Articles
[by Kate Hickson, Powys, Wales] These remembrances are not fixed. They are in a state of flux cum backfill as news comes in, as details get corrected, information emerges and weblinks appear.
3 November – Kingston, Jamaica-born sound system pioneer Duke Vin (properly Vincent George Forbes) died aged 84. Chris Salewicz’s obituary ‘Duke Vin: ‘Soundman’ who brought sound systems to Britain’ from The Independent of 21 November 2012 is here: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/duke-vin-soundman-who-brought-sound-systems-to-britain-8336228.html The same day Doogie Paul, bassist with James Yorkston from 2001, died. Yorkston’s tribute ‘RIP Doogie Paul’ is at: http://www.dominorecordco.com/uk/news/06-11-12/rip-doogie-paul/
14 November – the original fiddle player with the Irish band the Chieftains, Martin Fay died in Dublin aged 76. Ken Hunt’s obituary Ian Campbell: Musician whose politically charged band led the British folk revival of the 1960s’ from The Independent of 4 December 2012 is here: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/martin-fay-foundermember-of-the-chieftains-8324180.html
24 November – The founder of the Ian Campbell Folk Group, Ian Campbell died in Birmingham in the British Midlands. Ken Hunt’s obituary ‘Martin Fay: Founder-member of the Chieftains’ from The Independent of 17 November 2012 is here: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/ian-campbell-musician-whose-politically-charged-band-led-the-british-folk-revival-of-the-1960s-8376327.html
25 November – Ken Regan, Bronx-born photographer who amongst other subjects captured Dylan’s 1975 Rolling Thunder tour and before that the Beatles, Muhammad Ali and Robert Redford. An enigmatic character by several accounts. The Times of 8 December 2012 ran an obituary enitled ‘Ken Regan – American photographer whose reputation for discretion gave him rare access to many of the great names in pop, rock, cinema and sport’ – but you need to subscribe for access to that anonymous piece of writing.
27 November – Mickey Baker, with Sylvia Robinson, one half of duo Mickey & Sylvia, died near Toulouse in France, aged 87. Their Love is Strange was a crossover hit in 1956. Other covers included ones by Lonnie Donegan, the Everly Brothers, Peaches & Herb, Wings and Jackson Browne and David Lindley. Tony Russell’s ‘Mickey Baker obituary – Versatile American guitarist who had a million-selling hit with Love Is Strange’
from The Guardian is here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/dec/02/mickey-baker
30 November – the Malian balafon maestro died aged approximately 81. He worked with a wide range of Malian musicians including Les Ambassadeurs (and later their vocalist Salif Keita after he went solo), Amy Koita and Tata Bambo. Jon Lusk’s obituary ‘ Keletigui Diabate: Master of the Malian balafon’ from The Independent of Saturday, 19 January 2013 is here: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/keletigui-diabate-master-of-the-malian-balafon-8458106.html
15. 12. 2012 |
read more...
[by Ken Hunt, London] When you get past a certain age (or succession of them) – usually they are pretty arbitrary but they come with a zero – you will be spoiled for musical nostalgia ideas. The one has a lot to do with thinking about rhymes, rhythms, mythologies and conversations. The music is from Lal Waterson, Peter Bellamy, Commander Cody & The LPA, Scarlett O’, Folk & Rackare. The Pogues, Muzsikás, Jiří Kleňha, Tom Waits and The Watersons. Last updated 28 September 2013.
Christmas Is Now Drawing Near At Hand – Lal Waterson
The Watersons were one of the greatest groups to emerge from the English Folk Revival. Their singing had an uncanny surefootedness about it. This is solo performance by the youngest of the three siblings. “So proud and lofty do some people go,” she sings.
To this day, Lal’s singing remains a profound influence. There is a clear-sightedness to what does in this short piece. Here she sings unaccompanied on her own. It permits multiple glimpses or insights into what she could do alone. Usually she was an ensemble player. Here she just sings her stuff. A rich voice, a simple song with a moral born out of Christianity and socialism. It condemns showiness and pride, the latter not in a ‘before the fall’ sense, more in discovering humility and place. Its very simplicity speaks volumes. From A Yorkshire Christmas (Witchwood Media WMCD 2029, 2005)
Maria – Folk & Rackare
Folk och Rackare – Ulf Gruvberg, Jørn Jensen, Carin Kjellman and Trond Villa – were a Scandinavian folk band that concentrated on song rather than tune. That was unusual at the time. Also unusual was the fact that they were mixed-Scandinavian with both Norwegian and Swedish band members. Bernhard Hanneken, a decade a bit later the musical booker at Tanz&FolkFest Rudolstadt, first tipped off about them at the time of their Sonet (Sweden) LP Anno 1979, peculiarly released in 1979. Many years later, they reunited
Two years on, they released Stjärnhästen, meaning ‘Star horses’, from which Maria comes. It is a mixture of Christmastide and Yuletide material – it bridges the Christian and Yuletide. It is a remarkable treatment of seasonal song, reminiscent of the Watersons’ Frost And Fire. Ulf Gruvberg told me for the booklet notes to this 1996 anthology: “We had an influence. For instance, before each Christmas I get 10-15 phone calls from people singing in choirs wanting the staff-notated material of Stjärnhästen. I have to tell them that we don’t have that notated. We never notated our arrangements. We just sang until we liked what we heard. Then we froze that and went on.”
Stefan Nielsen adds the ice-crystal keyboards. The band temporarily reunited in 1996. And then they were gone. From Folk & Rackare – 1976-1985 (Resource Records RESCD 515, 1996)
Fairytale of New York – The Pogues featuring Kirsty MacColl
The Philip Chevron-compiled The Pogues Box Set (Rhino, 2008) includes three demos of this song from 1986 (two with Elvis Costello in the producer’s chair) and 1987 that capture the arrangement coming together, with fluffs and touches inserted or tested out, and Kirsty MacColl turning into quite the vocal actress. This though is the bold final version.
In December 2011 this unlikely duet between Shane MacGowan and Kirsty MacColl was widely reported as being the most played festive song. The British licensing body PPL tallies plays in places such as shops, restaurants, gyms and pubs, in television plays and on radio. What a long way it’s come. A secular carol with no fake-spiritual message. From If I Should Fall From Grace With God (WEA 2292-44493-2, 1988)
Karácsonyi kántálás – Muzsikás
An ensemble piece from the Hungarian folk band that acted as my primer in Hungarian folk music from their 2011 Christmas album. From Csordapásztorok (Grylus Kiadó GCD 114, 2011)
Daddy’s Drinking Up Our Christmas – Commander Cody And His Lost Planet Airmen
There was something so other about Commander Cody And His Lost Planet Airmen regaling us with this song about coming Christmas apart somewhere in the United States. It begins with a peal of pedal steel playing Silent Night. Daddy collects his pay, cashes the cheque and goes on a binge. Another mistake is taking the car. It ends with pedal steel decking the holly. Sorry, decking the hall with boughs of holly… The LPA’s John Tichy is the writer. From the single with Honeysuckle Honey (DOT DOA-17487, 1973).
Tichá noc – Jiří Kleňha
Until 2006 Jiří Kleňha had a pitch on the eastern side of Prague’s Charles Bridge (Karlův most) from 16:00 to 19:00. He played an almost extinct and very obscure variety of chord zither called the Fischer’s Mandolinette. Over the years and on many occasions I stood and watched him play. His instrument was very weathered and frequently he did what buskers do and played enough to attract people’s attention, a short instrumental, and then took questions. There were always questions about the instrument. Over the years bought whatever recordings he had for sale. One time I walked David Harrington of the Kronos Quartet across the bridge from the castle side, hopeful that the musician would be there and he was, sat, as hoped, playing his Fischer’s Mandolinette in one of Prague’s great tourist traps.
This is the longest track – at 2:41 minutes – on the musician’s collection of Czech Christmas carol miniatures. Its grace and concision are astounding. In under three minutes he delivers everything that Silent Night should. It is a familiar tune and that is why his interpretation stands out all the more. After it, he finishes Poslechnčte lidé (‘Christmas songs’) with a half-minute of pealing bells – entitled simply Zvony (‘Bells’) – and those peals sound all the world like Christmas all over Europe. In the particular is a sense of the universal in a manner of speaking because they could be bells from so many continents.
For me, Kleňha was one of those street music surprises that we stumble upon. He wasn’t as flamboyant as tales of Moondog have it from those who encountered Moondog in New York City in his heyday – think about the tributes from Janis Joplin or Pentangle. Nor was he like Cologne’s Klaus der Geiger, a riveting street performer. He was the one and only Jiří Kleňha. I will never forget his brand of street music and his Fischer’s Mandolinette until my grey cells run dry. Long may he prosper. From Poslechnčte lidé (Own label, 1995)
For more information in Czech, English and Russian visit: http://www.aa.cz/citera/
Cancel Christmas – Scarlett O’ & Jürgen Ehle
No apologies about including a song of my own, a lyric set to music by Jürgen Ehle. It’s that time of the year. The lyric came in rush while driving to interview June Tabor for the Always boxed set notes. It was a bright sunny day, the narrow, two-lane cross-country roads were relatively traffic-free and I pulled over at an overtaking pull-in and scribbled down the refrain. Minutes later the rest gushed out and I pulled off the road again as soon as there was a safe place to park. A quick and painless delivery. Unlike the subject matter. It’s a song about bereavement, about the chasm between the bereaved and the unbereaved at the time of the first Christmas after the death of a loved one.
The movie it’s running is like watching the River Vltava flowing in your head while listening to the Vltava movement of Smetana’s Má Vlast and then getting some halfwit chattering inanely about the Bay City Rollers and their “sugar baby love”. It’s an overload of the unwanted. It’s that first Christmas in particular when prattling on flows noisily all around you.
There were two triggers. Scarlett O’ and Jürgen Ehle were putting together a project of material relating to Christmas. They mentioned wanting something original in English. That coincided with a friend’s death. I put two and two together, subtracted one and made three. From Gans ohne Tannenbaum (Electrocadero ELT001, 2005)
More information at http://www.scarlett-o.de/
and http://www.juergen-ehle.de/
Saint Stephen – Peter Bellamy
Ah, Peter Bellamy, the Marmite folksinger supreme. People loved his singing or loathed it. I fell into the first category. This is from the first solo album he released after the break-up of the Young Tradition (as opposed to his first solo album). It’s a song given the full Bellamy treatment with lyrics from here and melody from there. Saint Stephen is a ballad heard by the British engineer, politician, antiquarian and writer Davies Gilbert (1767-1839) in the town of Bodmin in Cornwall. He included it in what Bert Lloyd’s notes to this LP call “the pioneer modern carol compilation”, the 1822 Collection of Christmas Carols.
The internet gives its fuller title as Some ancient Christmas Carols, with the Tunes to which they were formerly sung in the West of England. Collected by D. Gilbert. To add to the confusion in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography his entry by David Philip Miller it states, “Gilbert collaborated with William Sandys on a collection of Cornish ballad carols, part of the oral tradition which he saw in danger of disappearing. Their Christmas Carols Ancient and Modern (1822) set the agenda for the rediscovery of this ancient form.” No matter. It is the Peter Bellamy version here. From The Fox Jumps Over The Parson’s Gate (Topic 12T200, TSDL200, 2013)
New Year’s Eve – Tom Waits
This song has a full contingent of Waitsian characters. The first one we meet is Irvine, whose name happens to end-rhyme with the disturbing of the previous line. The narrator cannot find him and Irving figuratively exits stage right before he’s even entered this Fairytale of Hogmanay. Other characters get name-checked. Nick, Socorro, Candice, Ray, Fin and others. One would not be surprised if Mr Waits had not had a crafty tipple and a listen to Shane and Kirsty. But I’ve been wrong before. A Hogmanay carol with no houghmagandie (Scots: ‘fornication’) content that I can tell. From Bad As Me (Anti 87177-2, 2012)
Here We Come A-Wassailing – The Watersons
This song concerns that mysterious folk custom of wassailing. The custom was puzzling enough when Frost And Fire came out in 1965. The album was subtitled “A Calendar of Ritual and Magical Songs” and its impact went far beyond folk circles. It profoundly affected more than one generation with its tales of ritual magic such as wassailing. In this midwinter song they are singing for their sup and plate and in return they bring luck and the hope of summer’s bounty.
It was an exceeding paradox how the Watersons did what they did. For one, it was extraordinarily hard to determine from the recordswho was doing what as they sang. Their singing foxed neat analysis with inversions from the expected or predictable. It was if the fox, rather than the hunters, was laying down a false trail. It only attained any degree of transparency when seeing them live. Lip-reading took on new importance. Only by watching them could you fathom who was singing what. Even then it was difficult. Lal, Mike and Norma shared what they sang. With Lal and Mike in particular that might even go so far as them making syllables that combined made a whole complete word.
“And we wish you, send you a happy new year.” From Frost And Fire (Topic TSCD563, 1965)
The copyright of all images lies with the respective photographers, companies and image-makers.
15. 12. 2012 |
read more...
[by Ken Hunt, London] The glories of work-related listening and escaping from the same know no bounds. This month’s special deliveries come from Abdulkarim Raas & Kuljit Bhamra, Joan Armatrading, The Fraser Sisters, Katy Carr, Sam Lee, Bert Jansch, Roy Bailey, Sandy Denny, The Owl Service and Miya Masaoka & Joan Jeanrenaud.
Hobey Hobey Heleyoy – Abdulkarim Raas & Kuljit Bhamra
As befits its main participants’ mixture of Somali, Punjabi and Indian expat East African elements, Hobey Hobey Heleyoy (‘Come Sing And Dance’), the opening track of one of the albums released in 2012 that has given me the most food for thought, delivers an assortment of Punjabi and Somali elements. It brings together two diaspora cultures – well, two-and-a-half or three – that have settled to the west of London in Southall.
Its completely joyous sound reminds why, of all the limited number of countries I have ever visited, Britain’s albeit flawed or blemished multiculturalism continues to inspire me. Southall is Little Punjab meets Little Mogadishu. What it will become is another matter altogether.
The colourful front cover artwork has party images – a few balloons on strings with a background of a blue sky with whispy cloud. Its design could function sadly like some warning avoidance signal. Actually, don’t be daunted or put off. Just stick a brown bag over the packaging and rejoice in the music within. Just go with Hobey Hobey Heleyoy. A more detailed appraisal of Somali Party Southall appears in the Winter 2012 issue of Pulse. From Somali Party Southall (Keda KEDCD33, 2012)
Love And Affection – Joan Armatrading
There I was keying minor corrections to an article with the television on and the volume way, way down. Not a top tip, despite the low volume hint, unless you’ve learned to filter out distractions.
Mariella’s Book Show from the 2012 Cheltenham Literary Festival was on. Mariella Frostrup announced that Joan Armatrading was going to sing. In due course she did, picking this fine song to sing solo to her own guitar accompaniment.
Down the years I have not been sedulous about following Armatrading’s career. It’s been reviewing commissions that have kept me apace with her work – and they have left big gaps in my knowledge of her career’s trajectory. This particular version of her well-known songs was one of two live performances on the figurative B-side of a CD single. More Than One Kind of Love and Good Times were the lead, figurative A-side tracks.
Its Love And Affection was recorded at the Hammersmith Odeon on 1 October 1988. It is a band version and the band has a very big sound. It’s not my favourite version so just blame Mariella Frostrup and Joan Armatrading and the effect of their voices. From the More Than One Kind of Love single (A&M AMCD 561, 1990)
Mała Little Flower/Mała, mały Kwiatuszek – Katy Carr
The London-based songwriter Katy Carr was born in Nottingham (of Sherwood Forest, Robin Hood, Anne Briggs and Roy Harris fame) to a Polish mother and Anglo-Scottish father. She and I met about a decade ago at a Record Collector do in Ealing to the west of London. We spoke a fair bit. At that point she had released either one or two albums or was between Screwing Lies (2001) and Passion Play (2003). Beyond those albums’ good lines in erotic themes and dreams, her songs handled the aforementioned subtly, tastefully and naughtily.
Paszport, her fourth album, with its Anglo-Polish and macaronic English and Polish songs, did not soar out of the blue because its Kommander’s Car was trailed on Coquette (2009). It was a song that she wrote as a consequence of meeting Kazimierz ‘Kazik’ Piechowski. He had escaped Auschwitz in 1942 masquerading as a German officer.
Mała Little Flower works beautifully. Mała meaning ‘small’ acts as a form of emphasis (in a small, small way), works as a macaronic trick and allows a mała/flower rhyme. From Paszport (Deluce Recordings MDL 414, 2012)
More at www.katycarr.com where you will also learn more about Mała Little Flower itself.
A Stitch In Time – Fi Fraser and Jo Freya
This is one of the finest interpretations of a Mike Waterson song that grew legs. Rescued from oblivion by his brother-in-law Martin Carthy, since Mike was rather slapdash about remembering his own songs, happily singing them, then often moving on to another song and completely forgetting what he’d previously composed, this is tale supposedly based on a real-life incident. It is about wife-beating and a wife’s revenge.
Frequently I write many, many months in advance of anything appearing in print. Depending on when you read this, this song was or will be an example of that. Fi Fraser and Jo Freya’s version of the song was one of those deals. After Carthy the song went on to be covered by Peggy Seeger, Grace Notes, Chumbawamba, Christy Moore, My Prior & The Girls, Lucy Ward and, no doubt, still more interpreters that currently skip my mind. This interpretation is definitely from The Fraser Sisters (No Masters NMCD12, 1998)
Go Your Own Way My Love – Sandy Denny
Here Sandy Denny records a version of Annie Briggs’ song on this 75-track, 4-CD boxed set, itself extracted from the earlier 19-CD boxed set called Sandy Denny (illustrated here), released in 2010 in an edition of 3000 copies. This is the 2012 release. The artwork on both Sandy Denny (2010) and The Notes And The Words (2012) summons a combination of Mucha and Kelley-Mouse.
Anne Briggs was an important influence on Sandy Denny. Denny later wrote the song The Pond And The Stream about her. It was an important relationship for both of them. Denny’s performance is pretty faithful to Annie Briggs’ own on her Anne Briggs (Topic, 1971). Bert Jansch was one of the first musicians to cover this song helping it to gain wider currency. The pivotal line – and clearly Denny and Jansch recognised this from their delivery and the accentuated tone of their voice – was “I want to die…” From The Notes And The Words – A Collection of Demos And Rarities (Island Records 371 246-9, 2012)
On Yonder Hill – Sam Lee
One continues to follow Sam Lee’s progress and development with interest, doesn’t one? He is tackling traditional Anglo-Scottish material in a most interesting fashion – nothing arch intended by the use of ‘interesting’. This is one of the British tradition’s many hare songs. Here though the hare is not a sexual metaphor of the Bonny Black Hare form.
Sam Lee’s arrangement strays from what most would consider the traditional with trumpet (Steve Chadwick) and tuned tank drums (Saul Eisenberg). It makes for a most excellent sound from one of the albums of 2012. From Ground of its Own (TNCR001CD, 2012)
Upcoming musical activities from Sam Lee and James McDonald can be read at www.songcollectorscollective.co.uk
Fine Horseman – The Owl Service
This song was pretty irresistible. It is a song written by Lal Waterson, a voice I miss beyond anything I’m prepared to put on the historical record. That applies to her singing as a member of the Watersons, the Waterdaughters, working with her brother Mike Waterson or her son Oliver Knight. Or Lal just phoning to chitchat about the weather or talk about mutual friends, folk music or recipes.
The Rif Mountain Collective and The Owl Service disbanded in 2012. They were a musical collective I never had the opportunity to listen to, let alone review. This album arrived out of the blue. This is their take on a song that Annie Briggs filched brazenly from under Lal Waterson’s nose before Lal had even finished writing it. The Owl Service does it well, keeping close to Lal and Mike Waterson’s arrangement on Bright Phoebus (Trailer, 1972).
Stone Tape Recordings is Steven Collins’ new endeavour. From Garland Sessions (Stone Tape Recordings STR-002, 2012)
More information at http://www.stonetaperecordings.co.uk/
Old Man’s Tale – Roy Bailey
This is a song from the pen of Ian Campbell (1933-2012). It is a sociological document knitting together the yarn of fragmented memories. This very British lattice takes the form of individuals recalling what happened to their families beginning with the Boer War to some point in the late Twentieth Century. There were two Boer Wars which pitted the British Empire against the Afrikaans settlers of South Africa between 1880-1881 and 1899-1902, hence their alternative title of Vryheidsoorloë, meaning ‘freedom wars’ in Afrikaans. Old Man’s Tale takes in the consequences of war, chronicling the Depression, the rise of fascism, the poverty and imperialism boomerangs and the freedom wars, some real, most not that never or only partially deliver what the all-purpose, panacea-promising politicians try to sell them as.
Roy Bailey told me that Ian Campbell had put the song together after talking to people who shared their memories with him. His trick was to take the factual and make it into one family’s story. The truth is in the fiction. Accompanying and realising the truth are John Kirkpatrick on squeezy instruments, Martin Simpson on guitar, Donald Grant on fiddle and Andy Steward on bass. Bailey sings with his typical understated passion and intellectual growl. From Below The Radar (Fuse Records (Sheffield) CFCD407, 2009)
More information at http://roybailey.net/
For Birds, Planes & Cello – Miya Masaoka & Joan Jeanrenaud
This 54:25 ambient sound cycle brings together bird song under the flight path in San Diego and the former Kronos Quartet cellist Joan Jeanrenaud. Currents flow through these columns, sometimes deliberate, sometimes subconscious. This falls into the former category.
The field recordings were made by Marcos Fernandes and Miya Masaoka in March 2004 and the piece was premiered that month at the Heathlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, just north of the San Francisco Bay Bridge. Jeanrenaud’s cello draws on the actuality recordings and draws out the timbres from the recordings.
For previous avian-aeronautical-musical connections from the Giant Donut Discs treasury of recorded sound, try Giant Donut Discs’ Exhibit A – Singing Nightingales and RAF Bombers from August 2012. From For Birds, Planes & Cello (Solitary B SB-002, 2005)
More information at http://www.miyamasaoka.com
And http://kenhunt.doruzka.com/index.php/giant-donut-discs-%c2%ae-august-2012/
Strolling Down The Highway – Bert Jansch
Bert Jansch died on 5 October 2011. One year on from his death, untold thousands of words have been written about him and his music. This was one of Bert’s best known songs. It’s a young man’s song and reflects a different era, a time when rambling was all in vogue, when a young man could hitch from Edinburgh to London for a gig or from one side of Europe to the other and when it was pretty much safe to do so. It was a song in the Woody Guthrie, Alex Campbell and beat mould, from a time when we were believing hard, from his debut LP recorded by Bill Leader in 1965. A very good young man’s song. Alex Campbell sang it as well. From Bert Jansch (Castle CMRCD204, 2001)
Ken Hunt’s obituary of Bert Jansch from The Independent of 6 October 2011 can be read at http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/bert-jansch-guitarist-whose-style-influenced-his-peers-across-five-decades-2366017.html
The copyright of all images lies with the respective photographers, companies and image-makers.
30. 11. 2012 |
read more...
[by Ken Hunt, London] Imagine an ideal world in which no two concerts by a principal song-delivering vocalist were ever the same. That would mean repertoire, in fact an extraordinary breadth of song repertoire and, naturally, the interaction between composed and spontaneous composition – not just jamming or busking it.
And all that within a series of strictly demarcated rules of engagement. Delivering that would mean shooting the grammatical rapids of melody, rhythmicality and linguistics, too. (Grammatical in a music sense.) In essence, that was what Aruna Sairam did in Paris – a city she first appeared in, she advised, before an audience of something like 20 or so people in 1988, as she explained in a ‘Meet the Artist’ discussion organised by Les Ateliers du Monde the previous day.
Over three decades of reviewing Aruna Sairam’s music initially on CD or later in concert, I have never encountered any vocalist to compare with her. For me, she reveals in extraordinary ways. Concert to concert, she negotiates the impossible, springing surprises. At the Théâtre de la Ville, approaching her 60th birthday, this most physical of singers did not so much sing as fly vocally with a repertoire that enabled her, albeit sitting cross-legged, to dance. To see is to believe.
In Paris she flitted between tradition and modernity, as, in my experience, like no other South Indian classical vocalist. She worked her way through a repertoire of Tamil, Sanskrit and Marathi songsmithery. Her closing tillana Kalinga Nartana by the 18th Century composer Ootukkadu Venkatasubba Iyer was as good as it gets in terms of melodicism twinned with rhythmicality. She sang of the Boy Krishna dancing the serpent-demon Kalinga – in this context an alternative to the more usual name, Kaliya – into submission.
There have been three truly great deliverers of devotional song which I have had first-hand knowledge of. They were, in order of experience, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Alim Qasimov and Aruna Sairam. Despite her appearance as the first entirely Carnatic billing in the BBC Proms’ 116-year history in 2011, she remains the great unknown.
Still, if there is any justice, that won’t be for long.
All photographs © Ken Hunt and Santosh Sidhu/Swing 51 Archives.
Note: the ‘Sayeeram’ on the poster is the French-language rendering of her family name.
19. 11. 2012 |
read more...
[by Ken Hunt, London] Miya Masaoka, The Chieftains, Getatchew Mekuria & The Ex & Friends, Harpo Marx, Gee En Tong, Barb Jungr, the Carolina Chocolate Drops, Josef Režný, Serafina Steer and Kala Ramnath are the musicians who conjure and provide the fun this month, as ever much of it work-related or work avoidance-related.
Come Sunday – Miya Masaoka
Her website biography begins: “Miya Masaoka, musician, composer, performance artist, has created works for koto, laser interfaces, laptop and video and written scores for ensembles, chamber orchestras and mixed choirs. In her performance pieces she has investigated the sound and movement of insects, as well as the physiological responses of plants, the human brain, and her own body. Within these varied contexts of sound, music and nature, her performance work emphasizes the interactive, live nature of improvisation, and reflects an individual, contemporary expression of Japanese gagaku aural gesturalism.”
This is Miya Masaoka from a long time ago, interpreting the Duke Ellington composition Come Sunday “written for Mahalia Jackson inspired by the twenty-third Psalm”. For non-Christians, that is the golden oldie beginning “The Lord is my Shepherd I shall not want./He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: He leadeth me beside the still waters.”
Miya Masaoka interprets it for solo koto. The notes explain: “The solo follows the harmonic structure of the piece.” Her interpretation goes deep, like applied gagaku, like wine rolled round the mouth. Visit Miya Masaoka’s website’s homepage for a better mental picture of her instrument’s visual splendour. It is the same instrument as Kim Stringfellow photographed for the album artwork. Miya Masaoka’s music was a tip-off the US guitarist and improviser Henry Kaiser, an introduction for which I thank him most profoundly. From Compositions + Improvisations (Asian Improv Records AIR00014, 1993)
More information about Miya Masaoka at http://www.miyamasaoka.com/
Kim Stringfellow’s evocative imagery of Miya Masaoka and her koto on this album was a really big help – that is not faint praise – in weighing up what was before me then and is before me now. Her website is at http://www.kimstringfellow.com/
The Foxhunt – The Chieftains
When I hopped on the ride between The Chieftains 3 (1971) and The Chieftains 4 (1973), the Chieftains’ merry-go-round had been spinning for a fair few years. This particular track from their pre-Derek Bell line-up is a fantasia on the theme of fox-hunting put together by their uilleann piper and tin-whistle player Paddy Moloney. His suite races across tough terrain in a most marvellous way. From The Chieftains 2 (Claddagh/Atlantic 83322-2, 1969)
Bati – Getatchew Mekuria & The Ex & Friends
This is not the most obvious track to select from this liaison of musical derring-do. (The most obvious one would probably be Tezeta.) Yet Bati captures the coiled musical tensions and strainings at the leash that this marvellous musical collaboration produced.
Getatchew Mekuria plays tenor saxophone in a mid-tempo Ethiopian groove that The Ex support and deliver so sinuously. It is a masterpiece of empathetic playing.
Given the ripples that run through The Ex’s personnel, The Ex on this album are: Arnold de Boer (trumpet), Andy Moor (guitar), Terrie Hessels (guitar) and Katherina Bornefeld (drums).
In December 2012 The Ex celebrates their 33⅓ Anniversary with three bespoke Ex fests in London, Paris and Amsterdam.
From Y’Anbessaw Tezeta (Terp Records AS 21/22, 2012)
More information at www.theex.nl and www.terprecords.nl
Harpo Woogie – Harpo Marx
Yes, the same Harpo Marx, the one in the dubious fright wig, the one who communicated wordlessly with horn honking, harp and bulging eyes in motion pictures! This is a headlong dash of a piece (with added xylophone) from the Mercury album Harpo At Work! long-player. (Or was that Harpo At Work? – it varied.) In his autobiography, Harpo Speaks he wrote, “When I sit down to play the harp in the Marx Brothers films, you are seeing the real Harpo Marx.”
An exhilarating rush of a piece from a marvellous triple-disc anthology of harp music that also includes Germany’s Rüdiger Oppermann, Brazil’s Christa Braga, Burma’s Saw Takah Wah, Ireland’s Paul Dooley, Paraguay’s Félix Pérez Cardozo and Brittany’s Alan Stivell. From Magic Harp (NoEthno 1012-14, 2011)
More information at www.noethno.de
Oo Hoo Yu (Parts 1 and 2) – Gee En Tong
Strange are the paths… Reviewing this album at the time of its release, I loaned its CD booklet and all sorts of artwork to Classic CD, only to have the magazine go down the tube. Consequently, never got any of the artwork back. Without this booklet’s notes, along went the details of what was on this album of recordings made between 1902 and 1930 in China and the United States. Eventually, I located a second copy of the album.
This particular piece of music dates to around 1928. Its title translates as ‘Wandering the five lakes’ and it has a modern classical feel to it. Admittedly that may be down to technological restrictions. The notes do not explain much. Its musicians are from Amoy province (a name borrowed for condiments) to the west of Guangzhou to the northwest of modern-day Hong Kong. (Guangzhou was also known historically as Canton or Kwangchow and is one of China’s largest cities as well as the capital of the Republic’s Guangdong province.)
Part 1 in particular has a processional rather than a pilgrimage feel to it. The instrumental continues in Part 2, picking up in tempo. What is not so much disappointing as intriguing is how the recording simply cuts off. It is in contrast to the British Raj-era recordings of instrumentalists and singers that have come down to us. In them the musicians turn the track – maybe an entire raga exposition – around within the confines and capabilities of 78 rpm technology. Here it simply gets chopped mid-note. Maybe that speaks about the greenness of the performers before the microphone. Maybe that is to do with the recordists or technicians. No matter, it is the music that counts. From Rain Dropping On The Banana Tree (Rounder CD 1125, 1996)
Old Man – Barb Jungr
In his autobiography, Waging Heavy Peace (2012), Neil Young observes that he wrote the song about his ranch foreman Louis Avila on the Broken Arrow Ranch. “…I wrote the song Old Man about Louis. My dad thought it was written for him, and I never told him it wasn’t, because songs are for whoever receives them.” It’s one of those songs that grew wings and flew.
Barb Jungr is a true vocal artist of the kind where the singer does not get in the way of the song. The song’s the thing. This particular interpretation places “keyboard queen” Jenny Carr’s piano well to the fore in the mix. Neville Malcolm’s double-bass and Rod Youngs’ drums (with a good deal of brushwork) provide the understated underpinning. She wears her influences lightly even when she adds harmonica. From Stockport To Memphis (Naim Audio Ltd naimcd179, 2012)
Country Girl – Carolina Chocolate Drops
“Rhiannon wrote this after traveling all over the world with the Chocolate Drops and not finding anything better than her home turf in North Carolina she still lives in the town she was born in, Greensboro.” That was way the track is described in the booklet notes.
It is one of the finest original compositions in the Choc Drops’ current repertoire. (The complete credits are Rhiannon Giddens, Lalenja and Adam Matta.) It’s an evocation and unapologetic celebration of homeways, family and roots. Judging by their performance of it at the Shepherds Bush Empire in October 2012, in concert it is getting ever more muscular and nuanced. From Leaving Eden (Nonesuch 7559-78627-1, 2012)
V Strakonicich Za Voltářem – Josef Režný
The Czech bagpipe player Josef Režný was one of many musical introductions effected through Petr Dorůžka. As he handed me the then-new, now out-of-print CD, he redubbed it The Hidden Smell of the Czech Bagpipe. The cut of his jib and his schoolboy humour appealed to me instantly and immensely. We signed a blood pact on the spot that should anyone ever invent the internet that we would co-host a website (whatever that was). And thus it came to pass. Pivo (beer) and toasts may have been involved.
Born in February 1924, Josef Režný is one of the very most important pipers to come out of Europe. He has been a trailblazer not only for dudy – Czech for bagpipes – but the wider dissemination of bagpipe music across Europe. Notably this has been through his work at and for the International Bagpipe Festival – Mezinárodní dudácký festival – held every other year in the Southern Bohemian town of Strakonice. He also appears in the 2007 film Call of Dudy: Bohemian Bagpipes Across Borders, co-directed by Radim Spacek, Jeffrey Brown and Keith Jones.
This particular piece of Strakonice-rooted music finds him accompanying a female choir. His filigree playing is a wonder, especially during the instrumental introduction and valediction. At under two minutes in length it distils so much as I understand it of Bohemian folk music. From The Hidden Spell of the Czech Bagpipe/Hrády Dudy (Bonton 71 0129-2 711, 1993)
Skinny Dipping – Serafina Steer
The title track of the upcoming album produced by Jarvis Cocker. Never heard Serafina Steer before. Never heard of her before. No idea if this music will stick around. That’s part of the thrill. She plays harp and sings. Since it is a white label advance copy the bigger picture eludes. So far, so good. Right now it is the combination of voice and harp and lyrics that intrigue. From The Moths Are Real (Stolen Recordings SR 063, 2013)
More information at http://www.serafinasteer.com/
Bhatiyar – Kala Ramnath
This is the ‘concluding’ performance in a two-CD companion set of raga recordings that trace a cycle of dawn to dusk and dusk to dawn. This particular raga concludes the four to six am shift. On it the Hindustani violinist is accompanied by Subhankar on tabla. Kala Ramnath’s is a most spirited performance – enough to wake the dead. From Aavartan – Musical Odyssey- 2 Dusk to Dawn (Kalashree no number, 2012)
More information at http://www.kalaramnath.com/
The copyright of all images lies with the respective photographers, companies and image-makers.
30. 10. 2012 |
read more...
[by Ken Hunt, London] Séamus Ennis, Yasmin Levy, Maria Doyle Kennedy, Peter Bellamy, David Crosby & Graham Nash, Crosby, Stills & Nash, The Everly Brothers, Marty Robbins, the Grateful Dead and Leonard Cohen populate the isle this month.
Reels: The Mountain Lark/The Sligo Maid’s Lament/The Flax In Bloom – Séamus Ennis
Along with Paddy Moloney of the Chieftains (born 1938) and Willy Clancy (1918-1973), Séamus Ennis (1919-1982) was the musician most instrumental in turning me on to uilleann pipes – Ireland’s elbow pipes or píobaí uilleann so named since an elbow pumps the bellows. They started me on a voyage of discovery that continues to the present day that has involved looking backwards to Leo Rowsome (1903-1970) and forwards to Liam O’Flynn (born 1945).
I chanced upon this album of vintage recordings captured between 1940 and 1978 in December 2005. Wandering around Limerick the day after interviewing Christy Moore and Declan Sinnott, I went into the curiously named Empire Music – well, that’s how it sounded to me. There sat in one of one of racks was The Return from Fingal just smiling at me and bent on beckoning the euros out of my wallet. It was not a bad exchange. Quite the contrary. It brought what I consider the finest album – two CDs’ worth thereof – into my life. This medley is one of those Ennis performances that so typically uplifts the spirits, grabs the attention and haunts the memory. Séamus Ennis died on 5 October 1982. From The Return from Fingal (RTÉ RTED199, 2004)
Firuze – Yasmin Levy
Firuze (a name, possibly Turquoise) is one of the outstanding tracks on Yasmin Levy’s October 2012 release, produced by Ben Mandelson. Much of the album, recorded in Tel Aviv, has big production numbers. Prominent in the mix on this particular track are Yechiel Hasson’s nylon-strung guitar, a post-Egyptian film music-style string section and percussion. It is a gem of a piece. Ben Mandelson produced. From Libertad (World Village 450023, 2012)
More information at http://www.yasminlevy.net/
The Most Beautiful People Are Broken – Maria Doyle Kennedy
Maria Doyle Kennedy is a singer and actor born, raised and based in Eire. Before seeing her perform at the Half Moon in Putney in south-west London on 4 September 2012 supporting Martin Carthy & Dave Swarbrick, I knew little more than nothing about her acting and singing. Sean McGhee, the editor of R2 had alerted me about her and reeled off a list of acting appearances in The Commitments, Queer as Folk, The Tudors and Downton Abbey. In the spirit of adventure and most especially Father Ted, I deliberately did no research before the gig. It was going to be a blank-canvas concert.
She performed this song at the gig. It has this great opening lyrical gambit, “She was a diamond/He was a miner…” She announced the song with the words, “Life is not perfect but that’s OK.” I have no idea what sparked writing and fashioning this song. Neither did I ask her or her husband Kieran Kennedy – who was accompanying her – afterwards. Yet even on first pass I read several layers of interpretation into this song born out of personal life experiences. May well have been wrong, especially if I misheard words. We all mine songs for personal meaning or sometimes we just let the sound flow over us. Once a song’s sung it’s set free and starts a new life. I like the life in this song.
The photograph of Maria Doyle Kennedy isn’t much, but it captures the concert’s mood. From Sing (Mermaid Productions MPCD23, 2012)
Tommy – Peter Bellamy
Pete Bellamy made the original Barrack Room Ballads in 1977, an album of Rudyard Kipling settings that Bill Leader produced. He recorded this particular song accompanying himself on Anglo-concertina. It was the first of his ‘Rud the Kip’ settings that turned my head. Pete made me think again about Kipling and rethink about how I had pigeon-holed him in some post-imperial box.
This song makes me think about soldiering and soldiers. It is a song about how the members of the public view and, more importantly, treat the armed services that politicians send off to war in our name. Which is, parenthetically, why many will never forgive Tony Bliar who dispatched so many.
One resurrected US soap Dallas made use of a glib platitude: “I don’t believe in the war but I believe in the warrior.” Kipling’s soldier is Tommy Atkins the Cipher. The Tommy of this song is the precursor of Buffy Sainte-Marie’s Universal Soldier. But Kipling’s is a transferrable, sadly ever more transferrable text and truth. It could refer to a veteran from any number of wars. Tommy’s omni-directional sentiments could also stand for those that went out to Algeria, Vietman, the Falklands, Iraq, Afghanistan and ever onwards. Above all, Tommy is about double standards.
Pete Bellamy wrote, “This song highlights the hypocrisy of a society which despised its soldiers in peace-time and would cheer them from the rooftops in time of war. The tune is a combination of folk and music-hall influences.” From Barrack Room Ballads (Fellside Recordings FECD253, 2012)
What Are Their Names – David Crosby & Graham Nash
It’s an unaccompanied live rendition of the song that originally appeared on If Only I Could Remember My Name (1971). The Occupy This Album album doesn’t specify where its particular recording comes from. It’s short, pared down, fragment-like.
It’s not a pointed song in a European political song sense. It plays on the vagueness of the word ‘they’, an idiom with a vagueness that travels well. David Crosby discusses who the particular they in his mind were in his and Carl Gottlieb’s Long Time Gone – The Autobiography of David Crosby (1988). More about Crosby, Nash, Occupy & Uncle Scam upcoming in R2 issue 37. From Occupy This Album (Music For Occupy 7 93018 33462, 2012)
Déja Vu – Crosby, Stills & Nash
This song originally lent its name to Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s album debut in 1970 – CSNY being the successor to the trio’s self-titled album of the previous year with the original core members expanded to four with the inclusion of Neil Young.
This live version recorded at the Performing Arts Center in San Luis Obispo, California on 22 April 2012 is one of DVD/CD set’s highlights. Additional to the trio, there is Todd Caldwell on Hammond B3 organ, Steve DiStanislao on drums, Shane Fontayne on guitars, Kevin McCormick on electric bass and James Raymond on keyboards. From 2012 (CSN Records 409-5, 2012)
Illinois – The Everly Brothers
Roots, the 1968 Lenny Waronker-produced album that this track comes from, opens and closes with Everly Family recordings made in 1952. They were from, the notes said, “a tape made in their home town of Brownie, Kentucky – once a small mining village, now reduced to smokestacks.” The centre image on the back cover was of Don and Phil Everly in country cover outfits franking their parents, Ike and Margaret Everly. The music inside was a revelation. It was a real stepping stone for listeners previously switched off by the irony-free posturing, the rhinestone dandyisms and reactionary conservatism of the Nashville country music industry. Apparently, it sold poorly at the time of its release – not helped by it clocking in at under 40 minutes.
This song is from the pen of Randy Newman. The Everlys spin its facets around as if it were a gem. A miniature, it lasts under two and a half minutes. Its uncredited pianist holds the whole thing together instrumentally with a rhythm section so good in the lightness of its touch it is astonishing. It’s not a hugely well known song in Newman’s canon but it is a vivid travelogue cum portrait with its images of Illinois prairie and grain fields contrasting with the lights, skyline and stockyards of Chicago. Meanwhile, there was the turn of the seasons. From Roots (Warner Brothers 7599 26927-2, 1968)
El Paso (Full Length Version) – Marty Robbins
This version recorded in April 1959 is a bonus track on the CD reissue. At over four and a half minutes in length, it wasn’t the one that occasionally got played on the radio in Britain. It is one of Marty Robbins’ country and western songs – and indeed his most famous one. He tells El Paso as a first-person narrative about a moonstruck cowpoke who falls for Feleena (Felina) “out in the West Texas town of El Paso”. She is the Mexican beauty in Rosa’s cantina who casts a spell over the unnamed cowboy. He gets jealous about her paying attention to a “handsome young stranger” and guns him down. He runs and steals a horse and makes off for the Badlands of New Mexico.
But there is a but. Like normal – because this is a movie, right? He still misses Feleena and returns to El Paso (“tonight nothing’s worse than the pain in my heart”).
As he rides in, he spots mounted cowboys and before he knows it, “something is dreadfully wrong for I feel a deep burning pain in my side”. (Bobby Sykes and Jim Glaser of the Glaser Brothers add the lifting harmonies at the end of the line.) I won’t spoil the ending for anyone who doesn’t know the tale… But next time you listen to it, listen to it one time just listening to Grady Martin’s Spanish guitar that runs through the song. A top tip to end on. From Gunfighter Ballads And Trail Songs (Columbia/Legacy OK 65996, 1999)
Dark Star – Grateful Dead
This is the 2:45 45 rpm single version. It distils the essence of the song that became the Dead’s most anticipated psychedelic excursion over the course of their voyage into the unknown. So anticipated that it enjoyed periods of retirement.
In one of the interviews that I did with Jerry Garcia, he touched on this single and its inclusion of banjo. “Actually then I used a tape, an old tape I found somewhere, that had me playing banjo for a banjo lesson I think I was giving to somebody. That tape is from ’62 or something like that. So, I found this old tape and threw it on the end of Dark Star just for the Hell of it, just to bring it up during the fade for the Hell of it. Completely unrelated.” From Live/Dead (Warner Brothers/Rhino R2 74401-E, 2001)
Hey, That’s No Way To Say Goodbye – Leonard Cohen
This recording is from the August 1970 IOW Festival. It was the first time that I saw him in concert. Looking at the accompanying photos in the Live At The Isle of Wight 1970 CD/DVD package is transporting. In the period shots, he has tousled hair. It is not the hairstyle on the almost passport or identity card likeness of Songs of Leonard Cohen of 1967 (he is not staring straight enough into the camera for that). Neither is it the neat grey trim and jaunty titfer of Live In London from 2009. It is another time…
Cohen’s songs were borderline Edna O’Brien. Like her writings, his songs were more than the pangs, the naughty bits and the traps that he laid in his lyrics. (Or his poems or prose.) They shared similar energies and levels of energy. This particular song is a slow dance for the minutes leading up to midnight. It is a pulling song as much as it is a valediction. From Live At The Isle of Wight 1970 (Columbia/Legacy 8697-57916-2, 2009)
The copyright of all images lies with the respective photographers, companies and image-makers.
30. 9. 2012 |
read more...
[by Ken Hunt, London] Nightingales serenade and sing us back home. In between come Hedy West, Joni Mitchell, Marianne Faithfull, Chavela Vargas, Radhika Mohan Maitra and Mike Seeger. This is, to some extent, a confluence of memories, dreams, reflections and applied coincidence inspired by Marianne Faithfull and her 2007 book (with David Dalton) entitled memories, dreams & reflections.
Londonderry Air – Beatrice Harrison
This is a famous and historical recording. The cellist Beatrice Harrison discovered that when she played in her garden in Oxted in Surrey her local nightingale would sing along. The nightingale was a wild bird. It wasn’t caged like a canary and recorded as it sang – as had previously been the case with recordings of wild bird song. This recording made on 3 May 1927 captured one of their musical conversations. The booklet notes state: “She eventually persuaded Lord Reith [of the BBC] that this was worth broadcasting. These BBC broadcasts started in 1924 and carried on for 12 years until she moved.” The Londonderry Air is also known as Danny Boy.
“Let memory of mortgages, loans and property sales/Dissolve into the cries of nightingales…” as was said twenty years after this recording was made. From Nightingales: A Celebration (British Trust for Ornithology ISBN 0 903793 91 1, undated [circa 1997])
Love In The Afternoon –Marianne Faithfull
This choice came out of a highly enjoyable conversation with the Folker and more photographer Ingo Nordhofen. He and I relaxed under a canopy in the shade at a music festival, toasted our hosts Regina and Rainer and chatted over a couple of drinks in that taking-a-break-from-work-before-returning-to-work way. The conversation turned to Marianne Faithfull and a performance of hers not too far from Weimar that we had both attended. That conversation set in train thoughts that led to picking this song by Angelo Badalamenti and Marianne Faithfull.
Unlike the romantic comedy of the same name from 1957 featuring Gary Cooper, Audrey Hepburn and Maurice Chevalier, this is an altogether different kind of affair going on. The emotional fulcrum changes as the narrative unfolds. By the second verse she is singing, “Don’t fall in love with me/Too much to lose.”
All this plopped on top of writing articles about Little Feat for R2 and Bass Guitar Magazine – their September and November 2012 issues – and that line of Lowell George’s getting conjured: “Of all the things I had to do/I had to fall in love” in Cold, Cold, Cold. And the deliciousness of thinking about the power to resist in its song manifestations. Futility and ambiguity are lovely bedfellows. From A Secret Life (Island CID8036, 1995)
You Can’t Resist It – Lyle Lovett
One thing, well, led to another when thinking about resisting, wearing thin or being worn thin or beaten down. I connected Marianne Faithfull’s Love In The Afternoon and Lyle Lovett’s You Can’t Resist It. John Goin plays lead electric guitar and Roseanne Cash sings backing vocals on this song.
Next thing I knew the Summer 2012 issue of Penguin Eggs was on the doormat and the cover article was Roddy Campbell’s interview with Lyle Lovett. Catch him right and Lyle Lovett is one of the best interviews in the music business. Studied journalism and all that. Campbell captures him in top form and Lovett is really illuminating about songcraft’s strange little ways.
Anyway, I got to remembering Lyle Lovett and an interview we did in June 1988. I left that interview to head off to one of the music critic’s least favourite tasks – the slog of transcribing the interview. Next thing I knew I had Lyle rushing down the stairs after me pointing me out to his manager. Panicky memories of a Zigzag colleague being forced to wipe the interview that he had just done with a rock bigwig flashed through my head. Lyle calmed me and told me he only wanted to introduce me to his manager and explained that I had extracted all sorts of things from him that he had not intended to talk about.
But I never revealed the sinless pleasures of the lad from Klein, Texas talking about watching Star Trek in German in some foreign hotel with a German dictionary. Nor the kindnesses bestowed on my 13-year-old son, when we went to see him at Woburn Abbey opening for Dire Straits on 20 June 1992. I left my lad in the secure backstage, green room area, guarded over by security while I worked, and with access to unlimited, juices, soft drinks and barbeque. When Lyle and I returned from watching Was (Not Was), there was Tom was sitting chatting over, no doubt, his umpteenth plate of food and umpteenth juice or soft drink to John Illsley and his parents. From Lyle Lovett (MCA Records/Curb MCAD-5748, 1986)
You’ve Changed – Joni Mitchell
A frivolous thought entered my head. It occurred in a dream. I woke and wrote it down. What would Joni Mitchell do with her hands if she didn’t have a cigarette and/or a paint brush in her hands?
Wayne Shorter is the featured saxophonist on this track, a song by Bill Carey and Carl Fischer in an orchestrated arrangement. From Both Sides Now – or, as I would prefer from the CD spine, Both Sides Now – Reprise (Reprise 9362 47620 2, 2000)
For The Roses – Joni Mitchell
Again one thing leads to another. Dreaming about Joni Mitchell is like dreaming in the English manner after an evening of Stilton, water biscuits and port. Very moreish and pleasantly hallucinogenic.
This is not a standard tale about success or the worship or brickbats that some encounter. There are many ways that a musician – actor, poet, author, continued overleaf – might respond. “I heard it in the wind last night/It sounded like applause.” I wish more people would cover it. It remains one of the finest expositions on pros and contras of fame and success and money I have ever heard. From For The Roses (Elektra/Asylum 7559-60624-2, 1972)
Bageshree – Pandit Radhika Mohan Maitra
Pandit Radhika Mohan Maitra (1917-1981) is a musician known more by association and reputation than the music he made in his lifetime. This is a recording of the sarod maestro made in 1957 with a young Shankar Ghosh accompanying on tabla.
His playing style has a bedrock of rabab ang – rabab style, the rebab being the sarod’s folk predecessor – learned from his first guru Md. Amir Khan and a dhrupad-based style of playing combining vina and sursringar forms from studying with Dabir Khan and studying sitar with Enayat Khan. I came to him from backtracking from his disciple, the sarod maestro Buddhadev Dasgupta. Eventually, some old recordings came into my possession and they illuminated my understanding of Buddhadev Dasgupta’s performance style.
After listening to this excellent performance of the late night raga much more about Buddhadev Dasgupta’s distinctiveness made sense. This recording follows the pattern of alap, jor and slow and fast gat compositions. From Moments (Bihaan Music CD-BMC-74, 2005)
Go to http://www.raga.com/interviews/210int1.html to read Ira Landgarten’s marvellous interview with Buddhadev Dasgupta that goes into his relationship with his guru.
More information about Bihaan Music’s exceedingly interesting catalogue of the subcontinent’s music is here: http://www.bihaanmusic.com
Waterbound – Mike Seeger
Mike Seeger (1933-2009) made a considerable number of albums, but this was his solo debut and for far too long it was out-of-print in both its US and UK editions (for Vanguard and Fontana respectively). This particular song is “a Virginia play-party piece with melodic reminiscences of Golden Slippers and Skip To My Lou”, according to D.K. Wilgus’ original sleeve notes from 1964.
John Crosby describes it in the reissue’s notes as “a mid-tempo song with a haunting vocal over the rhythmic drone on a strummed dulcimer accompaniment.”
That’s more or less my job done for me. But for saying that the recording has a delightful atmosphere and a real sense of wood, as in acoustic music, and microphone to it. It is also one of the reissues of 2012 thus far.
“The old man’s mad [angry] and I don’t care/The old man’s mad and I don’t care/ The old man’s mad and I don’t care/So long as I get his daughter…!” From Mike Seeger (Vanguard VCD 79150, 2012)
Tony Russell’s obituary ‘Mike Seeger: Versatile singer and multi-instrumentalist at the heart of the US folk music revival’ from The Guardian of Monday 10 August 2009 is at http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/aug/10/obituary-mike-seeger
Ken Hunt’s obituary ‘Mike Seeger: Folk musician who influenced Bob Dylan and the Grateful Dead’ from The Independent of Saturday 22 August 2009 is at http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/mike-seeger-folk-musician-who-influenced-bob-dylan-and-the-grateful-dead-1775851.html
La Llorona – Chavela Vargas
La Llorana (‘The Woman That Weeps’) comes from Julie Taymor’s film about the Mexican artist and muse Frida Kahlo. Chavela Vargas (1919-2012) appears in the film as Death and sings this song. Dulces suenos, Chavelita. From the film Frida (2002)
I read several obituries of Chavela Vargas. The one I liked best was from an anonymous fellow hack at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/music-obituaries/9456735/Chavela-Vargas.html
Bury Me Not On The Lone Prairie – Hedy West
If I ever were to feel that I had tired of Hedy West, I know that I shall be hovering over, and looking down on my own lifeless husk. Hedy West (1938-2005) was one of the most transformative interpreters of the Anglo-American folk condition. This is another song about one of the signature events in anyone’s life: death.
Bury Me Not On The Lone Prairie comes from her debut solo LP, Hedy West accompanying herself on the 5-string banjo (1963). She accompanies herself on banjo. There is nothing affected about her delivery, nothing extraneous by way of ornamentation, nothing out of place in the arrangement. Even in death, there are twists going on in this song. I am proud that Ace Records asked me to write the CD booklet notes for this reissue of her first two solo albums. Ace also squeezed three never-issued tracks onto this single-CD release.
All these decades later Hedy West remains a lodestone. From Hedy West accompanying herself on the 5-string banjo plus Hedy West Volume 2 (Vanguard Masters VCD 79124, 2012)
Singing Nightingales and RAF Bombers
This is a very famous recording. The BBC recorded it on the night of 19 May 1942 from the same wood as the Londonderry Air that begins this month’s Giant Donut Discs. The original intention was to broadcast the Oxted wood recording live. It begins in sylvan peace but then gradually a distant growl approaches. That growl was the engines of Royal Air Force (RAF) bombers – Wellingtons and Lancasters – on their way to bomb Germany. The notes say the target was Mannheim. It is a phenomenal piece of history. The recording engineer realised that German radio operatives would get forewarning that a raid was being mounted and pulled the live broadcast. The land-line preserved the recording, however. Eleven of the raid’s 197 bombers failed to return.
The illustration of the nightingale is from Leopold Scheidt’s Vögel unserer Heimat (‘Birds of our homeland’) published in 1902 – a gift given to me in July 2012 from the library of Harry Frank (1928-2012). I started reading the book deep in the heart of Thuringia (Thüringen) and as I did memories of this recording me came flooding back to me.
A triangulation occurred with Down by the Riverside, the old gospel song that includes the line, “Ain’t gonna study war no more…” From Nightingales: A Celebration (British Trust for Ornithology ISBN 0 903793 91 1, undated [circa 1997])
The copyright of all images lies with the respective photographers, companies and image-makers.
24. 8. 2012 |
read more...
[by Ken Hunt, London] Woodrow Wilson ‘Woody’ Guthrie (1912-1967) was born the day before my father. He was born on 14 July 1912 and Leslie Hunt wasn’t, so to speak. Both of them were hugely influential figures in my musical, creative and political development. Here’s a celebration of Guthrie’s work, with a little help Cisco Houston, Neil Young with Crazy Horse, Madeleine Peyroux, Billy Bragg and Utah Phillips.
How much? How long? – Woody Guthrie
Rather than fling ourselves into the Woody Guthrie song collection, let’s get familiar with his speaking voice and his anecdotage. This wire recording from 1949 was made in front of an audience at the Jewish Community Center in Newark, New Jersey. You get a feel for his accent, his spoken voice, his voice’s cadences and how he sounded. And how given a question or two he could yak.
Wrote his daughter Nora Guthrie, “In 2001, the Woody Guthrie Archives received two antique wire recordings documenting a 1949 performance […] moderated by his wife, my mother, Marjorie Mazia.” He talks for a quarter of an hour, could clearly talk the hind legs off a donkey. From The Live Wire (Woody Guthrie Foundation, 2007)
Ingrid Bergman – Billy Bragg
This was one of the pieces of left-over wordery that Billy Bragg set to music. He performs the song straight to acoustic guitar accompaniment. The lyric is saucy and it could have been done in any number of ways. It is that kind of song. Bragg’s approach and delivery invest the lyrics with something that I hesitate to say that Guthrie himself would have done. There is neither Leer, nor Lurkio here – not the merest hint of Frankie Howerd, so to speak.
I consider this to be one Billy Bragg’s absolutely finest creations. If you listen to it, you will realise how easy it could have tipped into something else, though not parody. Bragg’s far better than that. From Mermaid Avenue – The Complete Sessions (Nonesuch 7559-79628-0, 2012)
Tom Joad – Woody Guthrie
One of Woody Guthrie’s great pieces of re-writing, it condenses John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath character, Tom Joad into 16 or so verses. This particular version is from a 1949 live performance made at the Jewish Community Centre in Newark, New Jersey and captures his speaking voice in all its anecdotal charm – and that of his then-wife Marjorie, a dancer with the Martha Graham Dance Company.
Tom Joad is a song that I also associate with Joe McDonald. He included it on his album Country Joe McDonald thinking of Woody Guthrie (reissued in the UK as Vanguard VMD 6546 in 2011). It was an album originally released in 1969 and it was an important one because McDonald gave new validation to Guthrie’s songs in a way that sounds impossible now. Back then, relatively little of Woody Guthrie’s work was available in Britain. In 1969 it would have been impossible to imagine how much in the way of Guthrie recordings could have been around… From The Live Wire (Woody Guthrie Foundation, 2007)
Ship In The Sky – Cisco Houston
Cisco Houston (1918-1961) was one of the great popularisers of Guthrie’s songs. His early death meant that he is less remembered than he should be in the Guthrie narrative. He was close to Guthrie and shipped with him in the merchant marine on Atlantic convoy duties once the United States entered the Second World War. Jimmy Longhi’s Woody, Cisco & Me (1997) describes those times.
Talking in July 2011, Arlo Guthrie praised that book as nailing his father as he remembered him. This is an exclusive extract from that interview: “There were tie-ins to things I had remembered at home. My Dad had created these things called ‘hoodises’. A ‘hoodis’ was a contraption made up of junk that he either glued or nailed or stapled or somehow tied together that was like a sculpture. Like a modern art sculpture. He had made one on the ship that they were on during the Second World War. He had put it on the back of this ship and all the sailors were saying, ‘What’s that?’ He was, ‘Ahhh, it’s goin’ to make the ship go faster.’ They said, ‘Well, it can’t possibly make the ship go faster.’ And yet while it was up, the ship was making another two to three knots faster than they’d ever been able to go before. Now, I’d not saying that Woody is a scientific inventor: I’m only pointing out that maybe somehow or other… Somebody took it down and the ship went back to its normal speed. Is that real? I don’t know. But that’s Jimmy Longhi telling his story.” Read the book. From The Folkways Years 1944-1961 (Smithsonian Folkways SFCD 40059, 1994)
This Land Is Your Land – Woody Guthrie
A glass acetate recording and an alternative take made in April 1944 for Asch Records. Track 14 on The Asch Recordings Vol. 1 (Smithsonian Folkways SFW CD 40112, 1999)
This Land Is Your Land – Neil Young with Crazy Horse
And then there is Neil Young and Crazy Horse’s version.
Incidentally, the Woody Guthrie cover article in R2 examines the background to, and context of This Land Is Your Land as you are unlikely ever to have realised it might be. From Americana (Reprise 9362-49508-5, 2012)
Going Down The Road Feeling Bad – Woody Guthrie, Cisco Houston and Sonny Terry
A much travelled song. This version was cut in April 1944.
Madeleine Peyroux: “I heard my father [actor and teacher Rip Peyroux] sing it and it’s one of the few songs he would sing. He was not a singer by any means, but he would sing when he was especially emotional. It always brought him to tears. My father grew up down in Texarkana, born in New Orleans, and he had a rough childhood down there with a lot of alcoholism in the family. He grew up to be a rough kind of guy. He could get pretty mean, so hearing him sing a song like that meant a lot – not only because he could be a mean old man [laughter] but also because he grew up in the Jim Crow South.
“It was Woody Guthrie’s presence in the world, the singing of this kind of song – and probably other songs that were anti-fascist – that made my Dad sympathise and helped express feelings that my Dad had as a young boy in the South. My Dad hated the racism of the South and grew up fearing that the world was an unfair place. It turned him into a mean old man [laughter] but he did cry when he sang that lyric, ‘I ain’t gonna be a-treated this-a way…’ I think he knew it meant more than just one person’s problem. Somebody like Woody Guthrie could sing a song like this and make you understand that it was about poor white men’s rights and black people’s rights and everybody’s human rights. To make you feel that in however few words you have in that one verse. ‘I ain’t gonna be a-treated this-a way…’ That meant a lot.”
Track 11 on The Asch Recordings Vol. 1 (Smithsonian Folkways SFW CD 40112, 1999)
Pretty Boy Floyd – The Byrds
Had to choose this particular performance. It ushered in a whole new appreciation of Guthrie’s work – and country music – for many people, even though Sweetheart was much maligned at the time of its release in 1968 as not being Byrds enough, at least in Britain, and far too country.
Like Happy Traum tells it so well in R2 issue 34 (July/August 2012), it distils the story of the good guy outlaw fiction beautifully. From Sweetheart of the Rodeo (Columbia/Legacy CK 65490, 1998)
Snow Deer – Woody Guthrie
Recorded in April 1944, this song also known as My Pretty Snow-Deer, captures another side of Guthrie. It is an unabashed piece of romanticism or plain old hokum. This isn’t the political agitator putting the world to rights. This is a man making music to pay for the next hamburger or whisky or something towards next month’s alimony.
The excellent notes explain that Ernest Thompson had first recorded it in 1924 and recorded it as a voice, guitar and harmonica cut – contender for the first commercial recording using a harmonica rack – as popularised by Bob Dylan and Neil Young. Track 22 on The Asch Recordings Vol. 4 (Smithsonian Folkways SFW CD 40112, 1999)
This Land Is Not Our Land – Utah Phillips
Utah Phillips (1935-2008) was one of a kind and also one of many. “The lost verses to This Land Is Your Land…”, as he begins his introduction to this performance, is a piece of rewriting very much in the spirit of Woody Guthrie. His rethink about This Land Is Your Land – a song that Guthrie himself rejigged to fit prevailing situations and circumstances and recorded in varying forms – is just a tiddler of a text but it captures the presence and the wit of the man.
I interviewed Utah once for an article. The interview was very, very good. Afterwards, the periodical got cold feet about its political content. Imagine! Utah Phillips talking about politics! Well, I never! The piece got shunted in the sidings. I’ll get that interview run someday somewhere. (Offers on a postcard to this address.)
This Land Is Not Our Land was recorded in May 1999 “as part of a Free Speech Teach-In. “Don’t mourn: organise!” From Utah Phillips’ Making Speech Free (PM Audio Series PMA 0016-2/DIRT-CD-0063, 2011)
Ken Hunt’s obituary of Utah Phillips ‘U. Utah Phillips: Folk singer-songwriter’ appeared in The Independent long ago in Bethlehem: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/u-utah-phillips-folk-singersongwriter-841357.html
Ken Hunt’s article Universal truth – Woody Guthrie remembered appears in the July/August 2012 issue of R2 magazine. It is based on a conversation with Arlo and Nora Guthrie. Its companion piece has a cast of notables picking a song of Guthrie’s and reminiscing about, or responding to it. The cast comprises Wizz Jones, Robb Johnson, Rhiannon Giddens, Dave Goulder, Eliza Carthy, Judy Collins, Happy Traum, Christy Moore, Cerys Matthews, Anne Briggs, Barb Jungr and Madeleine Peyroux.
http://www.rock-n-reel.co.uk/
All interview material is © Ken Hunt. Usual permissions and attribution rules apply. The copyright for the images lies with the respective photographers, companies and image-makers.
Lots more information about Woody Guthrie at:
http://www.woodyguthrie.org/
14. 7. 2012 |
read more...
[by Ken Hunt, London] Another month with varying degrees of noise and loads of work-related choices. This month summons Jackson Browne, Mehdi Hassan, Jefferson Airplane, James ‘Iron Head’ Baker, The Radiators from Space, Neil Young, Sam Lee, Rokia Traoré, Country Joe & The Fish and back to Jackson Browne to do their bit to keep a freelance music writer sane.
Running On Empty – Jackson Browne
You know what it’s like when you seek solace in music? This month this one hit home mainly on account of those miles rushing by under the wheels and exhaustion – and most important of all because Jackson Browne and his magnificent seven lift the spirits.
Let’s hear it for David Lindley (guitar and lap steel), Russell Kunkel (drums), Leland Sklar (bass), Craig Doerge (keyboards), Danny Kortchmar (guitars) and, on vocals, Doug Haywood and Rosemary Butler. From Running On Empty (Elektra/Rhino8122-78283-2, 2005)
Gulon mein rang bhare – Mehdi Hassan
The Pakistani vocalist Mehdi Hassan (1927-2012) recorded hundreds upon hundreds of songs but above others, Gulon mein rang bhare (“Let the blossoms fill with colour”) became his signature song. The poem itself was from the pen of the left-wing poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz (1911-1984). One of Mehdi Hassan’s older brothers, Ghulam Qadir set the poem to music, choosing raga Jhinjhoti as its vehicle of transportation. It is a perfect example of the magical connection that can occur between lyricist, composer and interpreter.
The first of two CDs that come with Asif Noorani’s biography includes this rendition, recorded in concert. Sheer joy. The book implies that this is a recording made at EMI (Pakistan)’s Lahore studio in 1976. (Sometimes these things aren’t clear.) There is a real atmosphere to this recording of one of Mehdi Hassan’s signature pieces. Contained within Asif Noorani’s book Mehdi Hasan:The Man and His Music (Liberty Books, Pakistan, ISBN 978-969-9502-00-2, 2010)
Ken Hunt’s obituary of Mehdi Hassan from the Independent of 16 June 2012 is at http ://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/mehdi-hassan-musician-hailed-as-the-maestro-of-the-ghazal-7855063.html
Ishtiaq Ahmed’s tribute to him from Pakistan’s Daily Times of 17 June 2012 is at http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2012%5C06%5C17%5Cst ory_17-6-2012_pg3_3
For illuminations about Gulon mein rang bhare itself, visit http://urdustuff.blogspot.co.uk (and then track to 2007/04/faiz-gulon-mein-rang-bhare). Highly recommended. Deewaan, its blogger, does not re-poeticise Faiz’s ghazal. (No idea who Deewaan is.) The blog offers explanations of what is going on and going down.
Pretty As You Feel – Jefferson Airplane
This version of the song is the 45 rpm single edit. Recorded in sessions over December 1970 and January 1971 (the CD set’s booklet’s notes tell us), it has a similar sound quality to David Crosby’s If Only I Could Remember My Own Name.
Joey Covington sings lead. Grace Slick and Paul Kantner contribute backing vocals. Jack Casady is on electric bass. Jorma Kaukonen plays electric guitar. And Papa John Creach plays violin. In addition to those members of the Airplane, the performance has Carlos Santana on electric guitar and Michael Shrieve on kit drums. There was something about its atmosphere that felt just right this month… From Jefferson Airplane Loves You (RCA 02863 61110-2, 1992)
My Yellow Gal – James ‘Iron Head’ Baker with vocal accompaniments
This particular recording was made at Central State Prison Farm in Texas in December 1933 at the end of a collecting trip that John A Lomax (1867-1948) and his son Alan Lomax (1915-2002) made between July and December of that year. Baker sings with R D Allen and Will Crosby singing back-ups. It is a prison lament, a memory of loss, a multiracial memory from, hands down, easily the month’s most played CD.
When the Lomaxes recorded these prisoners, surely the My Yellow Gal singers could never have imagined in their wildst dreams that people would still be listening to their voices so many years later. The anthology from which this is taken was compiled and annotated by Mark Allan Jackson, the author of Prophet Singer: The Voice and Vision of Woody Guthrie (University Press of Mississippi, 2008) – a book I have never seen. From Jail House Bound – John Lomax’s First Southern Prison Recordings, 1933 (West Virginia University Press/Global Jukebox WVU GJ1012, 2012)
www.wvupress.com and www.globaljukeboxrecords.com
Morning Dew – The Radiators from Space
This interpretation of Bonnie Dobson’s song – I refuse to add another name to the credits – derives from the arrangement that the Irish band Sugar Shack came up with in 1968.
The Rads are Johnny Bonnie (drums and percussion), Philip Chevron (vocals, guitars and more), Pete Holidai (vocals, lead guitar, keyboards and more), Steve Rapid (vocals, synth) and Enda Wyatt (bass). Anita Bonnie adds backing vocals on this particular track.
A glorious throw-back of a track from an album that flaunts The Radiators from Space’s Irish credentials, past and present. From Sound City Beat (Chiswick CWK 3022, 2012)
God Save The Queen – Neil Young with Crazy Horse
The best part of the diamond wotsit ‘celebrations’ was listening to this as a balance and cultural assault from the Dominions. The segue into My Country ‘Tis Of Thee is special. From Americana (Reprise 9362-49508-5, 2012)
My Ausheen My Old Shoes – Sam Lee
This is the final track from the debut album of the London-based singer of traditional songs Sam Lee. This particular song is a Scots Traveller morsel that he gleaned from Stanley Robinson (1940-2009). It is delivered as an aural collage, one that includes Jane Turriff singing What Can A Young Lassie Dae Wi An Auld Man? (“What can a young girl do with an old man?”) to piano accompaniment (recorded by Bill Leader and courtesy of Topic Records), some swifts calling in aerial ballet (or aerial, little-swift-making naughtiness) and a recording of a half-muffled peal of bells from Bisley. And then there is the music… Oh, the music! He multi-tracks vocals and plays a little shruti box drone while Gerry Diver adds piano, fiddle and auto-harp.
In an unpublished interview with me that we did in May 2012, Sam Lee spoke of Stanley Robertson: “I think what Stan represented for me was a sense… I’ll start again. I’ll start with a quote I’ve only recently come across. You picked up on it in my email, the Mahler quote about tending the flame. I think what Stanley represented was that there were fires out there burning and this was a living tradition and not a dead and revived or re-enacted musical form. Not to take away from the beauty of it, this music was intrinsically related to a certain group of people and that as much as I had seen music really on a living basis in the hands of a privileged few living a comfortable and modern lifestyle.”
Sam Lee is a singer with a true clarity of vision with a gift for communicating the living fire of traditional music – cold and heated fire both. From Ground of its Own (TNCR001CD, 2012)
Ken Hunt’s obituary ‘Stanley Robertson: Storyteller and folk singer who chronicled Scots Traveller history’ from The Independent of 25 November 2009 is at http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/stanley-robertson-storyteller-and-folk-singer-who-chronicled-scots-traveller-history-1826875.html
Dounia – Rokia Traoré
“Chaque aurore annonce un nouveau jour…” – “each dawn announces a new day” – is how this song begins. Once upon a time, many years ago, David Harrington of the Kronos Quartet asked what I thought of Rokia Traoré and I simply answered that she was fab. I get little chance to listen to music from Africa nowadays because I am focussed elsewhere musically. This Malian vocalist-composer is one of those musicians that I cannot imagine ever wishing to give up following, however. She represents a spirit of adventure and danger. From Tchamantché (Nonesuch 7559-79934-5, 2008)
Janis – Country Joe & The Fish (“Orchestra conducted by Country Joe”)
This is one of the surprises that John Crosby’s luscious 4-CD boxed set documenting the roots history of the US-based Vanguard Records label springs upon listeners. It is an instrumental version of the Joe McDonald song about Janis Joplin released on a Vanguard single in 1967. Can’t recall ever hearing about the single before, unless it was from John Crosby himself back in the day when he was compiling the set. (In which case I have forgotten that conversation.) From Make it your sound, make it your scene – Vanguard Records & the 1960s musical revolution (Vanguard VANBOX 14, 2012)
The image is from Ace Records’ Right Track (June 2012): www.acerecords.co.uk/
Stay – Jackson Browne
The concluding track from the album that kicked off this month’s selections. It was first released in 1977 and the vocal combination of Rosemary Butler and David Lindley on falsetto still brings a smile to my face. From Running On Empty (Elektra/Rhino8122-78283-2, 2005)
The copyright of all images lies with the respective photographers, companies and image-makers.
11. 7. 2012 |
read more...
[by Ken Hunt, London] Aged 50, Joe Strummer died of a suspected heart attack at home in Broomfield in Somerset on 22 December 2003. In the warm glow and cold slab reality of his death, he seemed to have changed people’s perceptions of ‘reality’ more than most ever do. He was never the Bob Dylan figure that some claimed him to be after his death, though. Mind you, he did get to guest on Dylan’s Down In The Groove (1988).
The son of Ronald Mellor, a British civil servant in the Foreign Office who went where the diplomacy of the day posted him, he was born John Graham Mellor in Ankara, Turkey on 21 August 1952. Strummer, as he later ‘became’, had a wider understanding of other cultures than most Brits of his, or indeed previous, generations. He expressed it gloriously, dressing it in a nicely multicultural guise, in the fractured syntax and humorously dubious orthography of the Bhindi Bhagee song on Global A Go-Go (2001). (Ordinarily it would be bindi (ladies’ fingers or okra) and bhaji (fritter).) In this truly amusing ‘list song’, a Kiwi seeking the authentic taste of “mushy peas” asks him where he can locate the grey-green mush that has passed for pea heaven for generations of Britons. The New Zealander gets a stream of gastronomic consciousness for his trouble. From akee (Caribbean dried fish), lassi (Indian yogurt drink), Somali wacky baccy (quite likely an illegal substance) and onwards, Strummer arcs across to music and the sort of nutrients in his musical plate. He and the Mescaleros proclaim their tastes as ragga, bhangra, “two-step tanga”, mini-cab radio and a few etceteras. By now, with years of worthy, well-intentioned cod-reggae pieces/reggae codpieces – Big Youth’s Screaming Target or Toots Hibbert’s Pressure Drop anyone? – and Rock Against Racism gig sensibility behind him, Strummer had become something of a mouthpiece for a multicultural Britain. He was far from the only one, thank goodness. For a taste of that, try and imagine Billy Bragg and The Blokes’ English, Half English (2002) without him. And then the others.
Mellor said he adopted his Strummer moniker because he felt, with a nicely self-deprecating touch, the word fitted his guitar-playing prowess. Supposedly an earlier interlude had him masquerading as Woody Mellor in homage to Woody Guthrie. True or not, it fitted because Guthrie knew how to thrash a guitar better than most when it was needed. And when the time came around he pawned his guitar with the ‘This Machine Kills Fascists’ slogan…
Art flirtations behind him, Strummer played with the 101ers, a damn average pub rock group. Early pre-Clash recordings by Joe Strummer and the 101ers appeared as the album Elgin Avenue Breakdown (Revisited) (2005). The title alluded to the number of the house in which they squatted. Back in the day, that district of West London was one of London’s many squatting hotbeds offering rebellion as soon as the social security giro came. During Strummer’s tenure, the group released one single. Elgin Avenue Breakdown… comprised an unreleased studio session with live recordings with the approval of Strummer’s widow, Lucinda. The 101ers had been a fairly standard pub rock doing R&B covers until the Sex Pistols supported them at the Nashville Rooms in West London but the experience shaped Strummer’s approach and led in time to The Clash.
The Clash happened when two members of the London SS – the group’s guitarist Mick Jones and bassist Paul Simonon – whisked Strummer away. They needed a new name and the name they chose was The Clash.
Punk was a movement full of kidding on about rage and nihilism while wallowing in hedonistic complacency. (The rebellion begins when the social security cheque arrives, this pub closes and the like.) When it came to the disdainful matter of politics or any semblance of political insight, there was only one real exception to the punkish rule and The Clash was it. They rescued the punk movement from its fashion statement manifesto and manipulation in ways that Malcolm McLaren and the Sex Pistols could only dream of, fantasise over, or have nightmares about. When it came to going through the butter of society, the Sex Pistols, the Buzzcocks and Damned were the hammer and The Clash the hot knife.
The Clash had an authentic voice, not some posturing snide snarl or curled identikit lip for the crowd’s benefit. Punk swiftly degenerated into something else once a waft of dosh maced the young hopefuls. White Man In Hammersmith Palais howled about “turning rebellion into cash” and in Lost In The Supermarket they became the “special offer”. (As ever shall be, once ground smooth by the star-making machinery, wry amen.) Yet surely, if Mick Jones’ power chords count for anything, The Clash showed off a bar sinister genealogy that pointed to the Kinks as much as punk or reggae.
Parenthetically, John Lydon emerged post-punk, post-PIL as truly one of the most articulate, engaging and though-provoking interviewees of them all after his Johnny Rotten phase.
After Strummer’s death, Billy Bragg, one of many launched on the wings of The Clash, called Strummer “the political engine of the band.” (In the spurious link twilit zone, the working title for Combat Rock (1982) was Rat Patrol From Fort Bragg.) Good soundbite. More accurately, William, Strummer was the fuel that drove the movement’s only political engine. And The Clash only got better, got proficient, and got better at rock than at punk. And got good at humour: Julie’s In The Drug Squad still tickles.
Like most bands, The Clash’s five albums between 1977 and 1982 were downright variable in quality. The one that stood out was London Calling (1979). Try the strongly recommended three-CD The Clash On Broadway (1991) for a better career overview. It contains the stuff that elevated them above the ranks. Plus. Between its live Lightning Strikes (Not Once But Twice) with its Loaded Velvet Underground raucousness, its Sandinista! outtake Every Little Bit Hurts and the unedited Straight To Hell (which does what the Kinks’ Lola failed to pull off, thanks to the BBC’s worry-warts, namely, including the unexpurgated alternative to ‘cherry cola’), The Clash On Broadway captures the band’s essence better than pages of words (and I include these). The group disbanded in dragged-out silliness, drugged-out stupidity and low-life recriminations in 1985. It still took years for Strummer to admit his mistake about firing his songwriting partner Jones from the band in 1983. At least Strummer had the graciousness to do the decent thing and make amends.
To say that Strummer went on to do a lot of nothing for several years is only partially true. There was a lot of darkness and much foolishness after The Clash folded its hand. He worked on several film projects of varying quality. He racked up work with films such as Walker, Mystery Train, Lost In Space and Sid And Nancy – either/and/or acting/doing the music. There were other picture palace credits but they don’t matter. He filled in with the Pogues for Shane MacGowan for a while. Bless him and most of all, Strummer had the integrity not to do retreads of Should I Stay Or Should I Go (on the back of that jeans advert hit), This Is Radio Clash or Rock The Casbah for the king’s ransom offered to participate in a Clash reunion tour.
Instead, he put together one of Britain’s great bands of the turn of the Millennium – Bragg and the Blokes rank there too – and they were the Mescaleros. They first emerged in 1999. The songs told great stories, perhaps sung through a distorting prism, but worthy to sit beside the Bill Kirchen-led Moonlighters’ own mescal visions. Rock, Art and the X-ray Style was good. It was wonderful to see song credits going to Pablo Cook, Tymon Dogg, Scott Shields, Martin Slattery and Strummer. It said volumes about the organic creative process that happens in bands. The Mescaleros’ collective credits were just another reason to hope they were making music for a New Age.
Strummer did something else that brings him into the Grateful Dead class. Over the Dead’s thirty-year history, San Francisco’s finest did more benefits and raised and distributed more funds than arguably any music act had in history. Strummer shared a similar spirit. In his last month, he was working with Bono – U2 had been massively influenced by The Clash – and Dave Stewart on a track for a Nelson Mandela-driven project to do with awareness of AIDS in Africa. He also did a firefighters’ union benefit at Acton to the west of the metropolis at which Mick Jones, the man he had had sacked in 1983, joined him on stage.
This Life is an edited and expanded and revised version of an obituary that appeared in the Canadian magazine Penguin Eggs after Strummer’s death. In the meanwhile, we have Chris Salewicz’s Redemption Song (HarperCollins, 2006) to cast further light on Joe Strummer and there is Strummerville
For about Strummerville go to http://www.glastonburyfestivals.co.uk/areas/strummerville/.
2. 7. 2012 |
read more...
« Later articles
Older articles »