Articles
Pulse Festival of Central and Eastern European Music/Coin Street Festival
South Bank, London 16 June 2007
[by Ken Hunt, London] Now in its third year, the Pulse Festival proved hitherto to be something of an expatriate affair. Its focus on acts from countries from the former Soviet bloc meant that audiences from the acts’ homelands filled the venues in droves. It felt like patriotic solidarity or whatever you want to call it sucked people in. Mind you, that could equally be said of, say, Iranian, Kurdish or German expat audiences in London. Holding a day of free concerts on and near the National Theatre’s riverside terrace was an inspired idea. As was combining it with the Coin Street Festival. The free concerts included the Czech-Roma hip-hop ensemble Gipsy.cz, the UK-based hip-hop artist Goldielocks, the Polish rock band Tyman Tymanski & Transistors and the Slovak folksinger and folk music collector Zuzana Homolová. The Saturday concerts pulled in any number of randoms – tourists, families out walking, people attracted to the sounds of live music.
This review though concerns one of the Czech Republic’s great future exports. Namely Dan Bárta & Illustratosphere. Currently they are little known outside their homeland. However, in the Czech Republic Bárta’s reputation as a major vocalist is a given. If talking to Czech friends and strangers in a biased audience counts as a straw poll, then everyone knew him. The rub was that every one of them had previously failed in their attempts to buy tickets for the band’s concerts in Prague – Bárta’s home and base. It meant most of the crowd braving the showers was Czech. Why the band is so successful at selling out venues like the Akropolis in Prague – where they recorded the 2005 Retropicture album – swiftly became plain. (Ironically, I had seen Bárta perform once before in Prague when he performed solo and unaccompanied making his way singing up the central isle of the Smetana Hall in that art nouveau palace called Prague’s Municipal Hall.)
Before talking about music, let’s talk about mechanics and optics – if sight lines count. Illustratosphere including Bárta is a six-piece band. Stanislav Mácha (keyboards), Robert Balzar (double-bass and electric bass), Jiří Slavíček (kit drums), Jaroslav Friedl (guitars) and Filip Jelínek (keyboards and percussion) positioned themselves in a half-ring. (Bárta told me the following day this set-up was their standard set-up.) It means each musician can see every other musician, pick up on body language, watch for physical cues and maintain eye contact throughout. Within the performance half-ring Bárta holds court, mostly with eyes closed when singing in order to hold in he words. He moves to the front to sing and connect with the audience, pulling back to the middle space in order to respond physically to what is being played instrumentally. He has a post-Jamiroquai performance style, if I have got Jason Kay’s act down pat from the Vitual Insanity video. Or it may be a generational thing. Bárta and Kay were both born in 1969. Working in the Prague production of Jesus Christ Superstar from 1992 before hooking up with Illustratosphere definitely helped his stage presence, stage awareness and stagecraft.
It was one of those gigs when the band has so much to prove that they pull out all the stops. The lyrical mixture was in a ratio of about 60:40 Czech- to English-language material, mostly from Retropicture like Moje Vina, Some People, their cover of the Police’s Spirits In The Material World, Introduction To Happiness and Městem. It was clear that we were witnessing a consummate vocalist whose ease of voice artistry was uncanny. The extent of how tight Illustratosphere is as a band was clear as they played Introduction To Happiness and Vlčák.
Czech jazz is better known for its Jan Hammers and Miroslav Vitouses than its George Mrazes and Jiří Stivíns (or in Patti Smith rock-poetry circles, circa Horses, its Ivan Krals). If there is any justice in music, before this decade is done Dan Bárta & Illustratosphere will be holding down a proper engagement at Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club in Frith Street. They already have enough repertoire to hold down a week of improvised, one-off magic.
Pictures (c) 2007, Santosh Sidhu, Swing 51 Archives
25. 6. 2007 |
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[by Ken Hunt, London] As much as the films, Disney songs are the stuff of English speakers’ dreams (and nightmares if Fantasia‘s demon king counts), the common ground, the warp and weft of Anglophone culture. Hal Willner’s 1988 Stay Awake project was a fresh, ripe look at the Disney Songbook. Its cast included Los Lobos, Ken Nordine, Sinead O’Connor, Sun Ra, Bonnie Raitt, Syd Straw and Suzanne Vega. But one Stay Awake interpretation re-set the bar height beyond Sinatra’s wildest imagination.
25. 6. 2007 |
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Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, London
7 June 2007
[by Ken Hunt, London] There’s a good chance that you’ve read or maybe attempted to read The Lord of the Rings either in Tolkien’s idiosyncratic and often highly time-warped English or in translation. It’s much translated. It’s gone into many other languages and Peter Jackson successfully translated it into visual language in his masterful film trilogy (2001-2003). Turning the trilogy into a vehicle for the London stage has produced a lavish affair of a very different kind. Reportedly pumped into the production – and here I confess to the sin of repetition and coming over all faint – is the astronomical figure of GBP 12.5 million. Still, costs tend to sky-rocket when the stakes and potential for profit are high.
The Lord of the Rings previewed at London’s Theatre Royal from May 2007 until its premiere proper on 19 June 2007. It transferred from Toronto where it ran between March and October 2006. The three-hour London production supposedly has 25 minutes trimmed from the Canadian production’s script and more music has been added. (My gut feeling is that Laura Michelle Kelly who plays Galadriel, the Lady of Lothlórien gets to sing more than the original Galadriel had.) The music, credited to the Tamil film and Bombay Dreams composer A.R. Rahman and Finland’s Värttinä with Christopher Nightingale doesn’t quite dovetail. Värttinä’s folk idioms, rendered nicely by the pit orchestra under Richard Brown (including, pop-pickers, Andy Findon, formerally of the Home Service), are prominent in, for example, the opening pre-Fellowship of the Ring hobbit rural idyll. Here however, Peter Darling’s choreography understudies Morris parody too assiduously with neckerchiefs waved aloft and all that stuff. Värttinä’s pan-European folk music works well even if it lurches into sub-Chieftains territory at times. For me, Act Three (Return of the King) is the musically questionable act in preview. It is too transparently the Act designed to deliver the musical’s big numbers that people leave the theatre humming and singing. Frodo Baggins and Sam Gamgee get a song number about “now and for always” that dogs Tolkien’s own songwriting (as realised on that Caedmon LP of Middle Earth songs) before they slip-slide away into Mordor. The characters of Galadriel and Aragorn (played on the preview night by Robbie Scotcher, depping for an indisposed Jérome Pradon) get to go for the Big One too. Mind you, if I hadn’t taken notes, I’d still be ransacking my head for any melodic or lyrical memory of what anyone sang. The melodies and lyrics just aren’t memorable enough.
Still, bear in mind that the music is only a part of the theatrical experience that is The Lord of the Rings. And The Lord of the Rings is spectacular. Central to the spectacle is Robert Howell’s imaginative and pretty-penny set and Paul Pyant’s lighting. Circles and rings figure prominently in the staging, though not in any ham-fisted and hammy way. The set has weather-beaten wooden effects of interlaced branches and a multi-sectioned revolving stage that looks like a section through a tree ring. The set enables the actors to shine athletically – most especially Gollum and the choreographed Orcs who careen about in mondo bondo black leather wear in a crouched position like a Middle Earth evolutionary prequel to Return To Oz‘s nasties before their stick hands developed into wheels.
The London production has ditched several narrative- or comprehension-impairing plotlines from its Toronto predecessor. Put it another way, the musical’s narrative is definitely not competing with Peter Jackson’s film trilogy in time or on any other terms. This is popular theatre, pure and simple, so if you think you’re going to get the full trilogy staged before your very eyes, disabuse yourself outside the Theatre Royal before going in. The production wins by planting ideas of imagination and by never forgetting that this Lord of the Rings is a theatrical experience. Thus, when theatregoers take their seats before the first act, they get a glimpse of the Shire with hobbits frisking about and netting fireflies on stage. Sort of promenade theatre-fashion, hobbits also scamper around the audience ‘environment’. Far better happens during the break between Act Two (The Two Towers) and Act Three. In it Orcs materialise out of the darkness to harry theatregoers in the safety of their own seats. To say that there are a few nasty tricks involved is forewarning enough. Be assured, The Lord of the Rings will deliver ample surprises.
15. 6. 2007 |
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[by Kate Hickson, UK] Joe Boyd, the author of White Bicycles (subtitled “Making music in the 1960s”) did a great deal when it came to acting a midwife to the soundtrack to many people’s lives during the 1960s. He produced era-defining music by the likes of Eric Clapton & The Powerhouse, Pink Floyd, Soft Machine, The Purple Gang, Fairport Convention, the Incredible String Band, Nick Drake and Brotherhood of Breath. Then he went on to do it again, overseeing recordings by the likes of Richard & Linda Thompson, Kate & Anna McGarrigle, Maria Muldaur, Dagmar Krause and 10,000 Maniacs. With his Hannibal hat on, he brought Hungary’s Márta Sebestyén and Muzsikás and Bulgaria’s Bulgarka Vocal Trio to our attention.
He has shaped our musical perceptions, maybe third-hand as when Kate Bush turned on to Bulgaria’s best-known musical export, as he wrote about in Rhythms of the World (1989), but also in ways deserving of attention way beyond dimly remembered tales of bygone jolly goods.
Factor in Boyd’s time on the hamster wheel of the London club scene, artist management with Witchseason, his film activities, notably Scandal and Jimi Hendrix (since released in an updated two-disc edition by Warner Home Video), and as all-round scenester and White Bicycles has material enough to whet the appetite of any devotee of that era’s music.
The scene: North London. The date: March 2006.
Let’s try to avoid paraphrasing White Bicycles tales.
All for it.
Did you go about White Bicycles with a mental shopping list or did you do a mind map of the subjects you had to cover?
The first idea was, I’m going to write a book and two friends gave me one-sentence pieces of advice – which I immediately recognised to be true. One was, ‘Don’t do the whole thing, just do the Sixties.’ The other one was, ‘Separate chapters by subject rather than period.’ So I wrote a chapter about the Incredible String Band. That helped in a way to push me out of the picture when I was writing about Nick [Drake] or Muddy Waters. Once I had that I found the structure came to me pretty easily. In the course of numerous drafts, my prose was cleaned up, honed and streamlined and became less cluttered.
Did you have a free hand with what you could record for Elektra over here [the UK]?
Not at all. Fundamentally, my job with Elektra was slightly fudged in the sense that I really wanted to be a producer. I like to think what I have is a connoisseur’s eye for the business end of things. In my visits to England in ’64 and the spring of ’65 I went to Collet’s [Record Shop in New Oxford Street, the most important folk and jazz record store in London] and I talked to Hans [Fried] and Gill [Cook, the store manager], checked the bins to see what was what. I was interested in the record business as a business. And in things like distribution and promotion.
In the first half of ’65 a number of things happened. The first one was I helped Paul Rothchild find Butterfield and add Mike Bloomfield to the band. Rothchild was already a friend, but he now had a concrete reason to try and get me into the door at Elektra in some fashion as a kind of payback for helping him sign Butterfield. And also because having done that I’d showed that I was an asset. Potentially.
What he and I were always talking about was A&R. Like who’s good and who should be signed. I guess I’d met Jac Holzman but I ran into him at some little festival at some weird ski resort in Connecticut in August of ’65. After Newport. For some reason, George Wein had been involved a concert on Friday and Saturday nights and because I was working for George I went up there and acted as production manager, got the sound check done, set up the stage.
Because Judy Collins and Tom Rush, Phil Ochs maybe, were Elektra artists, Holzman came to the festival. There was a reception backstage after the first concert. I’d had a hard day, swallowed a glass of cheap red wine quickly and found myself in conversation with Holzman. He said, ‘So tell me, you’re been to England a few times, what’s Elektra’s presence over there?’ I answered, ‘Oh, it’s crap.’
Is this in the Bounty [Elektra’s UK budget outlet label] days?
No, Bounty didn’t exist then.
They were being imported by a company called Record Imports Ltd who were focussing mainly on Nonesuch. They had a big classical catalogue and also handled Blue Note. They had an office in a basement in Poland Street.
I said, ‘Well, first of all the records cost too much. There’s no good promotion. You’re not a serious presence.’ I said it all in rather blunt and rather undiplomatically because I’d had a few drinks. Afterwards I said to myself, ‘What am I doing? I’ve insulted Jac Holzman!!!’ To the contrary, I think. I think that Rothchild had been pushing him to see if there might be a job of some kind at Elektra. I think that rather than insulting him, Holzman quite liked my attitude and my aggression about what ought to be done about Elektra in England. So these two strands came together. At the end of September I was invited to come up to a meeting at Elektra. Rothchild and Holzman were there and they asked if I wanted to go to London and open an Elektra office. It was actually set up as a joint venture with Record Imports.
I was always struggling to get to be allowed to do anything as a producer. If you think about Holzman turning down Eric Clapton, Pink Floyd and The Move during that period, it was a shame. Although I don’t know if we as an organisation would have really been up to the task of marketing all those artists at the time. It was a pretty low-level, folkie, amateurish operation. The Love and then the Tim Buckley advance copies arrived probably a month or two before I left.
Still on the other hand you did get Sydney Carter, Alasdair Clayre and Cyril Tawney.
Yeah. Looking back on it, they had very good justification in being wary of what Boyd would be up to! Obviously from a commercial point of view in terms of whether I was the person who should have been given more of a free hand, it’s a lot ‘nicer’ to point to Eric Clapton & The Powerhouse and the Incredible String Band and the possibilities of Clapton and the Pink Floyd than it is to Sydney Carter and Alasdair Clayre.
I had a good time making that record Alasdair Clayre. Alasdair was a poet and wrote some good songs, taught English, was a Fellow of All Souls. Peggy Seeger played on the record. But I think I got into the idea of recording that record largely because he was my way of staying in contact with Vashti Bunyan. I felt that she was the star.
How were they connected then?
He knew her and he took me to see her. He played and she played at an ICA event, the old ICA before it moved to the Mall. He took me backstage afterwards. She’d gone so I kept sending messages to her through him. He saw her occasionally and I admit I was obsessed that I had to sign Vashti Bunyan. If I had to make an Alasdair Clayre record to prove what a good job we could do. Or if I told Alasdair to fuck off, I’d never find Vashti again. It sounds ridiculous from this distance, but at the time it had a logic.
What was the charm of her music for you?
Again, it’s like those memories we were talking about, the record that I eventually did with her, Diamond Day, stands in a way between me and what she sounded like three or four years earlier. I remember thinking that she was gorgeous, she had this gorgeous voice, she had these lovely songs. In a way my take on her was not much different than Andrew Oldham’s who signed her at the time. She was like Marianne Faithfull, only better. I haven’t heard the single that she did with him or any of the demos of the songs that she might have performed at the ICA ever. I just remember having this feeling that this was special and could be successful. She had a star quality in an anti-star sense, in a diffident, shy, hair falling in front of her face kind of way.
I think that what’s happening now with Vashti is fascinating. It sort of justifies my feelings. She performed with her hair falling in front of her face, very shyly at the Barbican in front of 2000 people and absolutely justified top billing. She’s getting offers from all over the world now to go tour, the record’s selling and selling and selling. I feel, I saw that, I saw all that in 1965 at the ICA!
Validation.
Yeah!
You touched on the Incredibles. I can remember going to Collet’s in New Oxford Street round about the time that Changing Horses came out. Hans Fried sagely told me they were under the sway of Scientology at that point and that one could detect that in the lyrics. I was never able to. Can you give me a hint of how they were coloured creatively?
I never really discussed these things with them. Their joining Scientology worried me because, to me, it seemed like a self-important, obscured cult. There were a lot of things that seemed at first to benefit them. It’s very hard to analyse a writer’s motive, why they write something. Certainly Scientology is full of stuff about past lives and has a strange take on the world and the spirit-mind-body relationship. You can parse some of those later lyrics, particularly I think in U, and come up with analyses in terms of the writings of L. Ron Hubbard and maybe come up with something. For me, what was noticeable most of all was [them] kinda going off the boil. One song in I Looked Up, for example, which I thought was actually one of their better later songs and I enjoyed recording it, was “This Moment”. That is very core to Scientology.
The theory of Scientology seems, on paper, to be very sound. If you somehow clear away the ‘engrams’ as they call them, the links that are built into your cellular system between painful memories and the details of what’s around you at this very moment, if you can sever the connection between the fact that you may have been in a school room with the colour of these walls and a teacher rapped you on your knuckles and humiliated you in front of the class, you will be freer in this moment to live, to be yourself, to respond to things that are happening now rather than things that happened long ago when you were smelling that smell, seeing that sight or hearing that sound. “This Moment” is one of their best Scientology-related songs because it’s a perfectly reasonable and universal sentiment. It just happens to come with a particular Scientology edge to it. I even like Licorice’s little verse.
My concern was about the decline in the quality of their songs. It was never clear to me whether Scientology had anything to do with that, because there were a lot of other things going on. It’s very hard really to find original artists who maintain a level of originality, freshness and spark six albums in.
One of the things I found interesting – and I don’t if this had any bearing on your role – was the way they would perform material before putting it out on record. That kept an edge and avoided comparisons. Often they would tour and not play or promote the new album’s material.
A lot of musicians were like that in the Sixties. I risk sounding like Old Fart about the modern day and young people these days, but I do find it depressing going to a concert and seeing a lot of artists playing their album. They play all the songs they’ve recorded and know what you want to hear. They know what they’re promoting and that the record company’s paying tour support. In the mid Sixties people played what they wanted to play. That was one of the things you did. You played songs you hadn’t recorded yet to try them out, to test them, to hone them, to get them ready to be recorded. That made the whole [recording] process of a different nature. And possibly higher quality.
They never did jam with Chick Corea though!
You alluded earlier to Nick Drake’s college friends peopling the songs; did you have many acts that you would talk to about the content of the songs? Was that a tendency of yours?
No. And I never really talked to Nick either about his songs. I tended to take them pretty much at musical face value. I didn’t really get into what they were about.
Were you in any way prepared for the impact for the effect of psychedelia on this country when it hit this country? A spirit was afoot.
For me, during the whole year of 1966 you could sense all these things building up. When Elektra and I parted company, which was September of ’66, I was faced with a choice. I had to decide whether I was going to stay in Britain or go back to America. I had no job.
My father came to England in October or November ’66 but he remembers getting on the bus to go to Heathrow [London Airport] to go back to America. He gave me a hundred dollars or something as a present. I was standing at the door of my bed and breakfast hotel and I was wearing my raincoat and it was torn. That’s the image he still has. I was in a precarious economic position. Fortunately, John Hopkins – Hoppy – had much more momentum, having been a very successful photographer, but he, combined with my friendship with him, kept me in touch with what was going on in the so-called ‘underground’ and how it was getting bigger and bigger and bigger. It was Hoppy that invited me to go the Roundhouse to the International Times launch party. That was really the template for UFO. Hoppy had reached the point where his activities with the Notting Hill Free School, International Times and all that meant he would have had to say to all his regular customers for his photographs, ‘I’m not available, I don’t have time.’ He pretty much had lost his main source of income, as had I. The Incredible String Band wanted me to manage them; I’d suggested it and they’d agreed that I should manage them. I had that but they weren’t making any money and I wouldn’t make any money managing them for quite some time. Hoppy had no money from International Times. We were both in this position that we really wanted to be doing what we were doing, but we needed cash flow to pay the rent. So UFO was that. So, that’s the long answer to your short question. Yes, I did see psychedelia as something that was going to be much, much popular. That’s why Hoppy and I started the UFO. We saw it as something that had potential to get a lot of people through the door and for us to pay our rent thereby. We did it definitely as a means of capitalising on what was going on.
Did you keep a collection of the posters from the UFO club?
In those days I didn’t keep things. When I think of some of the records that I had! The poster company crashed and burned at a certain point. The creditors got all the stock. I was running around frantically and never at that time, knowing that this was going to happen, did I go over and carefully rolled p two copies of each poster and put them in my attic. Very soon I was very depressed that I hadn’t. I got together with Felix Dennis and he suggested we had lunch. We went to a little workers’ caff. I’d never really known Felix. The International Times crowd was rather snooty towards the Oz crowd – they were Johnny-come-latelies and we couldn’t read their magazine, they were never part of the UFO world. Their real momentum came after UFO closed.
Suddenly in 1975 or 1976, I’m having lunch with Felix. He said he lived nearby, said he’d show me his pad. His study had all these beautiful framed UFO silkscreen posters. I said, ‘Oh Felix, oh Jesus, God, it’s breaking my heart. You were together enough to collect these.’ By the time Osiris went under, it would have been easy for him to take a few posters. And he had. That was the difference between Felix Dennis and me! He said, ‘You mean you don’t have a set of the posters? Oh well, I have an extra set.’ He pulled out a big tube that was not complete but had almost all of the UFO posters and gave them to me.
One of the things I particularly enjoyed about the book was the sound of bubbles of mythology being burst. That was to do with the whole business about the use of axes at Dylan’s performance at Newport. That’s a story that’s gathered so much moss as it’s rolled down the decades.
Paul Rothchild is the likely source for this. There is a story in some Dylan documentary where he talks about Pete Seeger talking about, ‘Cut the thing.’
This was a power line. Is anybody going to cut through that?
Exactly! I know Paul and Paul liked a good, embellished story. He’d heard me talk about the prisoners and the axes and certainly he was aware how violently the Old Guard responded to the sound. I’m also certain the source of this is Paul Rothchild. I know where Rothchild was during that whole thing. He wasn’t behind the mixing desk. He wasn’t backstage. He couldn’t have seen. He wouldn’t have seen and he could only have gotten it by hearsay. I was bragging about snatching the wires away from the axes with the Texas prisoners and Pete Seeger seeing me doing it. I certainly told Rothchild as well, how violently appalled they were by the level of the sound. The fact that I was reporting to Paul the violence of Seeger’s response to the sound and an incident with axes and wires and Seeger is my guess how that happened. If I didn’t see it, that doesn’t prove it didn’t happen. But Seeger knew enough about the way sound controls worked! You don’t power the speakers. The power would have been way back with the generator or a line to a utility pole or way off somewhere in the bowels of the production area, nowhere near the backstage. And a sound cable to a speaker? Well, they’re stacks of speakers and you’d go round cutting one after the other. Seeger knows enough about the way things work. It’s a mix-up. It makes a good soundbite though.
Afterword:
Fledg’ling Records released a similarly titled White Bicycles CD to coincide with the book’s publication. It includes Boyd-produced tracks by Pink Floyd, Purple Gang, Fairport, Geoff & Maria Muldaur, Johnny Handle, Dudu Pukwana & The Spears and Soft Machine. Boyd contributes written notes about each selection. More information at www.thebeesknees.com.
Read the review of White Bicycles in Czech
The White Bicycles CD won Mojo magazine‘s Compilation of the Year Award for 2007.
More information at http://promo.emapnetwork.com/mojo/honours2007/
9. 6. 2007 |
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BBC World Music Awards
The 1000 year Journey
Barbican
London, May-June 2007
The Barbican centre, well known for its flexible and multi genre programming, hosted this year’s BBC Radio 3 Awards for World Music ceremony. The nearly 5 hour long show with 2 intervals was opened by the winner in Asia Pacific category, the Indian classical musician Debashish Bhattacharya, switching between 3 different instruments, all based on the lap steel guitar.
Unfortunately, three of the total of 10 winners didn’t appear on the bill. Gogol Bordello (Americas category) rejected the invitation due to other commitments, the French singer Camille (Europe) and Somalian rapper K’Naan (Newcomer) sent a last-minute cancellation. Consequently, the Paris-Argentinian Gotan Project (Club Global) played a long set, the three core members being augmented by additional performers, including a female singer, and a string section, all dressed in white, which effectively contrasted with the dark and fatal machine-like electronango grooves. This year “shaker of the year” award was given to Yusuf Mahmoud, the artistic director of Sauti za Busara Festival in Zanzibar, and the Danish-born but Zanzibar-bred organizer and educator Hildegard Kiel, for their joint effort to revitalize the Swahili taarab orchestra tradition.
Middle East/North Africa category was won by Lebanese Ghada Shbeir. Coming from Christian Maronite background, she explores the thousand year old Arabo-Andalusian tradition as well as even older Byzantine and Syriac chants. She is a musicologist by her second profession, her repertoire is well researched and her band features the remarkable Charbel Rouhana, well known for his innovative oud playing.
The climax of the show was provided by the two oldest award recipients, who despite their age were not short of vitality neither drive. The Algerian born pianist Maurice el Médioni performed a wide array of styles, from boogie woogie to rumba and flamenco, always with a piquant Maghrebi flavour, as documented on his Descarga Oriental CD, recorded with the Cuban percussionist Roberto Rodriguez. After his last number, surprise surprise, Robert Plant entered the stage, to present the last award of the evening to Mahmoud Ahmed, the veteran master of Ethiopean ballads. His soulful voice with a hard driving horn section reminded of Otis Redding, but the typically pentatonic Ethiopian melodies drew from completely different musical culture.
Two days later in the same venue, The 1000 year Journey opened. The 3 week Gypsy series of concerts and films was started by Kolpakov Trio, led by the former director of the Romen Gypsy Theater in Moscow, and featuring his long-time admirer, the punk-Ukraininan bad boy Eugene Hütz from New York’s Gogol Bordello. Fanfare Ciocarlia fused driving brass section with some well known guest artists, like singers Mitsou from Hungary and Esma Redjepova from Macedonia – and the revue-like concept successfully tested on their latest CD Kings and Queens worked as well on stage. Taraf de Haidouks introduced their new repertory from the Maskarada CD to be released in late June. The band’s Belgian producer Stéphane Karo took the folk-inspired pieces by Bartok, Khachaturian and others and re-gypsized them back into the village-band format. The Barbican programme introduced also some inspiring non-gypsy artists, as the Sarajevo singer Amira, with repertory of passionate sevdalinka ballads and surprisingly delicate Macedonian tunes. On her current tour, she is accompanied by the British piano and accordion player Kim Burton, well known from the seminal British world music band 3 Mustaphas 3.
9. 6. 2007 |
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Pizza On The Park, London 23 April 2007
“A cause for national rejoicing,” exclaims the Oysterband’s front man John Jones whilst setting the scene for a rare Oysterband acoustic event. It’s St. George’s Day. What could be more celebratory than an (a) to (d) where
(a) is toasting England’s patron saint;
(b) is England’s national bard, Wm. Shakespeare’s birthday;
(c) is Boris Yeltsin’s exit from the Russian stage; and
(d) is an Oysterband unplugged bash at an upmarket pizza parlour on the wrong side of a Royal Park?
Over the course of their set, the Oysters conjure a little token religion, some socialism, the spirit of New Jerusalem and a buzz-saw cross-cut of culture, ancient of modern. Over the course of the evening, they really hit the parts that needing hitting.
For me, over 25 years, several incarnations and in many lands, the Oysters have revealed themselves as capable and incapable of many things. As my silver-backed friend Mike Kamp of Germany’s guerrilla folk magazine Folker! has observed of things that will not happen, the Oysterband will never land a great big hit. Mind you, that is so far off their agenda to be risible. Kamp’s point hinges more on the psychology and motivation of their music-making. If this gig had been designed as a promotional device to sell their 2007 album, Meet You There, one must say that the Pizza On The Park would have been shite. (Pardon quaint English vulgarity.) What they did was promote Meet You There‘s songs. And there is a big difference.
What this gig revealed was the Oysters’ horse in the locomotive. As ever, the Oysterband was John Jones (lead vocals, squeeze box), Chopper (cello, guitar, harmonica), Lee Partis (percussion box etc), Alan Prosser (guitar) and Ian Telfer (violin). Everyone sings. “Horse in the locomotive” is a piquant expression (here with added mollusc Dada), appropriated from a book by George Ryle. Mind you, Arthur Koestler appropriated Ryle’s “ghost in the machine” (though we never mentioned that shite Koestler’s name again in the house after that midwife toad business erupted). Here it refers to the Oysterband’s inherent power not being reliant on technology or amplification. That is, to this mind, the hard selling point of Meet You There. Here Comes The Flood, Bury Me Standing (an image of Roma persecution and burial derived from Isabel Fonseca and turned into song) and, most especially, Where The World Divides with its harmonies revealed the horse in particular.
Stripping away the crunch of full-tilt power can also reveal what is lacking. Chopper’s English Civil War drama, The Puritan – a song that didn’t make Meet You There – came across as a demo or a work-in-progress. The lyric is in search of a paring; its arrangement needs sharper focusing. Singling it out is no especial criticism. Songs need essaying and try-outs in public before shape and confidence synchronise. Most of the new songs emerged as really sturdy. The song that really flew for me was Bells of Rhymney. It figures, Jones confided, in an upcoming BBC Radio 4 documentary about that song [Note: Huw Williams’ The Sad Bells of Rhymney was first broadcast on Tuesday, 12 June 2007]. As they played the song made so familiar by, amongst others, Pete Seeger and the Byrds, a lateral thinking process kicked in. As they performed the song, as clear as anything, a three-movement Hindustani version ran in my head in teentāl (16-beat rhythm cycle) which moved through a sequence of tempi from vilambit (slow) to madhyalay (medium) to drut (fast). Just free-fall associating, but a sign that what the Oysters were doing was lubricating and stimulating the mental juices.
This next thing may sound like a backhanded compliment. It isn’t intended to be. For decades I have tried to crack the Oyster Band/Oysterband code, never quite completely succeeding, but staying intrigued enough to continually return to experience what is going on and to partake of the experience through drought and plenty. I don’t want the mysteries to dry up and with Meet You There they have entered a fresh green period. Check out Meet You There: it is the self-inflicted kick up the arse they were long capable and incapable of.
Ken Hunt
PS By the way, I lied about Nikolayevich Yeltsin (1931-2007). Nobody mentioned him all night.
For Oysterish updates go to http://www.oysterband.co.uk/
Pictures by Judith Burrows.
For more information about Judith Burrows visit www.flarefilms.co.uk
9. 6. 2007 |
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[by Ken Hunt, London] There is an iconic image of Fritz ‘The Orange Dude’ Richmond, who died on 20 November 2006 as the result of lung cancer, in Eric von Schmidt and Jim Rooney’s illustrated story of the Cambridge, Massachusetts folk scene, Baby, Let Me Follow You Down (1979. It was taken by John Cooke of the Charles River Valley Boys at Club 47 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Richmond is profiled playing washtub bass, wearing his trademark shades with a scarf around his neck, max musicianly cool. John B. Richmond was born on 10 July 1939 in Newton, MA.
9. 5. 2007 |
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[by Ken Hunt, London] The drummer and more, Ian Wallace, born in Bury, Lancashire, England on 29 September 1946, died in Los Angeles on 22 February 2007. California had been his home and base of operations since 1976 when he churlishly decided that the warmth of the Californian sun beat the fine wet rain of his homeland. His companion in rhythm in David Lindley’s El Rayo-X, Ras Baboo called him, in the finest tradition of finest crap cinematography and, one hopes, a curl of the lip worthy of Anthony Quayle, ‘English’. He could escape British weather but not his heritage.
1. 5. 2007 |
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[by Ken Hunt, London] The US critic Paul Nelson chose to walk away from writing, despite a writing career that included stints of writing and editing for Circus, Musician, Rolling Stone, Sing Out! and Village Voice. He wrote insightfully about a range of acts including Jackson Browne, Warren Zevon and The Clash. He specialised in engaging with music that excited him; during a stint at Mercury Records in the A&R department he signed the New York Dolls, an act of faith viewed as folly by many in the company.
1. 5. 2007 |
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[by Ken Hunt, London] His claim to inclusion here may seem droll, but the poet, songwriter, teacher, Noise Abatement Society mainman and so-called but very eccentrically sane, Ivor Cutler deserves homage more than an obituary for his surrealistic pillow folksongs. Born on 15 January 1923 close to the Ibrox Stadium in Glasgow of Jewish, Eastern European stock, he died aged 83 on 3 March 2006.
1. 5. 2007 |
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