Howard Evans (1944-2006)
14. 3. 2011 | Categories: Articles,Lives
[by Ken Hunt, London] British folk music found a top drawer brass player, arranger and composer in Howard Evans. He had an utterly pragmatic, utterly professional attitude to music making and the musician's life and from 1997, when he joined the Musicians Union's London headquarters, as assistant general secretary for media he revealed that over and over again. He was totally pragmatic about his art and the first to drolly prick any bubbles of pretension about making music. He brought a wider knowledge and a greater diversity of musical experiences to bear on making music than any professional musician I ever met but he never got the slightest tan from the musical limelight
[by Ken Hunt, London] Life is rarely dull on the treasured island. More travellers' tales, aka GDDs, from the faraway island - about love and deception, wading birds, coming on and vamoosing, work, tall trees in Kashmir, church bells and science fiction-inspired escapes. Bert Jansch, Lo Cor De La Plana, Carolina Chocolate Drops/Luminescent Orchestrii, Paul Kantner, Drewo, Gayathri Rajapur, Fairport and Shivkumar Sharma supply the music this month. By the way, the tally is not a miscount. Bert Jansch supplies two tracks.
Jack Orion - Bert Jansch
The LP jacket for Jack Orion, Bert Jansch's third solo album for Transatlantic, had a simple elegance. The front cover had a shadowy portrait of Jansch playing his acoustic guitar taken by Brian Shuel, the folk photographer of the period
[by Ken Hunt, London] Terry Melcher, who died of cancer on 19 November 2004, was a man of many parts and, as Doris Day's son, doors opened for him. Her only son, he was born Terry Jorden on 8 February 1942. Taking the surname of his mother's third husband, Martin Melcher (who legally adopted him), he helped shape a generation's musical consciousness and define the West Coast folk-rock sound. Before that he wrote songs, for instance, with Bobby Darin and Randy Newman, for his mother and for Paul Revere and the Raiders (for whom he penned Him Or Me (What's It Gonna Be))
[by Ken Hunt, London] Planning a trip to England, Scotland and/or Wales? Hoping your visit coincides with some musical adventures? The highly recommended Spiral Earth guide is the ideal place to start planning your time and trip.
In addition to major fixtures such as Cropredy, Whitby Folk Week, Towersey and Glastonbury, expect to uncover the unexpected - such as the Pipe and Tabor Weekend, Morpeth Northumbrian Gathering and the Sunrise Celebration.
The guide details UK folk, roots and alternative festivals by month and geography with a map to click on
[by Ken Hunt, London] East German rock music, nowadays known as Ost-Rock (Ost means east), has never had a champion outside the old East. Sure, Julian Cope got wiggy and witty with Krautrock in all its Can, Kraftwerk and Ohr-ishness. But aside from, say, coverage in the Hamburg-based magazine Sounds in the 1980s and Tamara Danz (1952-1996) - and Silly's lead singer's fleeting appearance in the last edition of Donald Clarke's Penguin Encyclopedia of Popular Music - Ost-Rock got short shrift outside its place of origin, the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Götz Hintze's Rocklexikon der DDR (2000) and Alexander Osang's Tamara Danz (1997) biography have redressed the balance somewhat. But Hintze and Osang wrote accounts in German.
[by Ken Hunt, London] More travellers' tales, aka GDDs, from the faraway island - this time from Bryan MacLean, June Tabor, The Everly Brothers, June Tabor, The United States of America, Eddie Reader, The McPeake Family, Clara Rockmore, Shujaat Khan, Artie Shaw and Christy Moore with Declan Sinnott. The strangest thing happened this month. Just like the S.S. Politician going down off Eriskay in the Outer Hebrides in 1941 and the 1949 Ealing comedy Whisky Galore, all these bottles of single malt whisky washed ashore in time for Burns' Night. Nobody was more surprised than me...
Old Man - Bryan MacLean
Bryan MacLean's songs were one of the multifarious delights that made up Love's Forever Changes, one of the great visionary albums of 1967
[by Ken Hunt, London] The Bengali singer Suchitra Mitra died on 3 January 2011 at her home of many years, Swastik on Gariahat Road in Ballygunge, Kolkata. She was famed as one of the heavyweight interpreters of the defining Bengali-language song genre form called Rabindra sangeet - or Rabindrasangeet (much like the name Ravi Shankar can also be rendered Ravishankar). 'Rabindra song' is an eloquent, literary, light classical song form, derived from the name of the man who 'invented' it, Rabindranath Tagore, the winner of the 1913 Nobel Prize for Literature.
Tagore's songs helped define Bengali and Bangladeshi culture and identity - and importantly pan-Indian culture - in the years before the dissolution of the British Raj and afterwards
[by Ken Hunt, London] Bengal's popular arts lost two of its major figures on 17 January 2011.
The actress Gita Dey (1931-2011) died in north Kolkata. From her debut as a child actor in 1937 in director Dhiren Ganguly's film Ahutee, she reportedly appeared in some 200 Bengali films and thousands of stage dramas and folk plays. A startling character actress with a presence that did not overwhelm the part, she appeared in such films as film director Ritwik Ghatak's Meghe Dhaka Tara (1957), Satyajit Ray's Teen Kanya and Komal Gandhar, and Tapan Sinha's Haatey Baajarey, Jotugriha and Ekhonee. Lawrence Olivier was amongst the people who celebrated her
[by Ken Hunt, London] One of my fondest memories of Britain's specialised music magazine scene of the 1980s into the 1990s is how little ego and rivalry there was for the most part. There were a couple of exceptions (no names, no pack drill) and, strange though it may seem, not a single ornery person from that bunch stayed the course within music criticism. Keith Summers wrote about music, collected it (as in, made field recordings of such as Jumbo Brightwell, the Lings of Blaxhall, Cyril Poacher and Percy Webb as well as later contributing to Topic's multi-volume series Voice of the People) and published magazines about it. He had the fall-back trade of accountant that funded his passions.
In 1983 Summers launched an excellent magazine called Musical Traditions
[by Ken Hunt, London] Winter draws on in London but on the fictitious tropical island the sun is shining. Helping to banish gloom this month is a rather fine selection of music. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, this month's haul of traveller's tales embraces Martin Simpson, Ella Ward, Yardbirds, Shashank, Don Van Vliet, David Lindley & El Rayo-X, Rickie Lee Jones, Swamy Haridhos & Party, Cyril Tawney and Anne Briggs.
The Swastika Song - Martin Simpson
I never lived through a European war. Many people I loved and love did. I only knew the survivors. I have lived and worked with people of many nationalities who did survive wars. Some were fascist. Some were unrepentant and boasted
