Sketches of American Counterculture – Laurie Anderson. Allen Ginsberg. Philip Glass.
17. 10. 2011 | Categories: Articles
[by Ken Hunt, London] Let's start metaphorical. Maybe poetical and ecological too. Counter-culture in the 1960s was like alternative now, like spring-water welling to the surface and forming rivulets. Streams and rivers form, few with fixed shapes. Currents change unpredictably. Some silt or dry up or form ox-bow lakes. Others keep on flowing and joining up. Counter-culture and alternative have something else going for them. Without getting rheumy-eyed, it's like great river junction at Prayaga - Hinduism's Allahabad - where the Ganges and Jamuna meet the invisible Sarasvati. Like Prayaga, they are where the seen and the spiritual meet in a great confluence
[by Ken Hunt, London] The Lovin' Spoonful was a band that, in the most cool of manners, took its name from a Mississippi John Hurt recording. They made a music that brought together jug band (skiffle) music, folk and folk-blues with an added pop into rock sensibility around 1966 when nobody knew exactly what was going on and definitely nobody knew where it was all going to go.
Born in Toronto on 19 December 1944, Zalman 'Zal' or 'Zally' Yanovsky (bottom left on the album sleeve in yellow and orange stripes, next to John Sebastian's orange and white stripes) died days short of his 57th birthday on 13 December 2002
[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...
[by Ken Hunt, London] Now, it's only personal opinion. Still, hear out my theory. Every movement has its share of before-and-after benchmarks or epiphanies. They divide people who experienced them first-hand from those who got the experience passed down. On 1 June 1980, a date that shall forever remain hallowed in the annals of what we laughingly call England's Folk Revival, Topic Records released a twelve-inch, nine-track masterwork known as 12TS411 in the trade and as Penguin Eggs to the punters that snaffled it up. It is no exaggeration to say that it took the folk scene by storm, much as Dick Gaughan's Handful of Earth did the following year
[by Ken Hunt, London] The Scottish folksinger Ray Fisher once told me that she had a series of scheduled performances in Czechoslovakia that were abruptly cancelled when the Soviet bloc forces had the bad manners to invade in 1968. The following year, rescheduled concerts finally took place. She recalled the mayor of one town greeting her. Two Soviet officers flanked him. The mood was tense. Then, one of them broke the ice by asking her excitedly whether she knew the Beatles. (With her winsome charm, no doubt she pulled it off effortlessly but alas I have no memory of how exactly she got out of that one.) As part of the cultural exchange, the tour introduced her to dudy - Czech bagpipes and 'bagpipes' in Czech - and she remembered the experience with wry fondness
[by Ken Hunt, London] The one has a lot to do with thinking about rhymes, rhythms, mythologies and conversations. The music from Panta Rhei, Ornette Coleman, Dick Gaughan, Pentangle, Traffic, Talking Heads, Márta Sebestyén, Martin Simpson (with Dick Gaughan), Steve Tilston and Aruna Sairam.
Nachts - Panta Rhei
This particular performance isn't typical of the East German jazz-rock Panta Rhei, lazily rather than waggishly labelled the Chicago of the East. Back in the day they proved to be the birthing ground of many of the most important Ostrock bands with personnel streaming out all over the place. Members went on, for example. to Karat and Lift. Overwhelmingly though, the band's image was shaped by its two lead vocalists Herbert Dreilich and Veronika Fischer.
[by Ken Hunt, London] To be truthful, there really have been very few disc jockeys who have changed society's attitudes to music. Tom Donahue introduced a virus to North American radio programming. Donahue's infected the San Francisco Bay Area. By circumventing conventional playlist conventions, he wove an unconventional tapestry that enabled listeners to think beyond the commercially regulated 45 rpm format, think about LP-length tracks as a format and thus to think for themselves. The pendulum had swung slow for too long and it needed adjusting because it was no longer in time with the times. John Peel did that too, only he took things further and took his catholic tastes and musical worldview to places far beyond an English recording studio
[by Ken Hunt, London] In July 1991, the first year that Tanz&FolkFest Rudolstadt was staged, just like the 2010 'edition', it took place under blue skies in baking temperatures. The 1991 bill served up plenty of scope for serendipitous discoveries of the new kind and reacquainting oneself with familiar acts. Bernhard Hanneken's festival programming for the 2010 festival did something similar in spades - only to surfeit degrees (let's not talk of lampreys) - with 27 stages scattered over the town. Then add a pedestrian street dedicated to street music
[by Ken Hunt, London] By any standard, she is one of the greats of popular music. He is, in my opinion and that of many others', the finest sitarist of his generation, with a work ethic and melodicism drilled into him through studying sitar with his father, the legendary - for once the word is deserved - Vilayat Khan and working as a Bollywood session musician. This world premiere looked to their recently released collection of sitarist-singer Shujaat Khan's settings to traditional melodic or lyrical themes, Naina Lagaike - to stick to the CD artwork's spelling - though the concert programme carried the more accurate "Naina lagai ke", meaning 'I rue having locked eyes with you' was an unmissable event. It was also the programme's baptism of fire before a paying public
[by Ken Hunt, London] The Great Folk Jukebox was billed as "A Tribute to Singing Englishmen with Marc Almond, Bishi, Green Gartside, Bella Hardy, Robyn Hitchcock, Lisa Knapp, Oysterband & June Tabor" (with, as the Oysters' John Jones quipped, "the beast that is Bellowhead" - nine thereof - as house band). The 'Singing Englishmen' part was a doffing of the cap to a Festival of Britain concert held on 1 June 1951. Although there were allusions to Bert Lloyd's The Singing Englishmen - a slim songbook published to coincide with the St. Pancras Town Hall concert and its six themes of freedom; courting; "On the job"; seas, ships and sailormen; "Johnny has gone for a soldier"; and "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness" - in truth, this was more like a gathering of the tribes
