Giant Donut Discs ® – December 2011
5. 12. 2011 | Rubriky: Articles,Giant Donut Discs
[by Ken Hunt, London] The one has a lot to do with thinking about loss and renewal, life and the end of life. The music is provided by Anoushka Shankar, David Crosby, Jayanti Kumaresh, Judy Collins, Chumbawamba, Franz Josef Degenhardt, Sultan Khan and Manju Mehta, Ági Szalóki and Gergő Borlai, Davy Graham and Federico García Lorca.
Bulería con Ricardo – Anoushka Shankar
This comes from Anoushka Shankar’s debut for Deutsche Grammophon, a fusion affair that travels the continents from modern-day north-west of the Indo-Pakistani subcontinent to the Iberian peninsula. Anoushka Shankar plays sitar, Pedro Ricardo Mieo piano, Juan Ruiz adds unspecified “Spanish percussion” and Bobote and El Eléctrico palmas (hand claps). It’s a feast of fun and should Anoushka Shanka, also a trained pianist, gets to collaborate with the flamenco pianist David Peña Dorantes there is no knowing where things might go. From Traveller (Deutsche Grammophon 477 9363, 2011)
Tamalpais High (At About 3) – David Crosby
I slid my nail through the shrink-wrapped LP in 1971 in Itzehoe. I had splurged good West German marks on an import copy from a record shop in Hamburg. It was one of the best purchases of my life. Crosby’s first solo album was and remains a gem.
I had no idea what had inspired his Tamalpais High (At About 3) musical adventure. I know now, but that is irrelevant. That is not the point of music. The point of music is the seeds it sows. We can review and change our thoughts about a piece of music as we age. We can also hold more than one interpretation. Many years later, I was sitting with a friend of my son’s age in San Rafael looking up to Mount Tamalpais. I told him a story about a friend’s son having died at the top of Tamalpais. I wept and let years of bottled up emotion pour out, as we talked about David Crosby, Los Lobos and the Pogues. One of the most cathartic experiences of my life. From If I Could Only Remember My Name (Atlantic/Rhino R2 73204, 2006)
Mysterious Duality – Jayanti Kumaresh
This is the title track from one of my albums of the year. The vainika (vina or veena player) Jayanti Kumaresh has the senior Karnatic violinist Lalgudi Jayaraman as a maternal uncle while her aunt is Padmavathy Ananthagopalan, with whom she studied vina. She also studied with S. Balachander (1927-1990), contender for firebrand vainika of recent times. This project is where so much comes together and where she reveals herself as one of the most promising vainikas of our day. Very Twentieth-first century with a few generations of musical glory as back-up. From Mysterious Duality (EarthSync ES0038, 2010)
My Father – Judy Collins
My Father originally appeared on Judy Collins’ Who Knows Where The Time Goes (1968). The arrangements and overall feel were a departure, for gathered around her were musicians capable of delivering folk-rock arrangements. There was something special about the sound of David Anderle’s production, just as there had been with Mark Abramson’s Wildflowers. On this track she was joined by Michael Melvoin on piano, Stephen Stills on electric guitar, Chris Etheridge on electric bass and James Gordon on percussion. She plays electric piano.
Reading her autobiography, Trust Your Heart (Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1987) recently, I came to an appreciation of this song that I had never had hitherto. I love the way she conflates her family’s history (she is the eldest of four siblings, not the youngest) in this Parisian fantasy. A key discovery, however, was reading that her dad had been blind. My Father’s poignant lines “And watch the Paris sun/Set in my father’s eyes again” took on new meaning. From Wildflowers & Who Knows Where The Time Goes (Rhino 8122 73393-2, 2006)
Salt Fare, North Sea – Chumbawamba
This song of Chumbawamba’s that uses a vocal sample from Lal Waterson’s Some Old Salty re-entered my imagination because it opens their Readymades – a project that I view as, crudely put, Britain’s answer to Beck’s visiting of the Alan Lomax Archives, but with the good manners to ask first. I was listening to it for as background research for an article about Davey Graham – whose Anji is prominent in the next track Jacob’s Ladder and somehow I wound up playing Salt Fare, North Sea and Jacob’s Ladder over and over. Chumbawamba continually tickle my fancy. One day I shall write about them properly. From Readymades (Mutt Records LC-12157, 2002) http://www.chumba.com/
Café nach dem Fall – Franz Josef Degenhardt
Flying back from Prague via Frankfurt am Main to London had been hellacious. Fog blanketed Ruzyně airport (PRG) and the Lufthansa plane permitted to fly out of the fog banks took on a bunch of people from a cancelled flight to Munich. At some point I unfolded the Frankfurter Allgemeine and let out a cry on discovering that Franz Josef Degenhardt had died. His death was on the front page of the newspaper.
Franz Josef Degenhardt shaped my expanding worldview and consciousness about politically engaged song when I first discovered him in my bosom buddy, Michael Moser’s record collection in Itzehoe in 1971. Later Franz Josef and I corresponded, put in touch with each other by his sister-in-law, the illustrator Gertrude Degenhardt. Many songs could have hit me in the aftershock of learning that he had died. This was the one. I love the sweep of his vision. It’s a list song multiplied many times. He’s a shameless old name-dropper and I love this suite all the more for it. He ranges from “Karl & Groucho Marx, Che Guevara & Bill Gates” (straightaway introducing the café’s nay-sayer, the garlic-eater (Knoblauchfresser) to the Rolling Stones and the Beatles. And it just goes on and on. (Many thanks to the Lufthansa crew on that fraught flight, too.) From Café nach dem Fall (Polydor 543 615-2, 2000)
Ken Hunt’s FJD obituary in The Independent of 23 November 2011 is at http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/franz-josefdegenhardt-musician-and-hero-of-the-counterculture-6266187.html
Rāg Kaunsi Kanada – Sultan Khan and Manju Mehta
I first met the sarangi maestro Sultan Khan when he did an all-nighter cushion concert with the father and son tabla maestros, Alla Rakha and Zakir Hussain in London in 1981. I first met the sitar virtuoso Manju Mehta, the sister of Vishwa Mohan Bhatt, at the Harballabh in Jalandhar in 2008. This is a duet recording from the 2004 Saptak Festival in Ahmedabad in Gujarat. After Sultan Khan’s death on 27 November 2011 I listened again and again to Soja Re (Go To Sleep) from the now out-of-print compilation Rough Guide To India as I started writing his obituary. Then I looked at the pile of Sultan Khan CDs beside me. I decided that this remarkable interpretation of Kaunsi Kanada was what I needed to listen to… From Umeed (Sense World Music 104, 2008)
Vörösbor – Ági Szalóki and Gergő Borlai
Kishúg is a marked departure for Ági Szalóki. On this album she lights out for, for her, new rock and world music territory. Much of the keyboard- and drum-saturated sound of Kishúg, in what seems to me, as the former London correspondent for El Cerrito, CA’s Keyboard magazine, to champion a retro vibe in an unapologetic way that you don’t hear much nowadays.
Listening through to this album I would suspend judgement and put this track on repeat (the way reviewers do) in order to mull over what was in the mix. I took me weeks for me to puzzle why this track did it for me. It was the Latin style percussion reminding me of the tasteful frenzy of Gene Clark’s masterpiece No Other and Ági Szalóki’s vocal. Maybe the track is more of a vibe than a song. Doesn’t matter.
Vörösbor (Red wine) shows off her vocal talent splendidly, a talent that is not reliant on understanding a word of Hungarian. (There are no translations of the lyric.) Powerful voice. Effervescent stuff. From Kishúg (Folk Európa Kiadó FECD 053, 2011)
More information at http://szalokiagi.hu/index-main.html
Photo © 2011 András Hajdu, courtesy of Ági Szalóki
She Moved Through The Fair – Davy Graham
This is one of those before-and-after performances. What was before? What flowed afterwards? It appears as the fourth track on this Dave Suff-compiled double-CD anthology – essential if you have never heard the wonders that were Davy (later, Davey) Graham. I cannot say that I knew him well but I did know him for a fair few years, interviewed him and corresponded with him over many years. This is one of his performances that remains for me a demonstration of his uniqueness.
My Davey Graham entry is in the January 2012 edition of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. This is the sort of music that guaranteed him a place in that history of British culture told through biography. From A Scholar and a Gentleman (Decca 532 263-1, 2009)
Zorongo gitana – Federico García Lorca and La Argentinita
I had forgotten that Lorca (1898-1936) had recorded music, let alone flamenco, although I knew of his flamenco connections and advocacy. I found this CD in a second-hand record shop. The last four tracks of this album have him accompanying the Buenos Aires-born Encarnacín López ‘La Argentinita’ (1895-1945) on piano in 1931. La Argentinita sings and adds hand and foot percussion, but her flamenco is diaspora flamenco and a signpost to later diaspora musical movements.
I have no idea about the availability of this recording, but for me, Lorca is one of my borrowed ancestors.
This is one of those tiny treasures. From In Memoriam (EMI (Spain) CDM 5 66783 2, 1998)
Ági Szalóki’s portrait is by András Hajdu and appears courtesy of Ági Szalóki. The copyright of the other images lies with the respective photographers, companies and image-makers.