[Ken Hunt, London] Let’s say goodbye to 2025 with an anniversary. At the very beginning of 2010 I pitched the idea for a regular column to Sean McGhee, the editor of RnR (after its original name Rock’n’Reel. My idea was to write about a socially engaged or political song or piece of music.
27. 1. 2026 | read more...
[Ken Hunt, London] 2023 into 2024 felt like bursting smiling into sunshine after being under one of the darkest clouds imaginable. In July 2024 I went back to the Rudolstadt Festival. The 2023 Festival had been really important. Santosh and I arrived there a month after being discharged from hospital and six weeks after major […]
30. 12. 2024 | read more...
[by Ken Hunt, London] Medical stuff prevented me working on Martin Carthy’s biography, Prince Heathen as much as I’d hoped in 2023. The upside was spending much of the year thinking about and challenging what I had already written. The downside was that for months all I could manage was to read or write for 10 to 30 minutes a day before being forced to rest.
In July the first, post-surgery turning-point was getting to experience the Rudolstadt Festival for the first time since Petr Dorůžka and I went together in 2019. Bizarrely I had completely forgotten writing an essay about the history of Folker magazine for the 2023 festival programme. The next, in late November, was Peggy Seeger and me talking as part of the MOTH Club’s all-day event Celebrating 75 Years of Folkways Records.
29. 12. 2023 | read more...
[by Ken Hunt, London] Intensive treatment for cancer prevented me working much on Prince Heathen – The Age of Carthy and England’s Folksong Revival for most of 2022. I resume work on Martin Carthy’s biography in 2023. The upside was spending much of the year thinking about and challenging what I had already written. The downside was that for months I managed to to read or write for 10 to 30 minutes a day before needing to rest.
There were hardly any live concerts and no street music to speak of. In tiny windows of opportunity, I did get to see one photographic exhibition, Gli Isolani (The Islanders) of mainly Sardinian and Sicilian pagan and pre-Christian folklore at Hackelbury Fine Art. I went along with Barry Pitman who specialises in photographing England’s morris and folklore
25. 12. 2022 | read more...
[by Ken Hunt, London] Another strange year spent thinking, living, breathing and writing about Martin Carthy and his approved biography, Prince Heathen. All I shall say on the subject is to say that Alan Garner’s Treacle Walker came out in October 2021. He crams into 150-some pages a lifetime of writing and many years of ideas and imagination. It took Alan a fair few years to write it and it was worth the wait. (A link to my Swing 51 interview Alan Garner: Read more ) A quote of his in the FTWeekend Magazine of 18/19 December 2021 caught my eye and imagination and will be in Prince Heathen and will serve to explain much. I hope. Enough about Prince Heathen.
In part this Best of 2021 reflects reviewing commissions from RnR and Jazzwise. In
1. 1. 2022 | read more...
[by Ken Hunt, London] 2020 will go down as the first year of Covid-19. It was the strangest year for making music and writing about it many of us have ever experienced. In late February I was working in Gaienhofen on the German bank of Lake Constance on a radio script for my contributions to Ulrike Zöller’s Pandit Ravi Shankar 100th birth anniversary event for BR-Klassik (Bavarian Radio’s classical station): https://www.br-klassik.de/programm/radio/ausstrahlung-2058660.html
I spent time drafting and testing phrases and sentences while gaining insights into what ordinary people who had never listened to Indian music understood made of what I said. I re-drafted my script with ordinary radio listeners in mind who were listening in their kitchen or sitting room or while driving.
31. 12. 2020 | read more...
[by Ken Hunt, London] Another year of writing, though ever fewer outlets didn’t bother me unduly. 2019 still meant masses of musical discoveries, reaffirmations and new historic explorations. The last quarter of the year turned golden with the prospect of concentrating more or less exclusively on the approved Martin Carthy biography Prince Heathen in 2020. I returned to Venice to work on the book in the spring of the year and managed to pick up a little Italian and vèneto in side-moments.
2019 saw me once again writing, reading and researching at U Zavěšenýho Kafe (‘At the Hanging Coffee’) in Prague. This July’s visits (with the Rudolstadt Festival as the sandwich filler in the middle) coincided with the birth of Franz Kafka (1883-1924) and I went prepared. I
9. 1. 2020 | read more...
[by Ken Hunt, London] The year went very well indeed with masses of musical discoveries and reaffirmations. For decades I have written in U Zavěšenýho Kafe (‘At the Hanging Coffee’) in Prague 1. The image is of me at its previous site when it was on Úvoz with Jakub ‘Kuba’ Krejčí’s mural of Czechoslovak historical and literary figures behind me. Now at Loretánská 13 I still write and hold meetings there.
31. 12. 2018 | read more...
[by Ken Hunt, London] The music I love music best tends to be music that needs to be played live, the better for it to evolve, blossom, thrive and survive. Music you know or suspect is never going to be performed exactly that way again. In Britain, compared to the Indo-Pakistani subcontinent’s music, concert-goers get relatively few chances to see Persian classical music reveal its merits and mysteries. It is often better on mainland Europe. Mahsa & Marjan Vahdat revealed that with a marvellous concert at the Parisian Théâtre des Abbesses in Paris. (One of the Théâtre de la Ville’s temporarily relocated venues.) The common link was they all left me thinking.
Compared to recent years, little by way of street music or busking made me stop and listen. Th
31. 12. 2017 | read more...
[by Ken Hunt, London] 2016 proved to be, to soundbite Elvis Costello, a particularly good year for the roses. Well, the artistic ones at least. (Brexit notwithstanding, in England the garden roses and the garden as a whole suffered somewhat thanks to the English climate’s vagaries of rain and sunshine.) Nevertheless, it truly was a year to remember musically. That was assisted by chance musical encounters that made me stop and stare and listen. The busker playing chromatic harmonica down below at Waterloo underground station one day in September was utterly spellbinding. A party bash outside the National Theatre in Prague celebrating a Czech national holiday was uplifting
31. 12. 2016 | read more...