[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 | read more...
[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 | read more...
[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 | read more...
[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 | read more...
[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 | read more...
[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.
27. 11. 2007 | read more...
[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.
14. 11. 2007 | read more...
[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 | read more...
[by Ken Hunt, London] The cult filmmaker Perry Henzell’s The Harder They Come (1972) was, and shall ever remain, iconic. Mind you, in Jamaica and in Britain both, the film had a hard start. In Jamaica, it caused riots when frustrated audiences couldn’t get into cinemas to see it. In Britain, when it was first screened, it met with apathy even in Brixton in London, SW9, the spiritual heartland of the expat Jamaican community. It took word-of-mouth recommendations for Henzell’s fictional story combining reggae studio hard knocks, hard times in Kingston and righteous criminality of a post-Robin Hood kind to take off. It hit the spirit of the times head-on.
8. 11. 2007 | read more...
[by Ken Hunt, London] On 16 October 2007, the powerful singer-songwriter Lucky Dube was murdered in cold blood in Johannesburg, South Africa, shot dead in what had all the hallmarks of a botched carjacking, in what many commentators portrayed as the current crime-wave. Lucky Dube had had two careers in music. Initially he had risen to become a major mbaqanga musician. Mbaqanga, he told me in one of our interviews, was “Zulu soul music”. Although his definition may have lacked musicological precision, it captured the music’s essence. Then, in a switch of careers, he changed his focus to reggae – Afro-reggae, as it was often called – and had an even more successful career in music, this time on the international stage.
8. 11. 2007 | read more...