Rachid Taha – Bonjour
10. 2. 2010 | Categories: Articles,CD reviews
[by TC Lejla Bin Nur, Ljubljana] Bonjour (Barclay/Universal, 2009) is Rachid Taha's eighth studio album since he started on his solo path in 1990. During this time he had released at least two Best Ofs, a hefty pile of remixes, extras & vinyl for collectors and a few concert albums and projects, notably the world-wide resounding success 1, 2, 3, Soleils with Khaled and Faudel in 1998. Before all that, way back in 1980's, he also recorded about two and a half albums with his band Carte de Sejour. To sum up, he's come a long way and produced an opulent harvest of quality music that dexterously evades genre labels; in his melting pot he brews rock welded to electro, wrought with music of the world from just about everywhere, obviously and particularly North Africa - all together often [...]
[by Ken Hunt, London] Peggy Seeger was one of people like Ramblin' Jack Elliott and Big Bill Broonzy and Cisco Houston whose records introduced Britain to an authentic lexicon of Americana. That word didn't exist in the 1950s but if it had those musicians would have pretty much defined it. In that period, as far as Cold War Britain of the 1950s was concerned, American music was a unholy trinity of the crypto, wannabe and cod. Skiffle, Britain's first youth movement, was a hugest craze but, as an American, Peggy Seeger had a head start.
By the time Peggy officially relocated to England in 1959, the folk scene was largely a young person's scene. A decade on, when I saw her with Ewan MacColl (1915-1989), every time I saw them he whiplashed me back to my schoolboy days and sitting on a form [...]
[by Ken Hunt, London] Vienna is a hothouse of regional musical idioms. And Trude Mally, who died on 4 June 2009, aged 81 in the Austrian capital, mastered two of the Vienna region's three principal indigenous and typically Viennese folk forms. She sang Weanalieder (Wienerlieder in standard German, literally 'Viennese Songs' or songs sung in Viennese dialect) and Dudler, namely, the Viennese variant of yodelling. The third form, incidentally, is Schrammelmusik, an instrumental and vocal form named after the family that originated it.
She was born Gertrud Barbara Mally on 21 January 1928 in Neukettenhof - nowadays absorbed into Vienna's southeastern suburban sprawl - and took to singing and playing the piano whilst still a child. She was something of a child prodigy and was performing on [...]
The "greatest sarod maker" - sarod maestro Amjad Ali Khan
[by Ken Hunt, London] The Indian instrument maker and repairer Hemendra Chandra Sen died at his south Kolkata (Calcutta) home on 2 January 2009 at the age of 87. From apprentice to master craftsman, over the course of more than sixty years he made tanpuras, sitars and sarods for many of the most illustrious Hindustani instrumentalists of the age. He also bridged the generations. Although a sitar player himself, he became especially associated with the sarod, the short-necked, fretted lute.
His customers included the sitar and surbahar player Annapurna Devi, her brother, the sarodist Ali Akbar Khan and their cousin, the sarodist Bahadur Khan, the sitarist Ravi Shankar, the sarodist player Rajeev Taranath, the sarodist Amjad Ali [...]
[by Ken Hunt, London] Who said most months' Giant Donut Discs reflect deadlines and commissions with a pinch of music for pleasure? This month's reflects twinges of pain as well. A little pain goes a long way. This time around, we feast on Davy Graham, Wenzel, Llio Rhydderch and (Fernhill's) Tomas Williams, Achim Reichel, Sonu Nigham & Madhushree, Billie Holiday, The Fisher Family, Los Lobos, Shirley Collins and Big Brother & The Holding Company.
She Moved Thru' The Bizarre/Blue Raga - Davy Graham
Davey Graham died on 15 December 2008, days before I was due to journey to India. That was why I missed his funeral. He would have approved of that - an excursion trip to India trumping a funeral trip. In the days before travelling I wrote his obituary for The Scotsman. Then whilst travelling [...]
[by Ken Hunt, London] The doom and gloom of recession and depression, inflation and deflation affected people's lives enormously during 2009. Some say it put dampeners on life. Musically though, on balance it was a year of hope, despite losses.
New releases
Aruna Sairam / Divine Inspiration / World Village
Damien Barber & Mike Wilson / Under The Influence / Demon Barber Sounds
Szilvia Bognár / Semmicske énekek/Ditties / Gryllus
Kaushiki Chakrabarty / Live at Saptak Festival / Sense World Music
Leonard Cohen / Live in London / Columbia/Sony Music
Gwenan Gibbard / Sidan Glas / Sain
Robb Johnson / The Ghost of Love / Irregular
La Musique D'Issa Sow / Doumale / Home Records
Amira Medunjanin and Merima Ključo / Zumra / Gramofon/ World Village
Cass Meurig and Nial Cain / Deuawd / [...]
[by Ken Hunt, London] Most months' choices reflect work. This is no exception. As ever, there is no particular order. These selections lodged in the cranium for various reasons. In the main, they reflect events and associations. Inara George came from nowhere. Matt Turner, Peg Carrothers & Bill Carrothers came from reviewing and talking to Patrick Humphries about a BBC radio programme. Mhuri yekwa Muchena and Louis Killen came from continually looking to where we come from as opposed to not looking back - and Griselda Sanderson from cross-connecting. Tom Constanten and Vishwa Mohan Bhatt came from concerts. Robb Johnson came from winter tales of the Hounslow expatriate kind. But they all join together here.
Thorneymoor Woods - Louis Killen
Louis Killen recorded this poaching song with a [...]
[by Ken Hunt, London] In 1959 the impresario Albert Grossman told the journalist Robert Shelton, "The American public is like Sleeping Beauty, waiting to be kissed awake by the prince of folk music." Who he meant if not himself is moot. That year the black folk-blues artist Josh White terminated his management contract with Grossman. Bob Dylan, whom he managed from 1962, was still stuck in Minnesota with the Minneapolis blues, yet Grossman was set on changing things in the folk business. A few years on, Grossman had his fingers stuck in many pies, folk, blues and beyond.
Months before contractually adding Peter, Paul and Mary - Peter Yarrow, Noel 'Stook' Stookey and Mary Travis - to his roster in January 1962, he predicted they were going to be "one of the top commercial groups". [...]
"When a society is afraid of its poets, it is afraid of itself. A society afraid of itself stands as another definition of hell." - Lenore Kandel
[by Ken Hunt, London] The Beat poet and counter-culture activist Lenore Kandel died on 18 October 2009 aged 77 in her adopted home town of San Francisco. There is a lazy default setting to think of the Beat movement as being primarily a male preserve. Yet women were also actively involved not only as muses but also as writers and activists. Kandel was doubly important in that regard because she was part of California's Beat movement and its hippie movement.
She was born in New York City on 14 January 1932; she was taken as a babe-in-arms to California where her writer father busied himself writing fiction and Hollywood screenplays. (Amongst [...]
