June Tabor and An Echo of Hooves (2004)
2. 11. 2009 | Categories: Articles,CD reviews
[by Ken Hunt, London] An Echo of Hooves represented a career milestone for the English folksinger June Tabor. In February 2004 its Hughie Graeme was named 'Best Traditional Track' and she received the accolade of 'Singer of the Year' in the BBC Radio 2 Awards. That though is transitory, foreign stuff, for her album An Echo of Hooves was a summation of decades spent learning how to work with, and work out the emotions contained in Anglo-Scottish balladry.
An Echo of Hooves was a culmination of decades of running ballads through the filter of her grey cells. "I've been singing ballads ever since I discovered traditional music," she says. "You'll find ballads, even if it's just one, on most of the albums. For some reason, and I couldn't even tell you what it was now, I wondered whether it [...]
Most months' choices reflect deadlines and commissions with a pinch of music for pleasure. This month's choices are Wenzel & Band, Martin Carthy, Javed Bashir, Sophie Harris and Ian Belton, Carol Grimes, Bob Dylan, Wasifuddin Dagar and Bahauddin Dagar, Alistair Anderson, Kaushiki Chakrabarty and Jackson Browne. As ever, they are in no particular order. Their only link is that none of them would go away. This month's selections deliberately sidestep the Best of 2009 polls, even though it is that time of the year for such musings for December and January titles.
Zeit der Irren und Idioten - Wenzel & Band
Some of the times I have been happiest in my life have been when music has lifted me up and carried me off. One of those occasions was seeing Hans-Eckardt Wenzel & Band perform on the [...]
[by Ken Hunt, London] The US record producer, engineer and mixer Greg Ladanyi, who worked with, amongst others, Jackson Browne, Fleetwood Mac, Jeff Healey, Don Henley, Los Jaguares, David Lindley and Warren Zevon, died on Cyprus on 29 September 2009. He died of the consequence of an accident on stage whilst touring with the Greek Cypriot singer Anna Vissi whose album Apagorevmeno (2008) he had co-produced.
Ladanyi won a Grammy Award for 'Best Engineered Recording - Non-Classical' with his co-engineered Toto IV in 1982 - a period that found the session musician spin-off band Toto at a peak of their critical and commercial success. He was also nominated for production or engineering work on Don Henley's The Boys Of Summer in 1986 and, at the 1st Annual Latin Grammy Awards in 2000, Los [...]
Ken Hunt looks back on a month's listening reflecting music influenced by work, travel and returning home. The moments are supplied this time by Cass Meurig and Nial Cain, Angelika Weiz & GVO, Ravi Shankar, Judee Sill, the Velvet Underground, the Young Tradition, Johnny Jones, Roy Nathanson, Asha Bhosle and Rahul Dev Burman and Ewan MacColl. As ever, the ten selections are in no particular order. Their only link is that over the month none of them did a bunk.
Deio/Cwyd dy Galon/Dawns y Tylwyth Teg - Cass Meurig and Nial Cain
For topping up my unfading interest in Welsh music. On this album Cass Meurig sings (llais - voice - in the credits) and plays fiddle (ffidil), the Welsh bowed lyre called the crwth and viola (fiola) while Nial Cain plays guitar (gitár). There is sense of loneliness [...]
Ken Hunt looks back on a wonderful month in music, advanced somewhat because of travel, provided by Amira Medunjanin and Merima Ključo, Bea Palya, Mike Seeger, Sachal Studios Orchestra, Tim Buckley, Faustus, Martina Musters-Musters, Johanna Huygens-Musters and Suzanna de Vos-Musters, Fernhill, Bai Hong and David Crosby. As ever, the ten selections are in no particular order and the only link is that none of them would go away.
Karanfil Se Na Put Sprema - Amira Medunjanin and Merima Ključo
Amira's London debut in 2007 at the Barbican was memorable. "Amira was born at a time when the popularity of traditional music in the former Yugoslavia was at high tide," it says on her website. On this recording - Zumra means 'Emerald' - the mood is largely sombre. The Bosnian tune Karanfil Se Na Put [...]
[by Ken Hunt, London] Neil Young once stated, "The great Canadian dream is to get out." It was certainly what three fifths of Buffalo Springfield did when they joined the California-based rock group's US contingent, Stephen Stills and Richie Furay. In 1966 Young and Bruce Palmer - the band's original bassist - had headed south in a 1953 Pontiac hearse with Ontario plates. Minds set on forming a rock group and already working up Young's Nowadays Clancy Can't Even Sing, Furay and Stills famously spotted the Canadians driving in the opposite direction on Sunset Boulevard. (Stills had already met Young in Thunder Bay, Ontario and had been taken.) Furay executed some nifty pursuit-chase driving and caught up with them before they hit the highway to head home. Four fifths of Buffalo Springfield [...]
[by Ken Hunt and Peter Bellamy: London] In 1986 after one of his concerts the English folksinger Pete Bellamy and I formulated the idea of Giant Donut Discs ®. It came out of a conversation about the wish to create a mutant version of Roy Plomley's Desert Island Discs BBC radio programme - http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qnmr - for the magazine Swing 51.
Instead of the stranded person coming up with tracks to take to the proverbial desert island, Pete and I wanted something capricious, totally of the moment, something that was ten pieces of music that were filling people's heads right then and now - not the considered weightiness of someone stranded on the BBC's desert island.
The principle was first thoughts, best thoughts - the old Beat adage. At the heart of the choices were the [...]
[by Ken Hunt, London] The Dutch counter-culture poet, writer and painter Simon Vinkenoog died in Amsterdam on Saturday, 12 July 2009, a few days before his 81st birthday. Born on 18 July 1928 in Amsterdam, Vinkenoog was the child of a lone parent family raised in the De Pijp part of Amsterdam's Oud-Zuid (Old South) district.
As a writer, he became part of the Netherlands' post-war flowering of small literary titles, editing the short-lived magazine Blurb followed by the bloemlezing (anthology) Atonaal - a manifesto of intent of the literary collective self-styled 'atonal poets' known as the Vijftigers (50ers). Coinciding with this Dutch and Belgian (Flemish) movement's emergence, from 1948-56 he lived in Paris - as ever a literary magnet of a place but especially then in the post-Second [...]
O, River/O Nodi Re - Zoe and Idris Rahman
For being a slice of deliciousness. While working on the Bangladesh chapter for - excuse mouthful - volume 2 of the third edition of The Rough Guide to World Music encyclopaedia, the Rahmans' Where Rivers Meet became part of my daily soundtrack. From Where Rivers Meet (Manushi Records MANUCD004, 2008)
www.zoerahman.com
Home Again - Martin Simpson
A song about finding your place that anyone can appreciate who has ever travelled, lived in different places or just stayed close to their roots. From True Stories (Topic Records TSCD TSCD578, 2009)
www.martinsimpson.com
Altyn Altai - Edil Huseinov
For its ability to make connections, however spurious. Working on an article about Topic Records and its 70th anniversary for the September/October 2009 [...]
[by Ken Hunt, London] Forty years or so ago, Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger released their most recondite project, the two-volume Paper Stage. It was reconstructions of the first Elizabethan Age's theatre for the second Elizabethan Age. The original peddlers of these more unauthorised than guerrilla playlets in song left few traces and fewer fingerprints. All that survived was the printed page. Theirs was street theatre, the equivalent of graffiti artist Banksy's Mona Lisa with a rocket launcher, or that Banksy rat sawing a getaway hole to freedom through the pavement. Without forcing the analogy, the Paper Stage material somehow survived on paper without the accompanying music, just as Banksy's long-gone, ephemeral spray paintings and stencil art images survive as photographic images in [...]
