A talk with Lev ‘Ljova’ Zhurbin
[by Petr Dorůžka, Prague] New York is a cosmopolitan city with very rich musical landscape. Do you think there is something special the Russian, East European, or Slavic musicians living in New York can offer that musicians from elsewhere lack?
Absolutely. In the folk scene, New York arguably has amongst its citizens the best Slavic/Balkan/Russian musicians that I’ve ever met. Not only are they strong as performers, they are incredibly open as musicians, adapting the Western musical styles in much more genuine and honest ways than happens in the East.
31. 12. 2008 | read more...
[by Ken Hunt, London] One of the former German Democratic Republic’s most notable and most famous rock musicians, guitarists and bandleaders Peter ‘Cäsar’ Gläser died in Leipzig on 23 October after a long illness. Gläser was born in Leipzig on 7 January 1949 and came to people’s attention as a member of the Klaus Renft Combo. Having joined them as a founding member in 1967, he was called up soon after to do national service in the army and he rejoined them afterwards in 1969. Peter ‘Cäsar’ Gläser (the nickname says a great deal) might be described as Renft’s shadow. After Renft effectively got banned for social criticism in 1975 (helped along by singing the lyrics of Gerulf Pannach who found himself exiled to the West), Gläser co-founded the splinter band Karussell. 
[by Ken Hunt, London] The German writer Peter Maiwald died on 1 December in Düsseldorf. Born in Grötzingen in the West German state of Baden-Württemberg on 8 November 1946, he gravitated to the left. He moved to Munich in 1968 before moving to Neuss in 1970. During this period he was establishing himself as a freelance writer before going on to co-found the magazine Düsseldorfer Debatte. Parenthetically, one has only to think of the Putney Debates during the English Revolution for a sense of the meaning of debate. 
[by Ken Hunt, London] On 27 February the best-disguised Russian superhero Ivan Rebroff, a singer and star of stage, film, musical and television died too. Rebroff kept his origins a closely guarded secret but he had been born Hans-Rolf Rippert in the Spandau district of Berlin on 31 July 193. He created, to go faux-designer, a huge peasant chic and Cossack bravado that became his trademark for the friendly face of Russia during the Cold War era. It is impossible to estimate what he did for rapprochement during the period. “I brought Russian soul to Germany,” he said once. 
[by Ken Hunt, London] Szilvia Bognár, Ágnes Herczku and Ági Szalóki’s album Szájról szájra – first released in Hungary in 2007 but invisible to the outside world until early in 2008 – ranks as one of the benchmark albums to emerge from the pan-European folk scene this decade. It is a master-class in the subtlety and power of interwoven voices as well as being a torrent of lessons on how to draw on traditional folk music and make it both now and timeless. But the wondrousness of Szájról szájra only really comes across in live performance when you match lips to sound. 
[by Ken Hunt, London] To declare an interest, Tom Constanten and I are addicts of bilingual punning and are old friends. Indeed we started our correspondence when I lived in Sutton, a town that I have no reason to return to in many years. As opener for Jefferson Starship, the audience got a magic show of multivalenced allusion, illusion and wordplay from the former keyboardist of the Grateful Dead during their wonderful experimental period as a septet in the late 1960s that produced Anthem of the Sun, Aoxomoxoa and Live Dead.
[by Ken Hunt, London] It’s one of those magnificently manipulative daughter-father lines. She is bending her father round her little finger. And both of them know it. Cyndi Lauper sings, “Oh daddy dear you know you’re still number one/But girls they want to have fun.” Girls Just Want To Have Fun became one of the most popular and most joyful English-language songs of 1983 and 1984. It appeared on Lauper’s She’s So Unusual (1983) and MTV picked up on its video to such an extent that it became their Video of the Year in 1984. The following year the song lent its title to a film staring Helen Hunt and Sarah Jessica Parker, though for some reason Girls Just Want To Have Fun the film didn’t use the Cyndi Lauper version of the song, plumping instead for a version sung by Deborah Galli with Tami Holbrook and Meredith Marshall. Nevertheless it still stuck close to the arrangement that Lauper had delivered. After all, Lauper put her stamp on the song in spectacular fashion.