Giant Donut Discs® – June 2010
21. 6. 2010 | Categories: Articles,Giant Donut Discs
[by Ken Hunt, London] This time around on the desert island phonogram we have Amira Medunjanin and Merima Ključo, Dave Swarbrick, Bea Palya, Elizabeth Cotten, Leonard Cohen, Marlene Dietrich, Vishwa Mohan Bhatt & Matt Malley, Kraftwerk, Jerry Garcia, Leonard Cohen, and Illa Arun, Sapna Awasthi & Kunal Ganjawalla.
Kradem Ti Se - Amira Medunjanin and Merima Ključo
On 27 May 2010 Amira Medunjanin and Merima Ključo - respectively voice and piano accordion - played St. Etherburga's Centre for Reconciliation & Peace on Bishopsgate in London. The night's repertoire consisted of the 14 tracks that make up their album and after playing the album they had to revisit one for their encore. The duo represents something special in contemporary Bosnian music - a merging of the traditional, the [...]
[by Ken Hunt, London] Ali Akbar Khan shuffled on stage with a walking stick, reasonable given he was one week away from 81. By night's end, all memories of the frail character that had mounted the dais at the concert's beginning had vanished. Swapan Chaudhuri, one of the most exceptional tabla players alive, provided the percussive accompaniment - a job a bit like catching eels with bare hands. He has an uncanny knack of being able to match and bat back this sarodist's glorious spontaneity. Alam Khan was the second, junior sarodist but he coped brilliantly with his father's senior waywardness. Ken Zuckerman, one of Khan's senior disciples and head of his Basel college, and Malik Khan, Khan's next son down after Alam, provided the drone accompaniments.
The section before the intermission [...]
[by Ken Hunt, London] Even though this month's choices are skewed and heavily informed by volumes 7-9 in Smithsonian Folkways' Music of Central Asia series, in terms of preference, as usual, there is no order implied and no order to be inferred. As ever, the common link to May 2010's GDDs is that this is music that stuck around. This month we meet, greet and embrace Jackson Browne David Lindley, Barb Jungr, the Kronos Quartet with Alim & Fargana Qasimov, Asha Bhosle, Les Byrds, Sirojiddin Juraev, Homayun Sakhi and Rahul Sharma, Jiři Kleňha and Neneh Cherry and Youssou N'Dour.
The Crow On The Cradle - Jackson Browne David Lindley
This is the sort of musical tastiness that prompts the unwary to say that if there is a tastier track released in [gentle reader, add the year you're reading [...]
[by Ken Hunt, London] London's National Portrait Gallery is currently offering two marvellous exhibitions of Indian art. Admission is free and while they may not appear to cast much light of the subcontinent's musical arts, amid the huqqa smokers, the military figures, nobility and royalty, there are a few correlations between Indian portraiture and aspects of the subcontinent's music to interest the musically minded.
The Indian Portrait 1560-1860 draws on works from successive Mughal courts, from an era when patronage - sponsorship in the modern arts vernacular - was keen to log its movements in an era before photography. Amid the portraiture of personages and merchants from Rajasthan, Gwalior and elsewhere in poses with blade and blossom or the courtesans at leisure, three images stand [...]
[by Ken Hunt, London] Folk music everywhere goes through changes of style and presentation. Little is immune to change. That applies whether we are considering traditional or revivalist forms. After all, everything starts from somewhere before going somewhere else. Very little is fixed in a stone. The US folksinger Susan Reed, who died on 25 April 2010 in Long Island, New York State, had a relatively short-lived but important part to play in the East Coast folk scene of the second half of the 1940s into the 1950s.
Born Susan Catherine Reed in Columbia, South Carolina on 11 January 1926, she grew up in a theatrical family. Her father, Daniel was in the film industry while her mother, Isadora was a theatrical publicist. From an early age she and her brother Jared - three years her senior - [...]
[by Ken Hunt, London] Ralph McTell is one of Britain's foremost commentators on the national condition using demotic idioms - folk, blues, ragtime. Rather like Wolf Biermann, Franz-Josef Degenhardt and Christof Stählin in Germany (and then add your own regional or national candidates), he has depicted his homeland through music, through songs, that meanings of which seem immediately apparent but which may well prove to be more eely or oblique.
This snippet is drawn from a long interview conducted in September 2006 for an article that appeared at the time of the release of the self-effacing man's 4-CD boxed set, The Journey - Recordings 1965-2006 (Leola OLABOX60) that David Suff put together for the label.
True to his roots, McTell booked a folk club gig at Twickfolk @ the Cabbage Patch [...]
[by Ken Hunt, London] April and another month in music rolls around and brings ten snapshots of what got played oodles. This divine bumper pack of GDDs comes courtesy of Broadlahn, David Lindley & Wally Ingram, Fred Astaire, Reem Kelani, Rajan Spolia, the Grateful Dead, Bonnie Dobson, Peerie Willie Johnson, Abida Parveen and Mac Rebennack.
Bua von Muata Natur - Broadlahn
The Graz-based Austrian folk fusion group Broadlahn was founded in 1982 and took their name from the dialect word Broadlahn which means a wide avalanche as well as being the name of an area of alpine pasture in Austria's Upper Styria region. Bua von Muata Natur is a setting of the Beatles' song Mother Nature's Son from Broadlahn's first album. (Bua is a southern idiom for son or boy.)
It opens with the sound of metal [...]
[by Ken Hunt, London] March's stuff and nonsense comes from Mickey Hart and chums, Joni Mitchell, The Carolina Chocolate Drops, Bob Bralove and Henry Kaiser, Wajahat Khan and the Medici String Quartet, The Six and Seven-Eights String Band, Jo Ann Kelly, Dillard & Clark, Farida Khanum and Sohan Nath 'Sapera'.
Rolling Thunder/Shoshone Invocation into The Main Ten (Playing In The Band) - Mickey Hart
In 1972 I clapped eyes on Kelley/Mouse's Rolling Thunder cover artwork in a record rack in the tiny Virgin record store at Notting Hill Gate. It shone out that in some way it was Grateful Dead-related. It turned out that it was the Dead's absentee drummer Mickey Hart's solo debut. The opening track sequence draws on and draws in so many threads. Shoshone shaman Rolling Thunder, marimbas from [...]
[by Ken Hunt, London] This month's prime quality stuff offers up some seriously magnificent music. This time round on the Banquet Isle with the hole in the middle, Joseph Spence and the Pinder Family, Steeleye Span, Emily Portman, Chumbawamba, Jenny Crook and Henry Sears, Eddi Reader, Lennie Tristano, Kate & Anna McGarrigle, Incredible String Band and KK are serving up the goodies.
I Bid You Goodnight - Joseph Spence and the Pinder Family
Manumission is a 'big' word in several senses. It means a release from slavery. (The Shorter Oxford Dictionary finesses its meaning better if more wordily.) The day I first heard I Bid You Goodnight, a piece of musical magnificence if ever, upstairs in Collet's folk department in New Oxford Street in London was a day my life changed forever. It was [...]
