Articles
[by Ken Hunt, London] The Telugu singer, dancer-choreographer and actress Tangutoori Surya Kumari – also rendered Suryakumari – was born in Rajamundry in November 1925. She became part of the Raj-era independence movement against the British that eventually triumphed with the end of colonial rule in 1947. She was a child-actress in Telugu films as early as 1937 when a part was written for her in Vipranarayana. Thereafter she juggled cinematic acting and playback singing roles…
8. 1. 2008 |
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[by Ken Hunt, London] Back in the 1960s, our understanding of the world’s varied musical traditions was woefully ignorant by today’s standards. If buying American blues or bluegrass albums was an expensive undertaking involving the adventure of a day’s expedition to nearest big city or crossing fingers or sending money to a mail order specialist, maybe in another country, then tracking down what was then called “International folk” – like Japonese court music – was similar to shopping on the moon. It could take decades to track down some choice morsel.
8. 1. 2008 |
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[by Ken Hunt, London] Founded in 1968 in Czechoslovakia, the Plastic People of the Universe finally made their UK début in January 2007. No founding members played but the spirit of the band that commandeered its name from a Mothers of Invention track remained intact and strong. The Communist regime vilified the “psychedelic band of Prague” nicely captured in…
27. 12. 2007 |
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[by Ken Hunt, London] Getting paid for something you’d be doing anyway is a rare privilege. Making
a decent living doing it is an altogether different mater, which is
why we present the fine things from 2007 that made our lives finer and
nourished our minds. These are the things that gave us the greatest
pleasure musically speaking.
14. 12. 2007 |
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[by Ken Hunt, London] Chanson is often construed as literate song. Even German, the language that brought us Schubert’s Lieder, treats chanson as a class apart from Lied. Just like Czech invokes chanson’s spirit in the phrase Česky Šanson. Chanson offers other species of commentary on the human condition and for one of the finest examples of chanson’s otherness, hearken to the exemplary work of Fran‡ois Béranger. He made his mark as what can only be described as a protest chansonnier.
14. 12. 2007 |
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[by Ken Hunt, London] The photographer and technical diver Keith Morris went missing off Alderney, one of the Channel Islands in the English Channel, on 17 June 2005. Born in the South-west London district of Wandsworth on 15 August 1938, he was responsible for some of the most enduring and unwavering images of British and American music
14. 12. 2007 |
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[by Ken Hunt, London] Likely as not, few of you reading this will have ever heard of Alain Daniélou. In terms of mystery and influence, Daniélou was among the 20 most influential characters from twentieth-century ethnomusicology and one of the characters who signposted the way into the world music labyrinth. He worked on such consciousness-shaping series and volumes as Anthologie de la Musique de l’Inde for Serge Moreux’ Ducretet-Thomson label, Religious Music of India for Moe Asch’s Folkways label, Folk Music of India for Columbia and the Unesco Anthology of the Orient for Karl Vötterlee’s Bärenreiter Verlag/Musicaphon.
27. 11. 2007 |
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[by Ken Hunt, London] In a hoary old quote that pops up in Patrick Humphries’ The Many Lives of Tom Waits, Waits, that lovable whey-faced geezer in black with a pork-pie hat, quips, “Marcel Marceau gets more airplay than I do!” Things may have improved marginally in the meantime – Marceau dying in 2007 will have given Waits a chance to cut in – but Waits has proved tenacious when it comes to avoiding anything so vulgar as a whiffette of becoming a popular singing star. Waits is a man of many threads. He has regaled us with many mythologies, mostly hand-woven and threadbare enough for the unwary dupe to be taken in and buy him that figurative drink out of pity.
Suckers! To call Waits a singer-songwriter would be like damning him with faint praise. Buying into that singer-songwriter job description might be likened to buying eau de cologne or Viagra on the strength of a spam message. Or similarly responding to that plaintively lonely Russian lass or that Nigerian pet-lover-in-distress. Truth is, Waits is a fabulist. Verisimilitude is his stock in trade. That applies to his music and to his secondary career as a fellow who pops up in such films as The Two Jakes, The Fisher King and Bearskin: An Urban Fairytale.
Improbably, though in a nice way, The Many Lives of Tom Waits is his first major biography of the man. The London-based writer, Patrick Humphries is an old hand too, an established music writer whose subjects include Dylan, Hitchcock, Elton John, Pink Floyd, Paul Simon and Bruce Springsteen. Amongst his string of fine books, two are seminal – as in standard works. His Nick Drake (1997) and Richard Thompson: Strange Affair (1996) are true E.M.D. works. The expression is the title of one of the American mandolinist David Grisman’s finest, early breakthrough compositions. It stands for ‘Eat My Dust’. And every writer who writes about Nick Drake and Richard Thompson – and now Tom Waits – will ever have occasion to acknowledge – or avoid acknowledging – Humphries’ groundbreaking achievements.
Waits doesn’t peddle autobiographical or confessional stories-in-song in an L.A. Confidential manner. Like Waits, The Many Lives of Tom Waits does, however, allow Humphries to don the Chandleresque cap (alliteration wins out over fedora) when telling the tale. Waits is no Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne or James Taylor. With Waits, you don’t get, in Humphries’ turn of phrase, “the open-heart surgery of Joni Mitchell or James Taylor”. Waits sends reports, sometimes Californian Chinese whispers, back from the Old Weird America. Or the Old Weird America in Waits’ Mind. Waits delivers fables. He tells tall tales. And, though everybody lies, Waits lies splendidly. His snappy one-liners are notable for their fragrance of insect repellent. Try, “I’ve always maintained that reality is for people who can’t face drugs.” (Did he filch the quip? Much like the lobotomy preference option one, does it matter? Allow Waits a few populist tendencies too.) He also protects his privacy, keeps his wife and partner-in-song Kathleen (née Brennan) and their family pretty well hid. He knows a thing or two about mystique. And did I mention meretriciousness? Humphries has wisely not set himself the task of unpicking verity from verisimilitude. That task would be messy. Like picking out just the red ones from a jar of M&Ms or Smarties while blindfold and allowed to use only your sense of taste. See? That’s how reading about Waits tinkers with a writer chap’s keying fingers.
The best part of the deal is that his songs and, heigh ho-ho, extraordinary renditions are like nobody else’s. Try, Waits’ dark-as-a-dungeon reappraisal of the 1938 Disney ditty Heigh Ho (The Dwarfs Marching Song) on Stay Awake and regurgitated on Orphans as evidence. Sure, you get a bit of this and a bit of that in his songs. Perhaps a glancing allusion to the dimly familiar or a bookworm’s regurgitation of something from some dog-eared almanac, like Waits’ spoken-word Army Ants with its Hammer House of Horror vibe on Orphans. A bit of banter, a prehensile-eared eavesdropping here, a lifted musical phrase or breaker’s yard metal-on-metal scream there. The stone-cold fact remains: his songs and attitudes are like nobody else’s. Surely, that’s why Iva Bittová from fair Brno town picked him for her wish-list concert. http://bittova.com/img/press/0704a.jpg (To be candid, I made it plain that we wanted a pair of complimentary tickets.)
The only disappointments with The Many Lives of. are bibliographical. The endnote references for each chapter have no cross-references in the bibliography. Mind you, what get at chapter’s end is the worst form of shorthand. To give random examples, how useless are “Brian Case, Melody Maker“, “Observer Music Maker” and “Timothy White”? Despite that inordinate irritation factor if you wish to get your head around the warped wonders that are Waits’, now you have two essential books to consult.
The first is Innocent When You Dream (2005). Edited by Mac Montandon, it is a gathering of collected journalism about, and interviews with Waits from the earliest days. The best stuff in it is like being locked in a Hall of Mirrors overnight and coming out with your imagination turned around, engaged and enslaved. The second book is Patrick Humphries’ The Many Lives of Tom Waits. Eat His Dust.
Patrick Humphries, The Many Lives of Tom Waits Omnibus Press ISBN 13:978-1-84449-585-6
27. 11. 2007 |
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[by Ken Hunt, London] To my mind, Martin Simpson’s Prodigal Son was more than one of the finest releases of 2007 – it was the finest album of his recording career, trumping even The Bramble Briar (2001), also made for Topic. And he made his first album, Golden Vanity for Trailer back in 1976, so the lad’s been around for some while. Explaining why Simpson has remained such a signal feature in my soundscape would degenerate into a wallow of words. Suffice it to say that his instrumental playing is impeccable, much like his taste in instruments. Over the last decade he has developed exponentially into one of England’s finest interpreters of British and American song material in a folk idiom, whether traditional folk, blues or, in the stamp of that maestro of mystery, Hank Bradley, bogus-folk from the US group Last Forever. Increasingly, as the Union Chapel concert hammered home with Love Never Dies (from 2003’s Righteousness & Humidity) and Never Any Good (from Prodigal Son), he continues to evolve as a songwriter.
He opened with a mind-focussing instrumental overture. Mind-focussing for him more than anyone else. Eyes shut tight, he segued from She Slips Away (about his mother’s death) and Mother Love (about his wife and daughter) into Little Musgrave. Little Musgrave – alias Matty Groves – is one of those Anglo-Scottish ballads of betrayal, retribution and restoration of the social order that our forebears apparently delighted in. Little Musgrave is multi-levelled. It drums home what a contravention of the upstairs/downstairs hierarchy can call down. The price of a midnight shag comes costly for one-off or trice-off Toyboy Musgrave. As the concert unfolded, Simpson played compositions by Cyril Tawney, Bob Dylan, Blind Willie Johnson, Randy Newman and himself. Tawney’s Sammy’s Bar he said he saw as being “about the relationship between Britain and the USA”. Nowadays what I see as being at the song’s broken heart has shifted. The poodle relationship remains. But I see it mostly in terms of exploitation. Surely, if anything, Cyril’s narrative addresses the relationship between money and sexual exploitation. It’s why great songwriting such as Sammy’s Bar permits new interpretations to seed and grow. One highlight was that song of Blind Willie Johnson’s about not being able to keep from crying sometimes. Simpson’s effects on the instrumental introduction – I’m not going to bluff the technology – reminded me of koto and shakuhachi territory. It contrasted well with the next number – Newman’s Louisiana 1927 – with its crisp snaps and flourishes and, another indication of great songwriting and song selection, its pre- and post-Katrina stings and relevances. Simpson’s own Love Never Dies is two playlets in song as opposed to a three-act play. The way he tells it, the song draws on a couple of visits to the same truck stop between Memphis and Arkansas during Simpson’s domicile in the USA. It telescopes observations and incidents. Apart from the 2003 version, it also appears on Simpson’s catch-it-while-you-can-at-gigs limited edition Never Any Good. Also part-Prodigal Son promo and part-trailer for the shape of things to come.
The second set brought on the band. Andy Seward, the co-producer of the three new tracks on Never Any Good (2007), played double-bass, Andy Cutting played one of those three-row squeezy things and Kellie While sang. The set opened with Lakes of Champlain. Simpson and Cutting opened before Seward joined in and then While started singing the lines beginning with “Mother, oh mother.” Until this point, I have held back that the show was being filmed by a team led by Robin Bextor for a DVD release. (Don’t you love the evasiveness of the passive voice?) Lakes of Champlain was the only performance of the evening that I felt could have done with a re-take. The energies didn’t work for me, were too hesitant in parts. The second song, Dick Connette’s Last Forever outgrowth from Pretty Saro, Batchelors Hall (pity the poor Saxon genitive, and maybe bachelors, come to that), turned things around. Thereafter the quartet never looked back, so to speak. Meaning that the whole band was not necessarily on stage the whole time. The set was another travelogue, with interposed observations on the human condition. The “bent copper” tale, Duncan And Brady summoned a memory of New Orleans from Simpson and an encounter with a citizen of that fine city who trilled “Louisiana’s got the best politicians money can buy!” Pretty Crowing Chicken into the fiddle tune Hiram’s Tune – or so it sounded – was announced as being “against the Geneva Convention” on the basis of being a three-row and banjo duet. (Pre-emptive banjo joke strike etc.) Leastways, that was how it started out before Seward joined in on plucked, later bowed string bass. The highlights continued with Richard Thompson’s Strange Affair, one of his more multi-levelled songs, and Simpson’s own Never Any Good – the omission from the title being (With Money) – about his father and his parents’ relationship. The home stretch was a slide take on The Lakes of Pontchartrain to what I would like to call an all-purpose, cut-and-paste rock’n’roll tune, similar to the vibe I get when Achim Reichel goes into post-Reeperbahn, Hamburg shanty territory. You get elegance with dirt under the figurative nails. The encore was Waitin’ For A Train in a rather un-Boz Scaggs-, un-Singing Brakeman- version, with lashings of banjo.
To conclude, I guess if there is anything puts people off about Martin Simpson – and causes grumbles about dark alleys and breaking his fingers – it is the very thing that elevates him to the highest highs in the pantheon of acoustic guitarists. He has an instrumental prowess on the guitar in particular that that can be deemed to be over-consummate. Like Adrian Legg and David Lindley, his playing goes to places most guitarists never go. Generally, Simpson’s balance of simplicity and flash stays on the right side. Occasionally I wish he’d play fewer notes and go for the song’s picked clean bones. But most of all, I wish time allowed me to see more of his performances. Mostly because of the ways I’ve seen I Can’t Keep From Crying Sometimes, Dylan’s Buckets of Rain and, most especially his own Never Any Good and Love Never Dies keep evolving. That intrigues me enormously.
There is a rather good biography of Martin Simpson at http://www.martinsimpson.com/biography/?PHPSESSID=97f349f32089f93 19563efc729b966ac
14. 11. 2007 |
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[by Ken Hunt, London] At the time of doing this interview – 13 August 1979 – the Scots musician Robin Williamson was based in California and working with the Merry Band. Their latest album at that point was A Glint At The Kindling (1979). This interview is an excerpt of a far longer interview. It concentrates on Williamson’s time with the Incredible String Band and before the band’s formation. The Incredible String Band had overturned people’s appreciation of what contemporary folk bands could do. No lesser mortal than Dylan had name-checked the Incredibles’ October Song in his interview with John Cohen and Happy Traum in the October/November 1968 issue of Sing Out! and that was big medicine.
12. 11. 2007 |
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