephen Stills and Richie Furay. In 1966 Young and Bruce Palmer – the band’s original bassist – had headed south in a 1953 Pontiac hearse with Ontario plates. Minds set on forming a rock group and already working up Young’s Nowadays Clancy Can’t Even Sing, Furay and Stills famously spotted the Canadians driving in the opposite direction on Sunset Boulevard. (Stills had already met Young in Thunder Bay, Ontario and had been taken.) Furay executed some nifty pursuit-chase driving and caught up with them before they hit the highway to head home
25. 8. 2009 |
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[by Ken Hunt, London] The Dutch counter-culture poet, writer and painter Simon Vinkenoog died in Amsterdam on Saturday, 12 July 2009, a few days before his 81st birthday. Born on 18 July 1928 in Amsterdam, Vinkenoog was the child of a lone parent family raised in the De Pijp part of Amsterdam’s Oud-Zuid (Old South) district.
As a writer, he became part of the Netherlands’ post-war flowering of small literary titles, editing the short-lived magazine Blurb followed by the bloemlezing (anthology) Atonaal – a manifesto of intent of the literary collective self-styled ‘atonal poets’ known as the Vijftigers (50ers)
7. 8. 2009 |
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[by Ken Hunt, London] The Scots composer and musicologist David Johnson died on 30 March 2009 at the age of 66. Born David Charles Johnson in Edinburgh on 27 October 1942, his focus both as a composer and a musicologist was profoundly shaped by Scottishness.
Over the course of his life he composed over 50 works, amongst them five operas. Two of them were inspired by so-called Border ballads, namely his All There Was Between Them (1969) and Thomas the Rhymer (1976). Others drew on other Scottish elements including Music For Hallowe’en (1960) and Piobaireachd (1976) – piobaireachd is the traditional pipe music of the Highlands of Scotland also known as Ceňl Mňr -, both works for solo recorder. Literary influences also informed his composing.
13. 5. 2009 |
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[by Ken Hunt, London] John Pearse died on 31 October 2008 in Besigheim in Germany aged 69. A wine lover – he wrote the book Cooking With Wine (1987) – it was wine that crooked its little finger at him and brought him to that Swabian wine region where he died. Born John Melville Pearse in Hook in the East Riding of Yorkshire on 12 September 1939, he grew up in the north Welsh seaside torn of Prestatyn in Denbighshire where the family ran a hotel.
Pearse supposedly took up the acoustic guitar in 1957, the clincher being getting fired up by Big Bill Broonzy – the US bluesman who toured the UK that year as part of a European tour and whose tour excited a whole generation of folk musicians including Pearse’s fellow Yorkshire musicians, The Watersons
27. 4. 2009 |
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[by Ken Hunt, London] Uriel Jones was one of the largely unsung heroes of popular music. His drumming added the muscle and sinew to many of the great hits that came out of his birthplace and hometown, Detroit, for he was a leading member of the Motown house-band, the Funk Brothers. He played on sessions that became international hits including Marvin Gaye’s I Heard It Through The Grapevine, Stevie Wonder’s For Once In My Life, the Temptations Ain’t To Proud To Beg, I Can’t Get Next To You and Cloud Nine, Marvyn Gaye & Tammy Terrell’s Ain’t No Mountain High Enough and Smokey Robinson & The Miracles’ I Second That Emotion during a period when Motown was an essential element in the soundtrack to people’s lives
1. 4. 2009 |
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[by Kate Hickson, Berriew, Wales] In the 1980s Swing 51 magazine would occasionally receive small packages from the United States containing cassette tapes merely identified as ‘Citizen Kafka’. It felt like the sort of deception the musical prankster Hank Bradley might perpetrate. However, Bradley’s looked and sounded different. Infuriatingly, the sender’s mailing address was missing and the US postal service was clearly in on the wheeze because every postmark came smudged to illegibility by bureaucracy. It felt a bit like a twofold conspiracy at the time. Prague folk might call it bonus Kafka-esque.
Citizen Kafka, it finally emerged, was an alias of one Richard Shulberg. He also rejoiced in the noms de télégraphie – wireless or radio aliases – Sid Kafka and The Citizen.
22. 3. 2009 |
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[by Ken Hunt, London] One of the great European jazz musicians of the Twentieth Century died at the age of 81 on 20 February 2009 in Hoei (Huy in French) in the western Belgian province of Luik (Liege). The Belgian multi-instrumentalist, arranger and composer Sadi, actually Sadi Lallemand (he took Sadi as his name because he didn’t like something about the sound of his surname), linked many post-war developments in jazz and popular music.
Born in Ardenne in the northwestern Belgian province of Namen on 23 October 1927, he was drawn to jazz through hearing Louis Armstrong on record as a boy circa 1938 and, his musicality stirred, he took up the vibraphone, the instrument with which he was particularly associated, in 1941
12. 3. 2009 |
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[by Ken Hunt, London] One of the former German Democratic Republic’s most notable and most famous rock musicians, guitarists and bandleaders Peter ‘Cäsar’ Gläser died in Leipzig on 23 October after a long illness. Gläser was born in Leipzig on 7 January 1949 and came to people’s attention as a member of the Klaus Renft Combo. Having joined them as a founding member in 1967, he was called up soon after to do national service in the army and he rejoined them afterwards in 1969. Peter ‘Cäsar’ Gläser (the nickname says a great deal) might be described as Renft’s shadow. After Renft effectively got banned for social criticism in 1975 (helped along by singing the lyrics of Gerulf Pannach who found himself exiled to the West), Gläser co-founded the splinter band Karussell. In 1
5. 12. 2008 |
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[by Ken Hunt, London] The German writer Peter Maiwald died on 1 December in Düsseldorf. Born in Grötzingen in the West German state of Baden-Württemberg on 8 November 1946, he gravitated to the left. He moved to Munich in 1968 before moving to Neuss in 1970. During this period he was establishing himself as a freelance writer before going on to co-found the magazine Düsseldorfer Debatte. Parenthetically, one has only to think of the Putney Debates during the English Revolution for a sense of the meaning of debate.
Maiwald’s writings were in part under the sway of the Brechtian model and he wrote agitprop poetry, songs and lyrics for Kabarett ensembles such as the Düsseldorf-based Kom(m)ödchen and Stuttgart’s Renitenz-Theater. Over
5. 12. 2008 |
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