Ken Hunt

Shelter Olivia Chaney

[by Ken Hunt, London] Much of Shelter was composed, if not conceived, in the relative seclusion of a cottage on the North Yorkshire Moors. Its accent is on self-written songs. Like the songs here, the artwork photos capture rural English scenes, Roman antiquities – as if reflecting her Florence (Firenze) birthplace (and the song Roman Holiday) – and, as with the visual backdrop to A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, a smidgeon of citified ways. Conjuring a sense of solitude and her classical music training, the seventh track is an adaptation of the English composer Henry Purcell’s O Solitude to her plain-speaking guitar and Jordan Hunt’s violin accompaniment. Tapping into another sort of (defiant) loneliness, the Everly Brothers’ Long Time Gone (“…when I leave, I’ll be a long time gone…”) is emboldened with melodic embellishments.

Shelter is a collection of emotionally intelligent songs in which half-rhyme and no rhyme tussle like princes vying for the free-verse crown. There are flashes of the melodicism and verbal dexterity of Joni Mitchell (‘Never been a puritan/Never liked their wine much‘), Judee Sill (without the darkness) and even a twinkle of Kate & Anna McGarrigle (on Roman Holiday).

O Solitude, My Sweetest Choice! is particularly choice. Hers is Purcell’s setting of Katherine Philips’ translation of Antoine Girard de Saint-Amant’s La Solitude – both were dead before Purcell reached six years of age. . (The first time I saw her sing, as part of Explorations: The Sound of Nonesuch Records – Session Four at London’s Guildhall School of Music & Drama in May 2014 – a precursor to the Kronos Quartet’s Folk Songs project, she included There’s Not A Swain in Purcell’s setting of John Fletcher’s words.)

Shelter, though, is hers and hers alone. Olivia Chaney’s making hay and the sun’s going to shine a long, long time.

Olivia Chaney Shelter Nonesuch Records

www.nonesuch.com
www.oliviachaney.com

The image of Olivia Chaney and Annie Briggs is © Ken Hunt/Swing 51 Archives. On 11 October 2017 I introduced Olivia to Annie for a truly memorable day. We walked and talked at Kew Gardens until the light and wine ran out.

7. 8. 2018 | read more...

John Perry Barlow (1947–2018)

[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. Extensive interviews with key members of the band became a letter away. A priority was the dash to do the first in-depth interview with John Barlow (yet to be billed as John Perry Barlow), The first fruits of their writing collaboration with Bob Weir appeared on Weir’s 1972 studio album Ace, solo-credited even although the whole band was on it and it debuted their new line-up on disc.

Hunter had explained, “With Weir, we spent a lot of time working on things, but I don’t think that we basically satisfy each other. He’s not that nuts about my approach to imagery. He doesn’t want it to be thick he wants it to be lighter and more obvious. He’s not trying to be in the least cryptic. He wants it to be very accessible. We’ve turned out some really good material, but our heads aren’t that together. We want to work together and every now and again we do, but it doesn’t really click.”

Transatlantic phone calls were prohibitively expensive. The future cyber champion and I did the interview the new-fangled way. I sent questions, cassettes and International Reply Coupons – early international currency of choice, continually recycled, rarely cashed in at post offices – and in due course Barlow’s revealing, self-effacing and lengthy interview popped through Swing 51‘s letter box in Sutton, Surrey. He called Hunter “a real poet”, “the genuine article” and continued, “It’s as difficult for Hunter to write in a literal vein as it would be for Wallace Stevens or T.S. Eliot. And Bobby likes his imagery ;concrete. He wants everybody out there to understand it they don’t of course. But that’s what he’s shooting for a lot of the time, so he rebels when I try to slip in something that’s a little vaporous, which I personally would prefer to do more often because, while I’m not the poet Hunter is, I would rather have my songs be poetry.”

The Grateful Dead only ever had one Top 10 song in their three-decade lifespan between 1965 and 1995 – and afterlife – and the Dead did not care a jot. If anything, Touch of Grey, written by the core team of Jerry Garcia and Bob Hunter, was an aberration, a minor liability and on several levels something they did not need. With their ultra-loyal, cross-generational following known as Deadheads, hit singles and chart activity never troubled them. While many wrote them off, knee-jerk fashion, scorning them as psychedelic slackers, they had a prodigious song output, to which Barlow contributed his part as lyricist especially and principally for Bob Weir. In the doing, they created a wrong-headed, alt business model. It has since been celebrated in popular economics textbooks. One, David Meerman Scott and Brian Halliagn’s Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead (2010), summarised it with populist, hippie stereotype transcending maxims like “Bring People on an Odyssey”, “Build a Diverse Team”, and “Encourage Eccentricity”.

John Perry Barlow was born in 1947 in Jackson Hole, Sublette Co., Wyoming, the only child of the Republican state legislator Norman Barlow and Miriam Barlow Bailey (née Jenkins). A far cry from the citified bohemian ways of the Bay Area-based Grateful Dead, on the face of it Barlow’s upbringing was the living antitheses of this psychedelic rock group’s ethos. His embraced a staunchly Republican frontier spirit, the Mormon Church, Boy Scouts, freemasonry and a life lived in the vicissitudes of cattle ranching on the Bar Cross Land & Livestock Company in Cora. Wyoming’s subarctic climate produces long snow-bound, freezing winters and short, cool summers. “What we talk about around here,” he once said, “is cattle prices and the weather. And primarily the weather. [.] We’re out in it all the time. We tend to regard life as a prank played on us by God, with his best instrument being the weather.” The elements duly figured in Weir/Barlow songs such as Cassidy, Looks Like Rain and Weather Report Suite.

Barlow became a difficult child, a “jack Mormon” and his father, he explained in his first major interview anywhere in Swing 51 in 1984, “was told it was best to get me sent away if he wanted to go on running for office.” He was duly sent to a prep school called Fountain Valley in Colorado Springs where he first met a fellow outsider called Robert Hall Weir, thirteen days his junior. “The school functioned largely for kids with behavioural difficulties, not in a clinical sense, but it was a pretty open-minded place,” he continued. Deemed misfits, “the upper classmen singled us for particular Hell, Weir more so than me fortunately, but we both took a fair amount of shit.” Barlow and Weir, a dyslectic, adopted child from the middle-class suburb of Atherton, California and already a serial school expulsion specialist, formed a deep and abiding, lifelong bond.

Later in college Barlow’s thesis advisor – “an eminent American writer” – took his honours thesis work to the publisher Farrar, Straus & Giroux who bought an option on The Departures. With the “fairly sizeable” advance, “having just gotten out of the draft and out of college” he went to India for about five months. He finished it in an abandoned wintertime beach town called Clinton, Connecticut on Long Island Sound. The first section and the newly written second half never worked, let alone dovetailed, and that was that. It was, he recalled in that Swing 51 interview, “a picaresque fantasy about America and our old yearning to be ever on the cutting edge of a frontier. It was about a people who need frontiers running out of them.” He continued to write, including journalism such as reviewing the BMW R75 for Motor Cycle Magazine. He later would gain extensive experience of giving testimonials to Congress on such weighty matters as Wilderness, Non Point Source Water Pollution, Acid Rain and the Grizzly Bear.

Back in California, Garcia was eager to encourage Weir’s songwriting. The youngest of the Grateful Dead’s founding fathers, Weir was a knotty, strongly opinionated individual. He had contributed as a co-writer to the That’s It For The Other One suite, first commercially released in 1968 on the Anthem of the Sun album. He too gravitated to Hunter as a source of words, collaborating, for example, on ‘Sugar Magnolia’ and ‘Playing In The Band’. But it was a relationship rendered artistically fraught by Weir’s lyrical interventions. Barlow stepped into the breach.

It fell to him to take over running the ranch in 1971. One of his wife Elaine Parker’s photographs shows him as a prototypical cowboy rancher: bearded, sunshaded, dressed for the weather in cowboy hat, quilted windcheater and leather chaps emblazoned with the Bar Cross brand, carrying a bale of hay in one hand and a baling hook in the other. 1971 was smack dab in the middle of the Dead hitting a purple patch between 1970 and 1972. During this peak period of creativity, Weir’s first solo album Ace appeared. A solo album in name only, it featured the entire mothership’s line-up, including the new kids on the block, keyboardist Keith and vocalist Donna Godchaux. It became the band’s de facto studio album of 1972. It also unveiled the new Weir/Barlow partnership, evidenced by Black-Throated Wind (written in India and the source of the title of Mother American Night: My Life in Crazy Times, Barlow’s memoir written with Robert Greenfield, to be published in 2018), Walk In The Sunshine, Looks Like Rain, Mexicali Blues and Cassidy. Though fewer numerically, the Weir/Barlow partnership went on to produce more substantial additions to the canon than any other writing partnership outside of Garcia/Hunter.

Cassidy, a lyric he wrote to an existing rhythm guitar part (rather than their more usual approach of Weir setting words), describes a welcoming and an adieu. Cassady, Barlow’s preferred (but overridden) personal spelling, was “a wave goodbye to Neal and a hallo to Cassidy”. Neal Cassady was the hero of Kerouac’s On The Road, a former Merry Prankster and the “cowboy Neal/At the wheel/Of a bus to never-ever land” of the That’s It. suite. Cassidy was the daughter of Eileen Law who “gave birth to [.] out there at the Rucka Rucka Ranch [in Marin Co., California] shortly after the time Neal Cassady died”. (At the time Law was much taken with the film Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid.) Both mother and daughter remained ever after members of the extended Dead family. The camaraderie and brotherhood of the organisation – whether the people who stood on stage, the lyricists who wrote the words, the graphic artists who painted and designed, the lighting and sound engineers – was and remains sui generis. Yet despite the new revenue stream of royalties, the Bar Cross, in the family since 1907, did eventually go under, as the feared “wholly-owned subsidiary of the Rock Springs National Bank”.

Barlow was an intensely humorous man whose conversation was peppered with drollery and deadpan asides and whose anecdotes could be devastatingly self-deprecating. An early cyber visionary, he popularised the term cyberspace, an expression he borrowed from William Gibson who coined it in his 1982 short story Burning Chrome and further promulgated it in his 1984 science fiction novel Neuromancer. Barlow was an early advocate of The WELL – short for Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link – one of the earliest virtual communities, founded in 1985 by the epidemiologist and technologist Larry Brilliant and the early LSD adventurer, Merry Prankster and Whole Earth Catalog visionary Stewart Brand. In July 1990 the month the Dead’s longest-serving keyboardist Brent Mydland with whom Barlow also wrote, died, Barlow, Mitch Kapor and John Gilmore co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation. This was a San Francisco-based, not-for-profit, digital rights group designed to promote civil liberties and champion free speech on the web. Collectively, EFP foresaw the potential of social media and the possibilities of bulletin boards were barely appreciated. It remains one of Barlow’s enduring legacies.

He died at his San Franciscan home of undisclosed causes. His 1977 marriage to Elaine Parker ended in separation after 17 years in 1992 and divorce. His survivors include his daughters, Amelia, Anna and Leah. His fiancée, Dr. Cynthia Horner, died in 1994.
John Perry Barlow, cyber-guru, free speech advocate and lyricist, was born on October 3, 1947. He died on January 6, 2018, aged 70

30. 7. 2018 | read more...

Zoe and Idris Rahman – Where Rivers Meet

[by Ken Hunt, London] This is an adapted article, based on a joint interview with Zoe and Idris Rahman that we did yards away from the Royal Festival Hall on London’s Southbank in 2008 for Jazzwise (a magazine I’ve written for since January 2001). The focus was the newly released Where Rivers Meet.

O, River also titled O nodi re opens Zoe and Idris Rahman’s Where Rivers Meet. It starts with a water ripple of piano. A consolidating flourish with shake-rattle percussion begins to purl beneath it. A reed takes up the watery melody. Melodic consolidations follow and the piano playing takes on a percussive guise – more cimbalom-like than santoor-like though. Then the sluice gates open and the ensemble pitches headlong into the melody. O, River ebbs and flows like a tidal river. It is flowing water the way Smetana’s Vlatava is flowing water.

It all fits. After all, river imagery is the fish and rice – or dhal (lentils) – of Bengali and Bangladeshi poetry. The river provides the staples of musical, lyrical and philosophical images. Watery journeys too feed the region’s music. For example, lives separated by currents and death reach an apogee of river imagery in the R.D. Burman composition Nadeer Paare Uthchhe Dhonwa (‘On the Other Side of the River, Smoke is Rising’) – a composition revisited by Asha Bhosle on the Grammy-nominated Kronos Quartet project You’ve Stolen My Heart. Yet the brother-and-sister team’s style touchstone for Where Rivers Meet isn’t disguised Baul messages to the Cosmos or the steady rowing rhythms of bhatiali – as Bengal’s boatmen  songs are known. Their meeting of rivers isn’t muddied jazz eddies pouring into some make-believe Sea of Bengal or into a Sargasso Sea of mishmash world music. That is because, even though many of the cultural touchstones on the album are Bengali, the dominant style touchstone is jazz. What Where Rivers Meet is, is a confluence of the Ganga – Ganges in anna-and-farthing old money – and the Thames.

Bengali is one of the world’s greatest literary languages. It is concentrated in present-day Bengal and Bangladesh yet also flows outwards into diaspora forms. Its literary giant of twentieth-century history was and remains Rabindranath Tagore who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913. It is also a region of enormous musical diversity and vigour. These include the region’s tribal and folk music traditions and the music of the Bauls – a tradition drenched in philosophical twists, obfuscation and triple meanings. (Baul lyricism irrigated the poetry of the likes of Tagore, The Band, Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsburg.) In the world of Hindustani art music certain Bengali names are bywords for musical excellence internationally. Take Ali Akbar Khan, Ravi Shankar, Nikhil Banerjee and Pannalal Ghosh for starters. Bengalis also rank high in annals of worldwide popular music. In terms of cultural penetration, what is now termed Bollywood music exceeds everything apart from rap, having long outstripped reggae or rock. Indian film also has long had a portmanteau job description, that of ‘music director’, encompassing composer-arranger, musician-session organiser – with illustrious names such as R.D. Burman, S.D. Burman and Hemanta Kumar Mukhopadhyay (accounting for him becoming plain Hemant Kumar in Bombay). No wonder then that Where Rivers Meet taps into both the lyricism and inspiration of both Hemant Kumar and Tagore.

Bengali music cross-fertilizes in many ways. Zoe – the pianist and, yes, there’s no umlaut (or diaeresis, meaning the two dots over a character) over the e – and Idris – the reedman – are of mixed Bengali-English bloodlines. Their Bengal-born father Mizan Ur Rahman (Zoe: “People in England, ‘obviously’ because it’s too difficult, called him Zan.”) had studied at universities in Calcutta, Dhaka and Karachi before being offered a post-graduate scholarship in English literature at Sydney University, arriving in Australia in 1962. Their Yorkshire-born mother Rita had emigrated to New Zealand as a girl in 1951 and had moved to Sydney in 1959. She was studying medicine when they met in March 1962 and they married there in 1965 and settled that year in England. In 1970 the couple and their Lancashire-born daughter Sophie put down roots in Chichester in West Sussex – which was where Zoe and Idris were born that decade.

At home they spoke English. “Otherwise we might know a bit more!” Zoe chimes in merrily. “Our Bengali is very, very basic,” confirms her brother. She continues, “We just spoke English at home. We’re very English really. He would say the odd word to us – if he wanted us to eat or leave the house quickly.” Both explode into laughter. “That’s when Bengali would come out.” It is a fitting side-tale to Where Rivers Meet that William Radice provides the translations to four of the five tracks with lyrics. He is the author of Teach Yourself Bengali – that Teach Yourself… series of self-improvement self-tutors came in mlok skvrnitý or fire salamander yellow-and-black dust jackets that would be familiar to a cpuple of generations in Britain. The Rahman siblings’ tales about how many chapters they have cracked varies too frequently to need another update to feed the fire. The fifth translation is by their father who appears on two of Where Rivers Meet‘s tracks as Mizan Rahman.

In mixed-race or mixed-nationality homes the music on the radiogram and its successors tends to ping-pong between the various cultures. I ask if their father used to listen to his music with their mother. “No,” replies Idris before they both collapse into laughter at the mere thought. Composure regained, he replies, “Maybe she wasn’t a fan, I don’t know.” “No, we do,” says his sister. “She didn’t like it.” The party line disintegrates immediately into guffaws. Shaming the devil, he says, “She didn’t like it. He used to sing while he was walking around the house, doing the washing-up and stuff – and she didn’t like that much either. That’s where we know some of these songs from actually. He used to sing bits of these songs while he was chopping onions and whatever. Doing this album was the first time we’ve actually heard these songs properly. But we knew them quite well from him singing them – in fact we knew them ‘wrong’ from him singing them. He sings them all wrong and out of time.” This causes two siblings to lose it completely. “It was really interesting to hear the proper versions,” he eventually recovers.

The first promise of what might come in a Where Rivers Meet sense was Muchhe Jaoa Dinguli, a discovery from fossicking through their father’s music collection. Its title means, their father comes to the rescue, ‘Days That Have Passed’ or ‘Days Gone By’ from the 1958 film Lukochuri (‘Hide-and-Seek’). “On my last album Melting Pot,” says Zoe, “there’s a track, which is my dad’s all-time favourite track, called Muchhe Jaoa Dinguli. That was the first time we’d done a Bengali song. I transferred a lot of old tapes to CD while [our father] was in hospital. He wanted something to listen to. On that cassette there were some other Hemant Kumar songs. They are such great tunes that you just want to play them.”

The Melting Pot (2005) version of the composition was her first overtly Bengali foray and, importantly, it also includes her brother Idris playing clarinet. Muchhe Jaoa Dinguli entered the Zoe Rahman Trio’s repertoire – the trio being Oli Hayhurst on double-bass and Gene Calderazzo on drums, both of whom play on Where Rivers Meet – and it also appears on their Live (2007) with Idris again guesting. (Live is a gig-sale album with deep currents that also draw on inspirations such as Joanne Brackeen, Dollar Brand/Abdullah Ibrahim and Phineas Newborn.) But that Muchhe Jaoa Dinguli was the latch-lifter.

“Where Rivers Meet started off with our dad’s cassettes or whatever,” clarifies Idris. “Not really a record collection. Just a few tapes. Basically the same tapes he’s been listening to for around 50 years! He’s still got them. Some old classics that he’s listened to since he was probably at school! Then it broadened out a little with experiences we had since starting the project and meeting people. The tracks with [vocalist] Arnob – which are Betrayed [‘Amar har kala korlam re’] and Stream of Joy [‘Anondo dhara’] – he taught those to us when we were in Bangladesh in 2006.” “We went over specially to record,” explains Zoe, “because we knew we were going to make this album. We went back the year after, the March of 2007, on a British Council trip.”

“Some of the other ones,” adds Zoe, “were taught to us by our cousins on our first trip to Bangladesh in ’86. One was Abar elo je sondhya [‘We’ll Surely Meet Again’]. We were taught to sing its little verse and had to perform it! At a party. My mum got a bit fed up because we were going round to all the relatives – and there were, like, 300 relatives – so we’d have a big party, the place would fill and we got up, got a harmonium and sang that song. They knew we couldn’t speak Bengali and that’s why we chose Abar elo je sondhya’.”

One of the joys of the material, says Idris, is the tunefulness of the source material. “The melodies are pretty amazing. They’re long and have interesting structures. We tried out playing some of them in our own sort of way and they worked very well. It was basically playing the tunes. We haven’t done a lot to them. We tried not to modify them too much from what they are in the original song form. They’re quite strange because of the lyrical content. The number of bars is quite odd sometimes. The vibe of the music is really beautiful. It’s very simple, melodically simple, but.”

He leaves a pregnant pause that his big sister exploits. “The violinist, Samy Bishai, did a gig with us recently and he found the melodies quite hard to learn. They don’t go where you expect them to go. The phrase length has odd measures because of the lyrics. And also rhythmically. Idris spoke about our Dad singing it in the kitchen and it being rhythmically wrong. It’s because the emphasis is in a different place. It sounds like it’s in a different place and actually is! When we heard Dad singing it you’d imagine the first beat of the bar to be in a certain place but when you heard the original and figured it out it was in a completely different place. I like those structures. A lot of the tunes are in a kind of 6/8 feel, but you’d hear the first beat of the bar actually where beat 2 is. The one that gets everyone is Tumi ele onek. Track 5.”

Asked about adapting the cadences of Bengali speech and song to the piano, Idris, the true sibling, answers, “There are quartertones and things that aren’t possible on piano. There are a lot of inflexions in-between the syllables. You can do it on the clarinet to a certain extent.” “I wish you could on the piano,” says his sister in classic sibling word-in-edgeways style. “But that’s partly why it is an album of piano and clarinet. The melody is the most important thing on this particular album. And staying true to the original sounds. You can only really achieve that on clarinet. You can’t get that subtlety on the piano. There is piano on the originals of a lot of these tracks. So, interestingly when we played it with [tabla player and percussionist] Kuljit Bhamra when we went round to his place, he immediately said that, for him, piano and clarinet is a certain sound that he recognises in that old film music. They did have piano and clarinet.”

The thing that has to be stressed is that while the source material is profoundly Bengali, Where Rivers Meet is profoundly jazz in orientation. And the concluding Tagore composition Do You Wish To Forget (‘Purano sei’) – with its feints at ‘Auld Lang Syne’ – is just a perfect bridge between cultures. One of the most inspiring and inspirational personal turn-ons of 2008 has been discovering the Rahman Siblings, whether Idris Rahman playing with the clarinettist Arun Ghosh or exploring Zoe Rahman’s back-catalogue. Not everybody gets to board the train at the first station. Zoe Rahman’s music and musicianship eluded me before Where Rivers Meet and now I cannot imagine my soundscape without her pianistic insights on and into life. Save future blushes and get aboard the train sooner rather than later. There are worlds I know I have yet to discover in Where Rivers Meet. There is no higher praise.

With special thanks to Mizan Ur Rahman. And the kismet of bumping into Hannah Vlček of the RVW Trust at the official unveiling of the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library and the ripples that meeting led to. Such was the demand after I reviewed Live in Jazzwise that Zoe Rahman Trio (Live) received a pukka release in 2009.

http://www.zoerahman.com/

http://www.jazzwisemagazine.com/

11. 2. 2018 | read more...

Giant Donut Discs ® – January 2018

[by Ken Hunt, London] This column brings together Najma Akhtar, Iva Bittová & Čikori, The Byrds, DAgADAnA, Dillard & Clark, Dick Gaughan, Rhiannon Giddens, Kaia Kater, Eddie Reader and Wilson & Swarbrick.

From February 2018 another source of information is https://twitter.com/KenHunt01

Both Sides The Tweed – Dick Gaugham

As somebody whose entire adult life has been lived as a bilingual European of unknown parentage, let alone bloodlines, I chose European as an identity. I believe the absolute folly of Brexit will haunt my grandchildren and their grandchildren. The only way to reform the European Union’s many and various failings was to remain part of the European Union.

In January 2014 I talked to Dick Gaughan about Scotland’s the proposed succession from the United Kingdom then in the offing. The referendum on Scottish independence took place that September and the vote was to remain. The River Tweed was the historic boundary between Scotland and England. A key sentiment in the song is “Let friendship and honour unite/And flourish on both sides of the Tweed”.

He expounded on the subject for R2, “What I understand that song to be saying is pretty much in line with where Scots in general ;are at the moment that is, trying to combat this idea that somehow or another seeking independence for Scotland is an exception. Because it’s not. It’s far from it. Of course, the Brits have a vested interest in pushing the line that it’s all anti-English. To be quite honest, it’s crap. It’s nothing to do with England, nothing at all: it’s to do with the United Kingdom and Scotland’s relationship with the rest of the United Kingdom.

“I think that ‘Both Sides The Tweed’ is in line with contemporary thinking within Scotland. Although it’s 30-odd years since I resurrected it as a song, edited with my amendments to it, the reason I leapt on the song even back then was it was a counter to the racism I had felt on both sides of ;the border. I had experienced anti-Scots feeling in England and I’d experienced anti-English feeling in Scotland. I thought this is not the way. There is more to it than that. It is not about Scotland being anti-English or England being anti-Scottish.

“There is something much more fundamental than that which is a nation’s self-sense of itself, how we view the rest of the world and how we relate to the rest of the world. That has to be free of prejudice. Otherwise why bother? If the only thing you’ve got in your favour is to be anti-something, then you’ve got nothing in your favour at all.”

The EU referendum took place in the United Kingdom and Gibraltar in June 2016. Scotland voted to remain. It was something repeated over and over at the Rudolstadt Festival 2017, at which Scotland was the regional theme. I kept harkening back to Dick Gaughan at Tanz&FolkFest Rudolstadt. And recalled one year sitting outside the Hotel Adler on the market square (Am Markt) at a table with him, Ian Telfer and John Jones of the Oysterband, drinking a beer and shootin’ the breeze. He recorded this song on his 1981 masterpiece Handful of Earth (Topic PSCD419) but the version I gravitate to is Gaughan’s director solo live version from that festival’s 1993 live album.

A note: At the Edinburgh Folk Festival in 1993 I was interviewing Archie, Cilla and Ray Fisher for a Sing Out! article. Gaughan was performing there with Clan Alba. At one point he took me aside and warned me about people hearing my accent if I went into some pubs in the city.

From Tanz & Folkfest Rudolstadt ’93 (RUCD 93-1, 1993)

Through The Morning, Through The Night – Dillard & Clark

One day a very long time ago in Bethlehem – an old expression goes – I breezed into Collet’s at its 70 New Oxford Street address. It was a folk record shop upstairs (and a jazz emporium in the cellar). On the ground floor behind the counter was a grizzled man who became a lifelong friend. His name was Hans Fried. It must have been 1968 because he played me the first album by Dillard & Clark called The Fantastic Expedition of Dillard & Clark. It had only just come out. Dillard & Clark were the early Byrd Gene Clark and the bluegrass banjo player Doug Dillard of the Dillards.

Through The Morning, Through The Night was the title song of their second LP which came out the next year. They shone and were gone. I met Clark in London – about year before his death. Backstage at Dingwalls in Camden Lock we talked about sitting down and scheduling an interview when he came back the following year. He died in May 1991 and Dillard in May 2012. I never met Dillard. Alison Krauss and Robert Plant covered Polly and Through the Morning, Through the Night on Raising Sand (2007). Both were fine interpretations. I don’t think anybody ever bothered to capitalise on that windfall of interest with a proper reissue. Goodness knows, the A&M Mobile Fidelity edition missed many tricks. From The Fantastic Expedition Of Dillard & Clark/Through The Morning Through The Night (A&M Mobile Fidelity MFCD 791, [undated])

Saint Elizabeth – Kaia Kater

The Canadian singer and musician opened for Rhiannon Giddens on her Farewell Highway tour in Britain at the end of 2017. This was the concluding song of her set. It was a song so beguiling on first pass that she has me craning forward to make of sense of what it is about.

I like the rough edges of the recording. One day she is going to commit this marvellous song to a better recording. Get it now before in this version because rough edges often tend to be chamfered away. From Nine Pin (Mavens Music KKH19-11, 2016)

So You Want To Be A Rock ‘N’ Roll Star – The Byrds

Younger Than Yesterday was the Byrds’ fourth LP album. It was released in 1967. Co-written by Jim McGuinn and Chris Hillman, the song gained traction as an American rock anthem. At this point they were Jim McGuinn on lead guitar and vocals, David Crosby on rhythm guitar and vocals, Chris Hillman on electric bass and vocals and Michael Clarke on drums.

While it’s been said its musical main hook is McGuinn’s 12-string Rickenbacker riff, for me two other elements which outshone anything else were Hillman’s unrelenting bassline and session musician Hugh Masekela’s soaring trumpet. Between electric bass and brass they keep the song’s body and soul together.

The reason it came back to prey on my mind was the death of the South African trumpet and flugelhorn player, Hugh Masekela on 23 January 2018, coupled with a commission to write an obituary of him for February 2018. I started pulling out things from my library shelves.

So You Want To Be A Rock ‘N’ Roll Star is one of the Byrds’ most anthologised, most heard songs. Logging in at under two minutes and ten seconds, it squashes in a lot about fame, whipped up fame at that cynicism. Apparently the screaming girls were recorded in Bournemouth on England’s South Coast. No reason to throw that in, apart from it adding a spurious English element. From The Byrds (Columbia/Legacy 46773, 1990)

A w Tomu Sadu – DAgADAnA

Daga Gregorowicz (vocals, electronika) and Dana Vynnytska (vocals, piano) are a duo I first came across in 2016 when Meridian 68 first came out in Poland in 2016. The Jaro edition keeps the music but changes the packaging, dropping the Polish content of the booklet’s text. Musically they blend Polish and Ukrainian cultural and mixed music elements often with a experimental daring unlike anyone else. Here they just sing. A w Tomu Sadu (In That Orchard) is a Slav, apparently specifically Ukrainian ritual song from Myropil in Romaniv Raion in Ukraine’s Zhytomyr Oblast – oblast just means region or district but with a post-Soviet bureaucratic overlay. From Meridian 68 (Jaro 4339-2 [undated])

https://www.jaro.de/artists/dagadana/

The Love We Almost Had – Rhiannon Giddens

Writing about a song of Rhiannon Giddens for my next RPM column of political song in RnR, I allowed myself the indulgence of leaving Freedom Highway to continue playing. This song was a fixture in her Freedom Highway Tour that I had caught at Milton Keynes and reviewed for that same magazine. Why fight the inevitable? This is a touching tale worth telling.

“The way you almost held my hand, dear
The time you kissed my cheek
The words that never left your lips, love
But I heard week after week.”

From Freedom Highway (Nonesuch 7559-79396-1, 2017)

PS At The Purchaser’s Option is my RPM column’s choice for March/April 2018. http://www.rock-n-reel.co.uk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpmE5m8AW6U

Black Is The Colour – Najma Akhtar

Najma Akhtar first entered my consciousness with the release of her astounding Qareeb in 1988. I reviewed it in Folk Roots and at its launch we spoke for the first time. A special friendship started that day. She later has performed, perhaps most famously, with Robert Plant and Jimmy Page on their 1994 album, No Quarter. She came to my 65th birthday bash with her mother who for the longest while I have cheekily called Oor Najma’s Mum.

This track is from her impending Five Rivers. This traditional song – Black Is the Colour (of My True Love’s Hair) – has by its very nature been around for a fair while. The litany of people who have recorded it is lengthy. Early American folkies such as John Jacob Niles and Burl Ives recorded it in the 1940s. Later it was sung by Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, Cara Dillon, Christy Moore and so on.

Najma Akhtar’s original take on the song with a post-folk rock sensibility is provides food for thought. Her vocals are quite unlike any other version or interpretation I have ever heard. I shall be writing more about this project. She is back in form. From a “private sample” of Five Rivers (Promo 2018)

http://www.najmaakhtar.com/

Jamie Come Try Me – Eddie Reader

For decades, January 25 has meant some musical input, cheer and reflection from Robert Burns. Jamie Come Try Me is definitely on the good cheer side of the fence and Eddie Reader’s version here has long been the one of my absolute favourite interpretations. It is one of Burns’ slyest pieces of mischief.

He takes the part of a woman angling for a man by the name of Jamie. Coquettish in an extreme in the original, Eddie Reader sings it like a dream. Perfect Burns Night fare. From The Songs of Robert Burns – Deluxe Edition (Rough Trade RTRADCDX097, 2008)

Red Rose Medley – Wilson & Swarbrick

This is another song that brings back memories of Dave Swarbrick and me laughing like drains. It was one of two tracks he played me in 2010 while we doing an interview at upstairs in his home in Coventry. (The other was Alistair Hulett’s Among Proddy Dogs and Papes.)The interview’s main focus was his wondrous raison d’être (2010). It had taken him from 2002 to 2010 to put together and the craft was astonishing. Even when he was promoting himself, he couldn’t resist talking about his project with Jason Wilson.

This song combines Robert Burns and Bob Marley. As I write this on my ‘to do’ list is going to the Swarb! It Suits Him Well memorial gig at the Nettlebed Folk Club in Oxfordshire. From Lion Rampant (Shirty Records SHIRTY4, 2014)

PS I am now going to plug a website and internet resource I believe to be one of the finest on the planet in terms of covering folk music. Please, please check out Reinhard Zierke’s Mainly Norfolk website. https://mainlynorfolk.info/swarb/records/lionrampant.html

A Paper Cone – Iva Bittová & Čikori

I don’t write many lyrics but I wrote A Paper Cone (of Cherries). Writing song lyrics is like sending children out into the world and never knowing what they do or are up to. In June 2017 I finally got to see Iva Bittová & Čikori perform this song of ours in Castle Courtyard, Ethno Port Poznań in the Polish city of Poznań. Proud father. From At Home (Pavian, PM0100-2, 2016)

https://www.bittova.com/diskografie-zobraz.php?id=40

The copyright of all images lies with the respective photographers, companies and image-makers. The Dick Gaughan interview material and the Dick Gaughan from his Twickfolk gig at 9 November 2014 in Twickenham © Ken Hunt/Swing 51 Archives.

10. 2. 2018 | read more...

David Crosby – On inspiration, patterns of writing songs and influences

[by Ken Hunt, London, Burns Night 2018] David Crosby is a musician whose influence is paramount to the way my musical tastes developed. Directly or indirectly. This interview snippet is drawn from a far longer one conducted in September 2012 for an article in R2 that appeared at the time of the release of the 2012 DVD set.

Here we discuss, among other subjects, a range of possibilities to do with writing songs and the influence of the Nubian oud player Hamza El Din. Hamza, it turned out serendipitously, had also been an influence on Crosby. And mirroring my own experience in a similar way to Ravi Shankar he opened my head to another set of possibilities with his Nonesuch Explorer LP Escalay. I would later interview him for the Kronos Quartet project Pieces of Africa and in his own right. He became a friend.

So, we’re here to talk about you and the chaps…

[Laughter] Yes. Ask anything.

Just arising out of the DVD [2012] there is this lovely transferrable maxim from a rather good songwriter whose name was Robbie Burns. He talked about talking about a problem rather than “nursing your wrath to keep it warm”. He talked about instead of bottling it up, getting it out. I thought that was a useful transferrable maxim for some of the stuff that CS&N had done.

I think that part of our job is talking about stuff that disturbs us or that we see. I think that goes right back to the troubadour days in Middle Ages Europe. Part of our job admittedly is just to make you boogie. Part of our job is to take you on more emotional voyages. But part of our job is to carry the news. So, we do talk about things that are going on. In America there’s some really awful stuff that’s happening. We’ve lost our Constitution. Our votes no longer count. It’s a corporatocracy and they run the country. And that’s a very disturbing thing.

So, yes, we do get stuff off our chests pretty often. Sometimes it is political. I think mostly we write about, you know, love: love lost, love found, love celebrated, love remembered. But, yeah, we do talk about the real world some of the time.

You can’t go on stage and just preach. That really doesn’t work. And it’s not our place to do it, but we can look at something and say, ‘That isn’t right.’ Or, ‘We believe that it is not right.’ I think the best we ever did was probably Neil’s song Ohio, but we’ve done it a lot of times. And I think it is part of what we’re supposed to do.

How did you as a band respond to Almost Gone being put into your lap?

We all jumped on it. Because we don’t think the man was treated fairly or is being treated fairly. We thought that he did a very brave thing and gave the American people a glimpse into the inner workings of our political, diplomatic and military machinations. We thought that Nash had done his job and we tried to support him.

How did he bring the song to the table?

[Laughter] He sat down and sang it.

But it wasn’t, as you describe in the DVD, with you handing Neil Young a magazine and him firing off Ohio. He brought the song to you?

Well, it’s a very organic thing. We just sit down with each other and sing the song. We used to call it the ‘reality rule’. If you couldn’t sit down and sing the song to somebody and make them feel something, then it wasn’t really done yet or it wasn’t the one. But if you can sit down and sing a song to the other guys and they say, ‘Oh yeah, I get that,’ then it’s real and we do it.

In that book that Graham Nash oversaw – I’ll use that expression – Off The Record, you talk about the difference between competition and cooperation and you come up with an aurochs line, hunting the wild beast, so to speak. Do songs tend to be brought in a fairly finished state to you as a band?

They grow as they are put into the chemistry. One of us may think up a counter-line, the way we did in Teach Your Children. Or one of us may say, ‘I don’t think that’s the best way to say that. What if you said, ‘Ta-da-da-da-de-da‘?’ We improve each other’s work, we always have.

How has that gone with writing credits therefore? Are you fairly lax about those matters?

Yeah. We’re not doing it to try to get a piece of the pie. We’re doing it to make the song better. Sometimes it’s so absolutely obvious that we’re writing a song together that we give credit to each other. But very often we don’t even bother because we’ve all done it for each other so many times that it’s all balanced out.

What might be an example of credit where credit’s due?

I have a song called Camera [on After The Storm, 1994] that I wrote largely about my father [Floyd Crosby] who was a cinematographer and photographer. I just didn’t have the chorus. Stephen said, ‘It needs a chorus.’ So I said, ‘Well, freakin’ write one!’ And he did – and so it became a Crosby/Stills song. When the guy gives you the whole chorus you really can’t ignore that.

But there have been some pieces where they were just contributions and we don’t beat each other up about that. We didn’t do this to make money. [Guffaws]

You lying toad!

Ahh, we did it with the intention to meet girls… [Still laughing] After we’d gotten the attention of girls we did it because we thought it was the most fun thing we could do. So, we don’t really worry too much about that. We’re not desperate for credit or money – either one. All of us have written well. Anybody who doesn’t know that we can write, sing and play isn’t listening.

So we don’t really agonise over, [mock-indignant tone] ‘Well, I thought those three words up!’ No, we don’t do that.

With the new material on the DVD, had you – for instance, with your Radio – road-tested those songs before the filming?

Yeah. We’ve been doing that one since the beginning of the tour because the guys liked it. It’s part of a record that James and I are making. My son James is the keyboard player. He is a brilliant writer and a much better musician than I am. I’m inordinately proud of him. He and I brought that one to the other guys. We said, ‘We’d like to try this one,’ and they said, ‘Oh, goody.’ They jumped on it. It seems to go down well.

A friend of mine, now dead, came up with a great line. His name was Hamza El Din and…

You know Hamza El Din?

Yeah. Knew him.

You’re talking about the oud player?

The oud and tar player.

I know the instrument you’re talking about and I know the man. Hamza El Din is amazing. Friends with him?

Anyway, Hamza had this wonderful piece called Escalay which means ‘water wheel’. He told me this story that when he was a feisty youngster he played this composition quite fast, you know, as if the water wheel was going round fast. Then when he got older it got slower. And when he got to his mature years it was even slower still. And I wondered – and there are two parts to this [question] – how, first, the physicality of playing the music affects you now compared with earlier…

Pretty much the same way. The excitement of playing music has not dimmed. But we do some tricks to try to sustain it. We change the arrangements of things pretty much all the time. We change things night by night. You’ll hear Nash and I take chances with the harmony off the record. We’ll sing something completely different. We do that in order to keep the stuff fresh and to keep ourselves from becoming like a wind-up toy. We constantly try to find new things in the songs to excite us, to get that little thrill out of the song. I think that’s a really healthy thing. I hope that it continues. So far it’s still working really well for us.

One of the things I found interesting is how little you’ve changed the tempos. The arrangements may change but the tempos are fairly fixed.

A tempo is a large part of how the emotional content of the song works. We rarely slow something down or speed it up. We do change the arrangement a lot, but not very much with tempos. You’re very observant there.

I don’t know about observant. I just pay attention.

That’s what I meant.

Since we are of advancing years, you and I both, do you believe in Dr. Stage?

What’s that mean?

If you’re feeling poorly or under the weather or out of salts, when you get on stage you suddenly feel better.

Yes.

Dr. Stage is an actorly term in England.

You know, I’ve been through a lot. I’ve got a number of things completely bonkered in my health and in my body. But the minute that I start singing I feel wonderful and I don’t notice any of that stuff.

Are you still a record collector?

Yes. In a very specific sense. I do look for two kinds of things.

I look for great singer-songwriters. And sometimes I find them! Somebody like Shawn Colvin or Marc Cohn. Or this young man that I’ve just recently met: Marcus Eaton. You can find them. They’re rare but they do exist.

The other thing I look for is world music, music from other countries and cultures that affects me very strongly. Hamza El Din stunned me as a player, almost as much as Ravi who was the first other-music-stream person to penetrate my consciousness. I thought Ravi Shankar could move a melody around as skilfully as John Coltrane. I was very affected by it and one of the first things that I did when I met the Beatles was to tell George about Ravi. He says, he said, and I don’t know if it’s absolutely true because I wasn’t there, that I was the one to turn him on to Indian music, which obviously affected the hell out of him once he heard it. I don’t know if that’s true but that’s what he said, so I’m goin’ to go with that.

I do really like other kinds of music because it affects me. It widens my palette of colours. It stretches the envelope.

© 2018, Ken Hunt/Swing 51



25. 1. 2018 | read more...

Best of 2017

[by Ken Hunt, London] The music I love music best tends to be music that needs to be played live, the better for it to evolve, blossom, thrive and survive. Music you know or suspect is never going to be performed exactly that way again. In Britain, compared to the Indo-Pakistani subcontinent’s music, concert-goers get relatively few chances to see Persian classical music reveal its merits and mysteries. It is often better on mainland Europe. Mahsa & Marjan Vahdat revealed that with a marvellous concert at the Parisian Théâtre des Abbesses in Paris. (One of the Théâtre de la Ville’s temporarily relocated venues.) The common link was they all left me thinking.

Compared to recent years, little by way of street music or busking made me stop and listen. The band at the Dar Essalam in Marrakesh, the restaurant in which Hitchcock filmed a restaurant scene for The Man Who Knew Too Much, with its excellent (Egyptian) oud player stood out. We talked about the Nubian oud player Hamza El Din and old Bombay film hits afterwards. On San Marco in Venice an ensemble fielding shifting  line-ups played a mixed repertoire of jazz and dance band standards. Apart from an unidentifiable tango, they wafted me back to my father’s warm-ups before going out gigging. Naming that tune in three turned into two, then one. The photo here is of a musician who “played real good/On his clarinet, for free”. Or if not for free then for the price of a chair, a plate of nibbles and an Aperol sprit in St. Mark’s Square. (Spritz seemed to be sprit in the osterie mainly frequented by locals for a glass of something wet and cicchetti or Venetian tapas-like snacks.) As this musician whose name I don’t know played, that line from Joni Mitchell’s For Free flashed into my head. ‘Cin cin!’ to a musician whose name I don’t know.

One of the great joys, illuminations and ruminations of the year had Peggy Seeger at its centre. Two books about her – a biography and her autobiography – emerged. Experiencing her breathtaking concert-reading with her sons Neill and Calum MacColl at Cecil Sharp House in London in November 2017 in the company of Bonnie Dobson and my wife Santosh heightened the experience. A remarkable friend and a wonderful friendship.

New releases aka Playlist

The number reflects travel and music festivals and a more active reviewing year than planned or originally wished for.

Sam Amidon / The Following Mountain / Nonesuch
Slick Aguilar, Tom Constanten, Mark Karan, Peter Kaukonen and Prairie Prince / Live Dead ’69 / Tyrell Replicants
Ridina Ahmedová and Petr Tichý / HLASkontraBAS / Poli5
Maniucha Bikont and Ksawery Wójciski / Oj borom, borom…/ Wodzirej
Blazin’ Fiddles / The Key / Blazin’ Fiddles Records)
Billy Bragg / Bridges Not Walls / http://billybragg.co.uk/bridgesnotwalls/
Jackson Browne / The Road East – Live In Japan / Inside Recordings (Japan)
Eliza Carthy & The Wayward Band / Big Machine / Topic
Daphne’s Flight / Knows Time, Knows Change / Fledg’ling
Debashish Bhattacharya / Hawaii To Calcutta: A Tribute To Tau Moe / Riverboat Records
The Dhol Foundation / Basant / ECC Records
Rhiannon Giddens / Factory Girl EP / Nonesuch
Rhiannon Giddens / Freedom Highway / Nonesuch
Gwyneth Glyn / Tro / bendigedig
Mickey Hart / RAMU / Verve Forecast
Robb Johnson / Songs From The Last Seven Years / Irregular
Lisa Knapp / Till April Is Dead – A Garland of May / [promo]
Kronos Quartet, Sam Amidon, Olivia Chaney, Rhiannon Giddens & Natalie Merchant / Folk Songs / Nonesuch
Lankum / Between Earth & Sky / Rough Trade
Lo’Jo / Fonetiq Flowers /World Village
Christy Moore / On The Road / Sony Music
Lars Mřller & Aarhus Jazz Orchestra feat. The Danish Sinfonietta, Kala Ramnath & Abhijit Banerjee / Glow of Benares / Dacapo Records
Nishtiman Project / Kobane / Accords Croisés
Offa Rex / Queen of Hearts / Nonesuch
Robert Plant and the Sensational Space Shifters / Carry Fire / Nonesuch
Christine Primrose / Gràdh is Gonadh – Guth ag aithris (Love and Loss – A Lone Voice) / Temple
Alan Reid & Rob Van Sante / The Dear Green Place / Red Sands Records
Martin Simpson / Trails & Tribulations / Topic
Jenny Sturgeon / The Wren and The Salt Air / www.jennysturgeonmusic.com
Sutari / Osty / Unzipped Fly Records
Richard Thompson / Acoustic Classics II / Proper
Tiger Lillies / Cold Night In Soho / Misery Guts
Happy Traum / I Walk The Road Again / Lark’s Nest Music
Trad Attack! / Kullakarva Shimmer Gold / Trad.Attack Music
Trio Da Kali and Kronos Quartet / Ladilikan / World Circuit
Various / Babylon Berlin – Original Motion Picture Soundtrack / BMG
Various / Too Sad For The Public – Vol 1 – Oysters Ice Cream Lemonade (American Folk Fantasies Written and Arranged by Dick Connette) / Storysound Records
Marry Waterson & David A. Jaycock / Death had Quicker Wings than Love / One Little Indian
Yorkston/Thorne/Khan / Neuk Wight Delhi All Stars / Domino
Maria Youssef / Syrian Dreams / Harmonia Mundi

Historic releases, reissues and anthologies

The Bulgarian Voices / Angelite – Passion Mysticism Delight / Jaro
Archie Fisher & Barbara Dickson / Thro’ The Recent Years / Gonzo
Lal & Mike Waterson / Bright Phoebus – Songs by Lal & Mike Waterson / Domino
Roger McGough / Summer with Monika / Fledg’ling
Ravi Shankar / Ghanashyam: A Broken Branch / East Meets West Music
Various / Rudolstadt-Festival 2017 / heideck
Various / Woody Guthrie – The Tribute Concerts / Bear Family

Events of 2017

There were many outstanding concerts this year. In chronological order these stood out for planting seeds and sending me away thinking. Beyond the sheer pleasure of music, what finer criterion is there?

Tom Constanten, Slick Aguilar, Mark Karan, Tony Morley and Richard Newman / Under The Bridge, Fulham, London / 3 February 2017
Broadside Ballads / Folk at The Foundling, Foundling Museum, London / 26 February 2017
Leon Rosselson and Robb Johnson / Cecil Sharp House, London / 8 March 2017
Iva Bittová with Marc Sinan and Dresden Philharmonic Orchestra „I Exist“ – nach Rajasthan  / Radialsystem V, Berlin / 2 April 2017
Mahsa & Marjan Vahdat / Théâtre des Abbesses, Paris / 20 May 2017
Abida Parveen / Royal Festival Hall, Alchemy Festival, London / 28 May 2017
Iva Bittová & Cikori with Antonin Fajt At Home / Castle Courtyard, Ethno Port Poznań, Poland / 10 June 2017
Debashish Bhattacharya & Kacper Malisz / The Grand Hall, Ethno Port Poznań / 11 June 2017
Yorkston Thorne Khan / Stadtkirche, Rudolstadt-Festival / 7 July 2017
Sutari / Theater im Stadthaus, Rudolstadt-Festival / 8 July 2017
Chitravina Ravikiran / Stadtkirche, Rudolstadt-Festival / 9 July 2017
Trio-Da-Kali / Konzertbühne (Heinepark), Rudolstadt-Festival / 9 July 2017
Roy Bailey with Marc Bloch / Green Note, London / 6 September 2017
Happy Traum Coming of Age in the Greenwich Village Folk Revival and the Woodstock Scene (1954-1971) / Cecil Sharp House / 20 October 2017
Amit Chaudhuri and Adam Moore, On Inspiration / Asia House, London / 2 November 2017
Yorkston Thorne Khan / London International Arts Festival / Rich Mix, London / 3 November 2017
Peggy Seeger and Family / Cecil Sharp House, London / 16 November 2017

A baker’s dozen of past music projects, released before 2017, either newly introduced journeys of exploration or ones which returned to inspire in the course of writing this year.

B.J. Cole/Emily Burridge / Into the Blue / www.bjcole.co.uk and www.emilyburridge.com / 2008
Olivia Chaney / The Longest River / Nonesuch, 2015
Ornette Coleman and Prime Time / Jazzbühne Berlin ’88 Vol. 5 / Repertoire Records, 1990
DagaDana / Meridian 68 / Karrot Kommando, n.d. [2016]
Kaleidoscope / Pulsating Dream – The Epic Recordings / Acadia/Evangeline, 2004
Kaia Kater / Nine Pin / Mavens Music
Yusef Lateef / Eastern Sounds / Prestige
A.L. Lloyd / Bramble Briars and Beams of the Sun / Fellside, 2011
Nørn / Fridj / Suisa, 2004
Helena Matuszewska & Marta Sołek / Projekt.Kolberg/ Karrot Kommando, 2015
Traffic / Mr Fantasy / Island Masters, 1968 (sic)
Mahsa & Marjan Vahdat / Twinklings of Hope / Kirkelig Kulturverksted, 2012
Yorkston/Thorne/Khan / Everything Sacred / Domino, 2016

The Woody Guthrie – The Tribute Concerts image of Rick Danko and Bob Dylan is courtesy of and © Bear Family. The image of Nørn circa Fridj is © Suisa. In the latest installment showing its varying fortunes, Smile is the 2017 edition of the local Banksy, taken one day in July 2017. The images of the (unknown) clarinettist in Venice and this year’s Smile are © Ken Hunt. The Mahsa & Marjan Vahdat in Paris photo is © Santosh Hunt/Swing 51 Archives.

An afterthought

Humankind’s knowledge of the planet has been in a state of flux since time immoral. What the species is doing in the name of profit is nobody’s business. One of the discoveries of 2017 was Synalpheus pinkfloydi. Now the nominal band there never was one for me. However, a Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute project collected this so-called Pink Floyd pistol shrimp in the vicinity of Las Perlas Archipelago in Panama Bay. Publishing its discovery Arthur Anker, Kristin M. Hultgren and Sammy De Grave explained of its range how the wee beastie is “unlikely to occur on the Dark Side of the Moon due to lack of suitable habitat…”

31. 12. 2017 | read more...

Giant Donut Discs ® – December 2017

[by Ken Hunt, London] This column brings together Maniucha Bikont and Ksawery Wójcinski, Jackson Browne, Olivia Chaney, Tracy Chapman, B.J. Cole/Emily Burridge, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Sandy Denny, Johnny Hallyday, Helena Matuszewska & Marta Sołek and, take a deep breath, Lars Moller & Aarhus Jazz Orchestra featuring The Danish Sinfonietta & Abhijit Banerjee. Now exhale. Apologies for the reminiscing so much.

Waxwing – Olivia Chaney

One Wednesday this October gone, Olivia Chaney and I met at Kew Gardens station. We had been writing to each other because we had a friend staying with us whose singing and artistry had been a real influence on her. On her collaboration with the Decemberists called Queen of Hearts (2017), she sings a song from the repertoire of Anne Briggs. That was the impetus to me asking whether she fancied meeting Anne. I had a hunch they might enjoy meeting.

And that was why the three of us spent an excellent day at the botanical gardens at Kew walking and talking until dusk approached and the temperature began to drop. We adjourned wisely to the Tap On The Line, the pub at the station exit on the Kew Gardens side. There we continued talking, sharing ideas and making connections until past nightfall.

Waxwing is a song by Alasdair Roberts, arranged by Chaney, on her debut solo album, The Longest River. “Waxwing, waxwing, what do you bring/From the frozen north?/Waxwing, waxwing, we’ve been waiting on you.” The song and its subject matter have a number of personal resonances foe me. One time in Robin Hood’s Bay on the Yorkshire coast with Lal Waterson and her husband George Knight, as we crested the top of the steep hill from the pub, I heard birds calling. They caused me to train my ears to pinpoint the source of the unfamiliar voice. They were waxwings in all their elegant winter finery. I referred to that incident in the article about Lal Waterson with a rara avis link.

Alasdair Roberts’ song also has references to amber – “I bring the amber that I have gathered/On the northern seashore…” and “We have no need, no need of your amber,/Likewise your gold and your jewels…” Those lines wafted me back to exploring Prague in the early 1990s and Václavské náměstí. Back then Wenceslas Square had many Cold War hangovers. One was Polish shop selling amber jewellery. From The Longest River (Nonesuch 7559-79562-7, 2015)

Epilogue: Mumbai Footprints – Lars Møller & Aarhus Jazz Orchestra feat. The Danish Sinfonietta & Abhijit Banerjee

This track is unique on this Danish-Indian album as it is the sole performance that doesn’t feature the primary Indian soloist, the violinist Kala Ramnath. Its launch pad is Lars Møller taking on the jazz saxophonist Wayne Shorter’s composition Footprints from Adam’s Apple (1966). It is a composition that has figured periodically in Møller’s career. The combination of Abhijit Banerjee’s tabla and Jonas Johansen’s kit drums underpins the performance rhythmically. The soloist on electric guitar is Thor Madsen and his playing is simply divine. It’s not the most obvious track to choose, I confess. From Glow of Benares (Dacapo Records 8.226115, 2017)

Stand By Me – Tracy Chapman

This song appears on the remastered Greatest Hits album in a live version from The Late Show with David Letterman recorded on 16 April 2015. It is a solo version of the Ben E. King, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller song. Just electric guitar and voice. It distills the sound that turned my head about her.

When her eponymous debut album appeared in 1982 was released I reviewed it for Folk Roots and I have a dim memory of reviewing her major London show at the Royal Albert Hall for the same magazine. Too many decades of writing and too much auto-erase after reviewing to remember. (How many times have heard my words quoted as if for the first time of hearing them?) Tracy Chapman’s interpretation is lower-key than John Lennon’s but it is also moreish. From Greatest Hits (Elektra 081227950132, 2015)

Goniony – Helena Matuszewska & Marta Sołek

This is the opening track of Helena Matuszewska (right) and Marta Sołek’s interdisciplinary instrumental work, Projekt.Kolberg. The surname in the title is a reference to Poland’s celebrated ethnographer Oskar Kolberg (1814-1890), one of the folklorists of the Slav lands who shone light on the riches of their homelands. The album fell into my lap through an introduction to Marta Sołek one bright June day in 2016 in the Imperial Castle in Poznań, the palace popularly called Zamek.

The chain of events that led up to that meeting had begun at the Colours of Ostrava in the Czech Republic in July 2014. I had an invitation to attend the festival – one of Europe’s greatest music festivals – and that led to doing a bit more public speaking than originally touted because I wound up talking to Emilíana Torrini and 9Bach as part of the festival. Unbeknownst to me it proved to be one of the most life-changing festivals of my time on the planet. Not merely for the music and the festival but especially for the people I got to know there. One, for example, was the Canadian writer Paul Wilson whose life was entwined with Czechoslovakia’s punk-tinged rock group, the Plastic People of the Universe. On our hotel terrace in Ostrava over successive nights a bunch of us, festival directors, agents, musicians and writers met after the festival. We drank wine or whatever and drank deep of music and poetry. One night, though how it came about exactly is lost, Wilson and I talked about raga and the Plastic People of the Universe.

Bear with me, I’m getting to the point. Another of the people I first met at Colours of Ostrava was the Polish man-about-town Mateusz Dobrowolski. Two years later we met again at Ethno Port Poznań. He introduced me to Marta. She gave me this album. I listened to some of it that night after the festival and couldn’t believe my ears.

Goniony translates as Chased. On it Helena plays the suka, Poland’s unique fiddle bowed and played upright, using fingernail technique. Marta fiddle and cello. The melody is gorgeous, a folk dance the delivery of which is like something out of an  Early Music repertoire. From Projekt.Kolberg (Karrot Kommando KK80, 2015)

Almost Cut My Hair – Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young

Steve Silberman in the booklet notes to this 3CD anthology of the work of David Crosby says how this track (which originally appeared on the band’s 1970 Déjà Vu LP) “can seem like hippie kitsch now”. It’s a good line. Administrations and regimes come and go but some take longer to go and outlive several lifetimes. Choosing this piece of “paranoia and defiance” (referring to Crosby’s delivery) fitted. I got a heavy cold for Christmas, my winter haircut trim went wrong. And this song kept playing in my head over and over.

Crosby for all his faults, many and various, has been a consistent influence beginning with the Byrds but via this outfit and his solo album If I Could Only Remember My Name… through to the present. Plus Crosby is a dream interviewee, experience has taught me. From Voyage (Atlantic/Rhino 8122-77628-2, 2006)

Out of the Blue No 2 – B.J. Cole/Emily Burridge

An introduction from the Canadian singer and songwriter Bonnie Dobson whose curious ears seldom do other than amaze me. She amazes me because I thought I listened to a fair amount of music. This is a composition by Emily Burridge. It opens this duo album of pedal steel and cello duets. The artwork says this is a “limited edition”. Its music is quite outside the norm. Other pieces are house arrangements of Satie, Purcell and Copland. From Into The Blue – Duets for pedal steel guitar and cello (BJEM01, 2015)

Lives In The Balance – Jackson Browne

This song of Jackson Browne’s has been around for a fair few years and down the decades I have written a fair few words about it. It is about “secret wars” and coffers filled. The band here is Browne, Althea Mills and Chavonne Stewart on vocals. The rest of the band is Bob Glaub on bass, Greg Leisz and Val McCallum on guitars, Mauricio Lewak on drums and Jeff Young on keyboards. A refreshing take on a song, the relevance of which has not diminished in the slightest. From The Road East – Live In Japan (Inside Recordings SICX 30050, 2017)

Oj borom, borom – Maniucha Bikont and Ksawery Wójciński

This was another tip-off. It is the nature of festivals that sometimes it is impossible to get to see even one’s prepared or proposed short list of acts appearing at a festival. Maniucha Bikont (vocals) and Ksawery Wójciński (bass, vocals) were not on my short list at Ethno Port Poznań for 2017 but that was more to do with fitting in work-related matters with essential socialising and interviewing for a 2018 article in fRoots.

When I am anywhere, regardless where, regardless how familiar or new a place is, I rely on people pointing me in the ‘right direction’ and at Poznań a friend I first met in 2016 called Wojciech Mania worked his magic at expanding my scant Polish education. I had missed the Bikont and Wójciński performance for some reason. At Wojtek’s recommendation, I bought this sumptuously packaged artefact released on the same label that put out Helena Matuszewska and Marta Sołek’s album mentioned above.

Musically speaking, the song, the album’s title track, knocked my socks off. The sonorities are astounding. “Through woods and birch forests a drunken boy is coming.” is how it opens. How it finishes is a story for another time. Plus I would like to think that something has been lost in translation. From Oj borom, borom… (Wodzirej ISBN 978-83-947498-0-4, 2017)

The Pond And The Stream (demo version) – Sandy Denny

Associations. Thinking about Anne Briggs and Olivia Chaney brings me back to this song of Sandy Denny’s about Annie. Never had the privilege to meet Denny, though I saw her perform on numerous occasions with Fairport Convention and Fotheringay.

This song also wafts me back to conversations with Dave Swarbrick about Sandy Denny. Swarbrick died in June 2016 and his voice is still in my head. He and I had laughed like drains together throughout a friendship that had lasted decades. I visited him while he was in hospital. At this point he couldn’t speak. He wrote, “How’s it going to end” on a scrap of paper. I scribbled, “Busby Berkeley.” He cracked up.

Back to Sandy Denny. Additionally, Phil Smee’s design and artwork summons the spirit of Alfons Mucha so nicely. It hits the spot. From The Notes And The Words – A Collection of Demos and Rarities (Island Records/Universal 371 246-9, 2012)

Noir C’est Noir – Johnny Hallyday

Rest in peace, Johnny Hallyday, born Jean-Philippe Léo Smet (1943-2017). Although this French version of Los Bravos’ hit Black Is Black isn’t exactly restful, it also reminds me of a long-running conversation with the English political songwriter Robb Johnson. The track reminds me of hitchhiking through France in the late 1960s and early 1970s. There would come a point during the midday heat when lifts dried up. Drivers were taking a break from the road and grabbing lunch. It was a cue to find a place to get a diabolo menthe (a soft drink made of peppermint cordial and lemonade) and some bread and cheese. Many of these bistros and bars had a jukebox. They provided a world of Aphrodite’s Child singing Rain And Tears, the Byrds doing Lady Friend and dozens of 45s by Johnny Hallyday and Françoise Hardy. This song was one of Hallyday’s from that period of my life, from a time when the kindness of strangers made such a lifelong impression on me.

Carla Bruni wrote a memory of Hallyday in The Observer, a UK Sunday broadsheet. Of all the things I read about him after his death, it was the one that stuck out, partly because she was communicating from a point of having got to know him privately. “One day, six or seven years ago, when my husband [the former French president, Nicolas Sarkozy] was still in office, Johnny invited me to sing with him for a TV show. I was so thrilled to be asked. We sang this very beautiful song called Quelque chose de Tennessee, about Tennessee Williams. There is a talking part at the beginning, which I did. And then he started singing, and really it was like a storm coming into the studio. He was not so young then, and not so well, but his strength was completely intact. His voice actually got better as he got older, it was lower and had more blues in it – it was like a burning forest fire. It was a magical experience.”

Rester vivant (Stayin’ alive). From La Génération perdue (1966) and elsewhere.

Read the whole piece from 17 December 2017 at www.theguardian.com/music/2017/dec/17/carla-bruni-remembers-johnny-hallyday-observer-obituaries-2017

The copyright of all images lies with the respective photographers, companies and image-makers.

31. 12. 2017 | read more...

Giant Donut Discs ® – November 2017

[by Ken Hunt, Venice and London] So much has been happening that it would be very hard and very boring to explain, let alone to know where to start. This column began and was concluded in London. Much of it was written during time in Venice on the outermost fringe of Cannaregio, a quiet part of the sestiere (as Venetian districts are called) remote enough to be away from the hustle and bustle of the tourist traipses. This assortment of music comprises a scattering of work, ancient and modern, from Judy Collins, Dick Connette, Bob and Ron Copper, Marlene Dietrich, Christy Moore, Severija, Sutari, Traffic, Marry Waterson & David A. Jaycock and Yorkston Thorne Khan.

Plane Wreck At Los Gatos (Deportee) – Judy Collins

[Elektra Records released a first-rate, somewhat pricey, three-LP boxed set Woody Guthrie: Library of Congress Recordings in 1964. I only held a copy in my hand when Vicki Nadsady was bequeathed me Marsha Necheles’ battered copy. Marsha was one of founder editors of Folkscene magazine out in California, which I wrote for.

Even around the time of his death in 1967, many listeners knew Guthrie’s music through interpretations from the likes of Jack Elliott, Cisco Houston and the Weavers. All these years later I am no longer aware when my actual Woody Guthrie revelation occurred. What is clear is that Judy Collins’ version of the song called Deportee swept me away. It appeared on her 1964 on Judy Collins #3 LP, the one with Jim Marshall’s startling photographic portrait of her.

Unfamiliar with Spanish, one word flummoxed. It was “Jesus” pronounced Spanish fashion! It remains one of the great tales of social injustice. Its relevance has only increased in these troubled times. The song now conjures a concatenation of extended images spawned by dog-whistle nationalistic policies and politics. They might be White Australia and Australian detention centres on Manus Island and Nauru, the wall policies of Viktor Orbán and Donald Trump. And on and on and on. From Woody Guthrie – The Tribute Concerts (Bear Family BCD17329, 2017)

Ride On – Christy Moore

Christy Moore’s favoured form of communication is the concert. On The Road has 24 tracks from 17, mainly Irish venues from Derry’s Forum to Dublin’s Vicar Street (with ‘appearances’ at Glasgow’s Barrowland and London’s Royal Festival Hall. Just love this song-story and Declan Sinnott’s electric guitar touches the parts other accompaniments generally miss. Sinnott’s guitar playing has a rare empathy. From On The Road (Sony Music 889885493842, 2017)

A Kulnę – Sutari

Founded in 2012, Kasia Kapela, Basia Songin and Zosia Zembrrzuska, collectively Sutari, are exploring the Polish counterpart of a Lithuanian multipart song form known as sutartinės. (Sutartinės derives from the word sutarti which means ‘to be in concordance’, ‘to agree with’.) It is a cross-cultural, two- and three-voiced style of polyphony unique to the Baltic region and vocal folk music. The singers tracked old recordings down held in the Polish Radio archives and also in the notations of Polish ethnographer, folklorist and composer Oscar Kolberg (1814-1890). That is not to suggest that Sutari make unaccompanied vocal music. Fiddle is prominent on this track.

A Kulnę means ‘Roll the wreath’ (“I will roll the wreath in the street/Where have all my suitors gone”) set to one of their own melodies and a folk tune from Mazovia (Mazowsze in Polish), a region in mid-north-eastern Poland. They sing five verses from different regions to this. It is a declaration of female independence. One verse says, “I loved a boy once and I was fine/I will love seven more for one is not enough.” Another, “I won’t go home before dawn/I have no baby crying after me.”

Bernhard Hanneken put them on Rudolstadt Festival’s bill this year. They proved popular. To get into their second concert I had wave my staff pass – Access All Areas with oomph – and sit behind heavy theatre drapes three metres from the mixing desk but I luxuriated in their sound. It was probably the worst seat in the house but I had got in. And they sounded so good and worth all wait and hassle to get into the building. From Osty (Unzipped Fly Records UFCD 011, 2017)

Song For Thirza – Yorkston Thorne Khan

James Yorkston explained the beginnings of Yorkston Thorne Khan in the notes to the album on which Song For Thirza appears. In 2011 he was sitting in his dressing room at a festival in Cowgate, Edinburgh playing his guitar when there was a knock on the door. It was Suhail Yusuf Khan. He asked if Yorkston minded if he joined him. He had his sarangi with him and while they talked he took it out of its case and started accompanying Yorkston’s guitar impromptu. It led to the Scots musician asked the Delhi-based musician if he fancied joining him on stage that evening. They winged the evening. They had a chance to reprise the experience later that year at a festival the novelist Ian Rankin was curating in Aberfeldy and the sponsor paid for Khan’s air flight.

Things progressed and double-bassist Jon Thorne who had been part of Yorkston’s jigsaw puzzle since 2009, as did the Irish singer Lisa O’Neill (who also sings on Song For Thirza) joined them. For a while they were going to be a Yorkston Thorne Khan O’Neill. Part of Everything Sacred album bears witness to that.

This song is by Lal Waterson. It entered my life while writing the book that accompanied the Watersons’ 4CD/1DVD anthology Mighty River of Song for Topic Records. It was a demo that had survived and it was from Lal’s son Oliver (younger brother to Marry) that James Yorkston heard it. It is a fond tribute to Thirza, the woman “brought from the workhouse” who helped raise the three Waterson siblings after their parents’ deaths. It is poignant. I never thought I would hear anyone who wasn’t the family sing it and do it justice. Yorkston Thorne Khan do. From Everything Sacred (Domino Recording Co WIGCD367, 2016).

The song is also available in its original version on Lal & Mike Waterson’s expanded Bright Phoebus – Songs by Lal & Mike Waterson (Domino REWIGCD102X, 2017)

No Face, No Name, No Number – Traffic

Traffic were a vital part of my musical education and development. This song, written by Steve Winwood and Jim Capaldi, set new standards of lyricism. It is quite unlike the tracks that surround it or the other music they were performing or recording. It has majesty with a church-like melody.

In September the living person I had literally known the longest, my friend John Howard Meakings (1949-2017) died. This was a piece of music he and I had listened to a great deal together. Two months later I found myself listening to Traffic as research for a commission. That would have tickled John. From Mr Fantasy (Island IMCD 264 546496-2, 1968 (sic))

Orphée in Opelousas – Dick Connette

Clocking “Written and arranged by Dick Connette” on the album cover seemed like a sure-fire guarantee of promise about to be tasted. With Sonya Cohen, Connette was a mainspring of Last Forever, a folk band that Joe Boyd introduced me to. He handed me the good stuff and I was hooked, honey. Later Connette produced and played on Loudon Wainwright III’s High Wide & Handsome: The Charlie Poole Project.

Too Sad For The Public did not disappoint. Connette’s featured singers realising this here vision are Ana Egge, Rachelle Garniez, Gabriel Kahane and Suzzy Roche. Among the album’s accompanists are Erik Friedlander (Liberty City features his “soulfully psychedelic cello”), Rayna Gellert (whose old-timey fiddle on Black River Falls is taste personified) and Chaim Tannenbaum (on harmonica). Running through the project, resurfacing three times is Jaco Pastorius’ Liberty City. That is pretty interesting in itself, without getting into its gratuitous Czechoslovak references or backslapping on a Czech-English website.

Connette himself sings Orphée in Opelousas. It is a retelling in which, to bend Lord Buckley’s The Nazz, Orpheus stomps on Louisiana terra. Quirky and visionary in ways few albums ever are, handsomely packaged, too, this whole album is one of my 10 of 2017. It is decidedly obscure but will repay diligence in tracking it down over and over again. From Too Sad For The Public – Vol 1 – Oysters Ice Cream Lemonade (Storysound Records 161-020, 2017)

Zu Asche, Zu Staub (Psycho Nikoros) – Severija

Television drama doesn’t figure hugely in my life, leastways compared to many people I know. Babylon Berlin is an exception.* Set primarily in Berlin in the aftermath of the Great War, in two series it has built a world of damaged and war-warped people with flawed characters. It depicts their struggles to make it through in the capital’s dog-eat-dog society in 1929. Corruption and vice is rife. Poverty is everywhere. Political factions of all stripes are jockeying for power. War veterans are treated like heroes or like scum – with much of the differing treatment of them divided along military rank or class lines. Then there is the wild life, the demi-monde of sexual frankness, unconventional sexualities and exploitation.

This song Zu Asche, Zu Staub (To ashes, to dust) made an immediate impact. It appears in varying arrangements throughout the two series, but its appearance in the second episode of the first series in a Moka Efti club showpiece is truly moving. It breaks down to a drum-led, choreographed dance floor number at one point. About its singer Severija Janušauskaitė I know little. Beyond her being a Lithuanian actor with a trail of small and silver screen work behind her, that is. She holds the attention. Playing a second cabaret role (this time set in France) in the second series she also delivers a performance of Vaskresenje. This Russian rendition of Gloomy Sunday and its dénouement (it does happen in France, after all) are a small screen masterpiece.

The soundtrack includes a number of cuts from The Bryan Ferry Orchestra, with Ferry fulfilling an on-screen role as louche as his press typecast him for. If they help lead people to Severija (Severija Janušauskaitė) all the better. From Babylon Berlin (Music from the Original TV Series) (BMG 538349170, 2017)

Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuss auf Liebe eingestellt– Marlene Dietrich

Watching Babylon Berlin fed another passion. Most likely anyone who does translations won’t be able to switch off comparing the original dialogue with the subtitles in translation as they come up. Chunks of the original, especially the working-class dialogue is played out in Berlin dialect or period slang. Finding an equivalent of equal fluency and fluidity in English wouldn’t be possible. Say, it were put into London slang (and I do not mean Cockney) and period slang. That wouldn’t work for the United States. So, how the translator negotiated the shoals was fascinating.

Mulling over those issues set in train brought back thoughts of adapting lyrics for another language. Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuss auf Liebe eingestellt here is the version from the Josef von Sternberg-directed film Der blaue Engel (The blue angel). Premiered in April 1930 at the Gloria-Palast on Berlin’s Kurfürstendamm, it took Marlene Dietrich to new places and helped launch her to international stardom. (It was shot in a German- and an English-language version.) By contrast Falling In Love Again is a pale shadow of its German counterpart. The ‘lost’ third verse is a celebration of female sexuality and the joys of physical loving. And that is yet another reason it is the version which calls me home.

The original Gloria-Palast was across the way from the Gedächtniskirche. Both got turned to rubble and ruins during bombing during the Second World War. In the case of the Gloria-Palast thirteen years after the Berlin premiere of Der blaue Engel.

From Bei uns um die Gedächtniskirche rum. (edel 0014532TLR, 1996) and Die blonde Engel – Die Retrospektive EMI Electrola 7243 5 35567 2 7, 2001)

Spencer The Rover – Bob and Ron Copper

I first heard Spencer the Rover sung by Shirley Collins on her 1967 LP The Sweet Primeroses, with her sister Dolly accompanying on her (rented) flute-organ. (Primerose is a variant of primrose.) This song above all of the songs on that album set me on a voyage of discovery. This album, recorded by Peter Kennedy and released originally in 1963, was an important step. A friend of mine was after it and I tracked it down in the second-hand records at Collett’s in New Oxford Street in London. Instead of keeping it, I passed it to him, but not before listening to it.

It led to me making the trip to Rottingdean in Sussex to hear Bob and Ron Copper. They were the first source or traditional singers I had ever seen perform. And it being those days, Ron Copper was propping the bar with a pint glass in his hands. I fell into conversation. I was hooked. And I began exploring music and musical roots with a new vision.

Years later I was with Bob Copper and his son, John, doing some interviews over a few ales when John Copper got a phone call saying there had been an accident in New York City. A plane had crashed into a skyscraper. A little later John got a second phone call. Another plane had crashed into a skyscraper. When I arrived at Brighton railway station there was a wait for the next train. I adjourned to a local pub to kill time, read and write till the train’s departure. The television was on. An unholy silence descended on the pub. Anyone who came in talking was hushed. Numbly I missed train after train. The date was September 11, 2001. From Traditional Songs from Rottingdean (Fledg’ling records FLED 3097, 2014)

Death Had Quicker Wings Than Love – Marry Waterson & David A. Jaycock

This little piece of thought-provoking perfection was sparked by Marry Waterson seeing a tombstone in the Old St. Stephen’s Church graveyard in Fylingdales, near Robin Hood’s Bay in Yorkshire. The inscription read “Death Had Quicker Wings Than Love” and is a translation via the Rev. John Wesley from the writings of Gregory of Nazianzus.

The album is produced Portishead’s Adrian Utley. On this particular track Waterson sings, Jaycock plays acoustic guitar, Moog and bowed guitar, Emma Smith violin and viola, Utley electric guitar and Kathryn Williams adds harmony vocals. I love its otherness. Its last words are, “A faithful maid lies here/a lover true, sincere.” From Death Had Quicker Wings Than Love (One Little Indian TPLP1419, 2017)

The copyright of all images lies with the respective photographers, companies and image-makers. The solo image of James Yorkston is © Ken Hunt/Swing 51 Archives.

* Since rules need exceptions, Detectorists (BBC Four) is another. Much of portent could be read into its everyday story of metal detecting. With (creator) Mackenzie Crook and Toby Jones in the lead roles, it blends a superb evocation of the English countryside, a nothing-happens-quickly approach and characters who banter about their dreams, hopes and troubles in life.

[An update (19 December 2017)… On reflection, gogglebox drama actually figured more prominently because Jed Mercurio’s Line of Duty (BBC One), with the can’t-take-my-eyes-offa you Thandie Newton as DCI Roz Huntley, and the penultimate series of Game of Thrones (HBO), a few hiccups aside (notably the cost-cutting Cave of Convenience scene), were pretty darn enthralling.]

11. 12. 2017 | read more...

Five forgotten Indians

[by Ken Hunt, London] These are five influential LPs of Indian classical music that captured the imagination of listeners in the early years of the post-war boom.

Ali Akbar Khan Music of India – Morning And Evening Râgas (His Master’s Voice ALPC 2, stereo, 1955)

Brother-in-law to Ravi Shankar, the musician Yehudi Menuhin considered the greatest on the planet, Ali Akbar Khan played sarod. In his celebrated jugalbandis (duets) with Shankar, this short-necked lute played the male role in conversations with the sitar’s female voice. Menuhin had met them in 1952 and was so enraptured that he finagled this album’s New York session – the first microgroove long-player dedicated to a principal Indian soloist. Menuhin is literally its master of ceremonies. With it a musical consciousness-raising began.

Bismillah Khan Raga Todi and Mishra Thumri (EALP 1254, 1961, reissued as Saregama CDNF 150647, 2005)

George Harrison’s love of India’s musical traditions never abated. In the 1960s he attended Rory McEwen’s invitation-only mehfil (cushion) concerts in London’s Tregunter Road and he was still turning up at recitals, some very small, more or less till the end of his life. One artist’s London recitals you could be pretty sure to see him at were Bismillah Khan’s. Khan played the shehnai, the double-reeded ’emperor’s flute’ (shehnai). This was his debut long-player.

M.S. Subbulakshmi The Sounds Of Subbulakshmi (World Pacific WP 1440 mono and WPS 21440 stereo, 1967, out-of-print)

The majority of musicians and listeners stuck to the northern or Hindustani music system. One who embraced the wonders of the Karnatic system was Jimi Hendrix. At the time of his death alongside the standard Ravi Shankars in his record collection he had this sublime female vocalist – most probably this, her World Pacific debut. M.S. Subbulakshmi was, is and shall ever remain a prime benchmark of the Karnatic vocal artistry.

Various artists The Anthology Of Indian Music Volume One (World Pacific WD 6200 mono, WDS 26200 stereo, 1967, out-of-print)

The Californian World Pacific label was the launch pad for many of the era’s greatest Indian musicians and was the mother-lode for Byrds and Beatles alike. This arm-and-a-leg expensive triple-LP package straddles the north-south divide with performances by Ravi Shankar, Ali Akbar Khan, the southern vina (fretted stringed instrument) maverick Balachander and others. After Ravi Shankar, the critics’ crush and the hippies’ craze, this boxed set formed of vital part of the upgrading of people’s education.

Various artists Drums Of North And South India (World Pacific WP 1437 mono, WPS 21437, 1966, out-of-print)

“The most comprehensive record of traditional Indian drumming ever recorded” included Alla Rakha, Chatur Lal, Ramabhadran and Sivaraman (the southern representatives) and Kanai Dutta. The Grateful Dead’s Tom Constanten and Phil Lesh turned the band’s drummers Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann onto this crash course in five-, ten-, eleven-, twelve- and sixteen-matra (beat) tâlas (rhythm cycles). Both studied with Shankar’s tabla player, Alla Rakha. On the sublime Fillmore West 1969 – The Complete Recordings (Grateful Dead Productions DECD291, 2005, out-of-print) Hart and Kreutzmann even recite bols (rhythm mnemonics) as route maps during one drum duet.

29. 8. 2017 | read more...

„I Exist“ – nach Rajasthan, Radialsystem V, Berlin, 2 April 2017

[by Ken Hunt, London] Regardless which of the nine Mousai (Greek mythology’s Muses of the arts), their descendants or their modern-day mutant offspring anyone evokes, the ways of presenting Art remain ever-changing and ever-evolving. That’s the nerve the German Jewish philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin exposed. It is in live performance and especially ones with extemporisation that a special kind of magic can occur. A cultural and multi-media extravaganza, „I Exist“ – nach Rajasthan (‘to(wards) Rajasthan’), as the cliché goes, it ticks many boxes.

Two days before Berlin, „I Exist“ had premiered at Dresden’s Festspielhaus Hellerau. Like any good touring production, straightaway a process of assessment and fine-tuning started. Dresden was different to Berlin, as Berlin would be to Munich. In Berlin – in the Ostbahnhof district – the first element of the production each audience saw was the UK-based Delaine & Damian Le Bas’s set design. It had static central and side panel art. Of British-based Traveller and Gypsy stock, the husband-wife team’s visuals were outsider art in orientation. In part it was heavily calligraphic, yet, most critically, it drew on Rajasthani folk and religious art motifs. Curtain up, the overhead video installation started ‘rolling’. With gong chimes from the production’s red-clad percussionist Maria Schneider, the music began.

The northern Indian state of Rajasthan flanks Pakistan’s Sind province and conceptually „I Exist“ is the product of the principals visiting the fabled ancestral home of the Gypsies in 2016, and their responses to the region’s history, culture and colours. Their experiences shape and form the work’s focus. Musically speaking, „I Exist“ blends contemporary and traditional music elements, whether fixed compositions or improvised sections. Complementing the music, the dual-screen video installation above the musicians captured elements of Rajasthan’s distinctive folkways, its pre-eminent hereditary musician clans – the Langas and Manganiars (or Manganihars) – and tribal peoples, and the foreign participants’ reactions to Rajasthan’s eye-opening cultural otherness. Anyone who has spent time there, even on a casual level, will attest to the sheer vibrancy of its lambent light and shimmering colours.

Above all, „I Exist“ is the product of teamwork. Marc Sinan is its artistic director, composer and electric guitarist-conductor. The western musical element is provided by the Marc Sinan Company in co-operation with the Dresden Symphony Orchestra and the No Borders Orchestra (an assembly of percussion, violin, viola, cello, double-bass, western flutes, trumpet, accordion). Musically, the all-important otherness came from the scene-stealingly good violin-vocal virtuosa Iva Bittová, a Czech musician of part-Roma bloodlines. In the video, as she referenced, without naming, the Roma survivor of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Růžena Danielová, the hairs on the back of my neck rose. She had movingly performed Danielová’s concentration camp composition in James Kent’s Holocaust: A Music Memorial Film from Auschwitz, televised by BBC2 in early 2005. The utterly, truly desi or down-home Rajasthani element was provided by three musicians. Under the musical direction of Vinod Joshi, „I Exist“ also had the brilliancy of female vocalist Raju Bhopa and male vocalist and harmonium player Dayam Khan and the dholak drummer Papamir. These three Rajasthani musicians’ contributions grounded the whole production in a Rajasthani sensibility and earthiness while their colourful traditional costumes – and Bittová’s complementing scarlet stage outfit – gave off something of the saturated-colour vibrancy of the place.

In one section of one song the Rajasthani musicians evoked the memory of a figurative bridge builder of a most singular kind. Namely Baba Ramdev. He could stand as emblematic for the entire project. (And the purpose of music.) Raju Bhopa sang about the legendary, medieval Hindu sant and Islamic pir who shared multi-religious sainthood, so to speak, much like the later mystic poet and sant (saint) Kabir. To this day, worshipping Baba Ramdev crosses the Hindu-Muslim divide and bridges caste divisions. His followers can be caste Hindus, tribal people or the casteless. In the last case that applies to Dalits and the supposedly castefree Muslims alike. Baba Ramdev could be the project’s patron saint. Well, that’s one interpretation.

At times it was nigh-impossible in a very good way to decide what to concentrate on. (This image captures that with its combination of overhead video and live music.) At times the video footage was irresistible. For example, one segment had Kathodi scheduled tribal people playing a folk instrument like nothing on the planet. The thalisar is an upright rod with a base plate which the musician stroked in a milking motion with both hands. Otherworldliness. I like that.

All images © Ken Hunt/Swing 51 Archives.

Top Iva Bittová in Berlin-Kreuzberg before the concert.

Below: A composite shot to give a feel of Delaine & Damian Le Bas’s visual presentation. Top left is Delaine Le Bas; top right Damian and Delaine & Le Bas. The live concert ‘part’ is left to right: Iva Bittová, Raju Bhopa,  Dayam Khan and  Papamir (plus unknown other).

http://www.bittova.com/

http://www.artexchange.org.uk/exhibition/safe-european-home-damian-and-delaine-le-bas

Update December 2017. Damian Le Bas died on 9 December 2017, aged 54.

25. 8. 2017 | read more...