Giant Donut Discs ® – October 2011
3. 10. 2011 | Rubriky: Articles,Giant Donut Discs
[by Ken Hunt, Gaienhofen am Bodensee] Purposeful drifting might conjure images of lying on a lilo – one of those air mattresses – on a lake, floating where the breeze, current or tide take you but that would be well wrong, John. These driftings all link up, even if the connections may not cry out. Ten selections from the Bosnian vocalist Amira, the Welsh group Fernhill, the largely forgotten British faux-folk slash singer-songwriter Mick Softley, the never-to-be-forgotten singer and guitarist Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, the maestro of Hindustani maestros Ali Akbar Khan, the Karnatic vina maestro Balachander, the koto player Nakahsahi Gyōmu, the Kinks who turned office workers into heroes of the everyday, Cilla Fisher and Artie Trezise, the Gaelic singer Alyth McCormack… Louring over this batch of music and jumble of emotions was the death of Ray Fisher balanced with the consolation of time spent with dear friends at Lake Constance (Bodensee) and an overdue reunion with Hermann Hesse.
Oj Ti Momče Ohrigjanče – Amira
Amira Medunjanin really entered my field of vision with her London concert debut supporting Taraf de Haïdouks in June 2007. Petr Dorůžka and I, your genial hosts here, went to the concert together. At that point the only recording of hers that I knew was Amira’s first album, Rosa (2004). Seeing her live enabled me to make greater sense of what she was doing. Since then, Amira’s progress has been a wonder to behold.
On this splendid track, a Macedonian song of grief from a man’s point of view, from her fourth album, Amulette she is joined by Bojan Z (Zulfikarpašić) on piano, Nenad Vasilić on string bass, Bachar Khalife on percussion with guest Vlatko Stefanovski on guitar. The vibe is Macedonian folk-jazz. The notes say, “This time the sorrow of loneliness and yearning belongs to a man. He walks by the lake and cries for his loved one. ‘Come back to me, here by the lake I await you.'” The separation could be the aftermath of an affair, a broken relationship or a bereavement. You get the drift. From Amulette (World Village 450018, 2011)
For more information visit www.amira.com.ba
Diddan – Fernhill
There are many exhilarating things to say about Fernhill’s work. Their music speaks to me even though nearly all of the little Welsh I ever had long ago slipped away through lack of use and practice. Nevertheless, there is something about the language’s sound that continually draws me back. Without entering the misty realm of cliché, it is a language of musicality with the sort of gruff, guttural leanings that contrast so well.
Fernhill is Christine Cooper (fiddle, voice), Tomos Williams (trumpet, flugelhorn), Ceri Rhys Matthews (guitar, flute, voice) and Julie Murphy (voice, sruti). Canu Rhydd (‘free poetry’), the minimalist album notes tell, was recorded in the last days of the Dartington College of Arts “before the college left its Devon home for good”. To my mind, Diddan’s style of arrangement – sweeping one moment, intimate the next – crystallises so much about Fernhill that engages so much. It captures their energy so very, very well with Julie Murphy’s soaring over driving fiddle underpinned with understated brass and guitar.
For those more inclined to the English, Forest – their take on the carol also known as Down In Yon Forest or the Corpus Christi Carol with the recurring lines “The bells of Paradise I heard them ring/…/And I love my Lord Jesus above any thing”- is also superb. From Canu Rhydd (Disgyfrith CD02, 2011)
For more on the history of Dartington Hall, track down Victor Bonham-Carter’s Dartington Hall – The History of an Experiment (Phoenix House, London, 1958)
More information about Fernhill at www.fernhill.info
Love Colours – Mick Softley
Back in 1971 Pete Frame interviewed Mick Softley for Zig Zag, the magazine that counts as one of turning-points in the appreciation of what was going on musically in Britain (and elsewhere) at the time. At times it was like a divining rod. Parts of Frame’s interview are included in the notes to this release of Softley’s Sunrise (1970) and Street Singer (1971). Another old friend, Nigel Cross, founding editor of Bucketfull of Brains supplies the contextual essay that accompanies the rest of this package.
Mick Softley had seen a small measure of success when his colleague Donovan covered his Gold Watch Blues on his debut LP and The War Drags On on the EP The Universal Soldier. As Nigel Cross reminds, both got into the UK Top Ten. Softley and Mac MacGann were going to go on tour with Donovan as part of his backing band and got as far as the Isle of Skye – not a sign of no sense of direction, more to do with it being Donovan’s home – but it never happened and they returned to St. Albans. Softley and MacLeod parted ways and Softley went solo.
Parenthetically, Mac MacGann went on to marry the US expatriate singer Dorris Henderson (how many times must she have been asked about the story of her singing on that wonderful Lord Buckley album?) and made loads of local music in Middlesex and Surrey, and settled in the Ealing-Richmond-Isleworth triangle; he died in Isleworth in 2011, by which time he and I had ample opportunities to talk about the flora and the fauna, especially the birdlife, of the upper tidal Thames and its environs.
Love Colours is an Indian-inflected, impressionistic piece from Sunrise with Lyn Dobson on sitar, Ned Balen on and tabla and Chris Lawrence on bass. Sue and Sunny (Wheatman), Lesley Duncan and Gringo add backing vocals. Very much in the stamp of the times, it just keeps growing. Pentangle’s Tony Cox produced. From Sunrise/Street Singer (BGO Records BGOCD66O, 2005)
Phil Davison’s obituary ‘Mac McGann: Folk musician in the vanguard of the singer-songwriter movement’ is worth reading at http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/mac-mcgann-folk-musi cian-in-the-vanguard-of-the-singersongwriter-movement-2264847.htm
Mo Run An Diugh Mar an De Thu (Hi Horó ’S Na Hòro Eile) – Alyth McCormack
This is from an album by Jonny Hardie (fiddle and guitar), Brian MacAlpine (piano and keyboards), Alyth McCormack (vocals) and Rory Campbell (pipes, whistles and vocals) and grew out of a commission by the Highland Festival, the notes say, for a programme of music celebrating Captain Simon Fraser’s Airs and Melodies peculiar to the Highlands of Scotland and the Isles of 1816. Fraser (1773-1852) had had Nathaniel Gow as his violin teacher and Gow’s sensibilities must have coloured his approach when laying down this collection’s tunes, many taken from the singing of his father and grandfather. However, such was the political climate of the day that he felt it politic to omit the words.
Nevertheless, the collection sold out. In an ill-starred move he recycled the profits into republishing the book in India and the American colonies. He fell foul of knavery. A portent of illegal downloading – and a reminder that things keep coming around – his book had already been pirated in the colonies and his printing failed to recoup his outlay.
This song – it translates as ‘My love today as heretofore’ – reunites the words with a melody that is seared into my cranium. It is the tune, the slow air wedded to Robert Burns’ Ae Fond Kiss (for example, on Eddi Reader’s sublime Sings The Songs of Robert Burns (Rough Trade, 2003)). Alyth McCormack sings this song so beautifully, bringing out its pathos. She returned to the song, its title shortened to Hi Horó, on her solo album An lomall/The Edge (Vertical, 2000) with beats and a greater rhythmicality.
If even a handful of listeners or visitors to this site back-track to the earlier Captain’s Collection version it would make an already happy man happier still. Either way, Alyth McCormack is a most marvellous talent championing the Gaelic arts. From The Captain’s Collection (Greentrax CDTRAX 187, 1999)
More information at http://www.greentrax.com/ and http://alyth.net/
Connection – Ramblin’ Jack Elliott
Originally released in 1968 on Reprise, Young Brigham was Ramblin’ Jack’s debut album for a major label. This Jagger/Richards song first appeared on the Stones’ Between The Buttons and would prove to be a song that he really took to heart and would regularly revisit. From Young Brigham (Collector’s Choice Music CCM-198-2, 2001)
Raagam-Taanam-Pallavi in Shri – S. Balachander
Balachander was a knotty character who rarely shied away from musical unconventionality. He could have been written off as an iconoclast or a renegade but for one thing. Balachander possessed a musicality that his critics could only envy. In South Indian music, it is the norm for a ragam to receive a short, crisp exposition, although there is a sparingly deployed sequence comparable to the longer renditions familiar from Hindustani concerts. That is called a raagam-taanam-pallavi. From Veena Chakravarthy S. Balachander In Concert (Swathi’s Sanskriti SA138, 2010)
Rokudan – Nakahsahi Gyōmu
A solo koto piece that swells and develops so beautifully through a set of variations from the third volume of the 1941 KBS recordings that World Arbiter has released. I know nothing about Nakahsahi Gyōmu – and never went googling – but to these ears he has a fine touch to the koto in a gagaku setting, gagaku being a courtly music style placing great weight on not only the notes but also the spaces surrounding them. A note therefore is not only released but framed. Rather than cramming in notes, the musician liberates the notes so each can be, as it were, held up to the light and their facets examined before the next arrives. Of course, that doesn’t always happen. A flurry may deliver a package of notes, so to speak. From Japan: Koto – Shamisen – 1941 (World Arbiter 2012, 2011)
Waterloo Sunset – The Kinks
It’s not just one of those songs, it’s one of those perfect London songs. From Something Else By The Kinks (Universal/Sanctuary 273 214-1, 2011)
For more information about this song, track down Nick Hasted’s You Really Got Me: The Story of The Kinks (Omnibus Press, 2011) and his highly recommended taster article ‘Ray Davies – How a lonely Londoner created one of the great Sixties songs’ from The Independent of 26 August 2011: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/features/ra y-davies–how-a-lonely-londoner-created-one-of-the-great-sixties- songs-2343826.html
Fisher Lassies – Cilla Fisher and Artie Trezise
This Ewan MacColl song opened the Topic LP, The Fisher Family (1966) and sits in fourth place in the running order of Cilla Fisher and Artie Trezise’s album, ranked as Melody Maker‘s Folk Album of the Year in 1979. At Ray Fisher’s farewell send-off at Whitney Bay on 12 September 2011 her sisters sang this song. Fittingly, it was blue skies above, clouds skittering across the sky in the direction of the North Sea and a hurricane blowing up and rocking the overspill attendees standing outside the crematorium. It was the sort of contradictory weather that Ray would have revelled in. So, no apologies for including her baby sister and her husband’s version of, to give it its fuller title Come All Ye Fisher Lassies. Rick Lee delivers the piano parts. This was such a great album. Maybe Cilla Fisher and Artie Trezise will one day take time out from their Singing Kettle incarnation to make another folk album. From Cilla & Artie (Greentrax CDTRAX 9050, 1998)
More information at http://www.greentrax.com/
Rāg Hemant – Ali Akbar Khan
Winter draws on so it’s time for a winter rāg and Hemant is an obvious choice. Water Lily’s Kavi Alexander enjoyed a fine friendship with the sarod maestro Ali Akbar Khan and it is not fanciful to suggest that their mutual respect contributed to the Indian Architexture‘s remarkableness. Accompanied by Swapan Chaudhuri, he laid down four pieces that, in the order of presentation, were Alam Bhairav (his own once-titled rāg composition Alamalaya Smriti), Hemant, Megh-Sarang and Durgā. But this is winter and years of returning to this recording have only made it more austere, more luscious. Ali Akbar Khan’s music is a wellspring to which I continually return. From Indian Architexture (Water Lily Acoustics WLA-ES-20-SACD, 2001)
The image of Ken Hunt interviewing Ali Akbar Khan in his home study cum shrine room from 1993 is © Santosh Sidhu/Swing 51 Archives. The copyright of all other images lies with the respective photographers, companies and image-makers. Hermannn Hesse’s first home in Gaienhofen from 1904 to 1907 was the next-door house on Kapellenstraße. Without getting sentimental or romantic, it felt like a place where the past and present connects.
Ken Hunt’s obituary of Ray Fisher from The Independent of Friday, 9 September 2011 is at http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/ray-fisher-singer-who-established-herself-as-one-of-the-most-important-figures-in-the-british-folk-revival-2351551.html