Bang On A Can and Iva Bittová, DeSingel, Antwerpen, Belgium, 17 October 2008
30. 1. 2009 | Categories: Articles,Live reviews
[by Ken Hunt, London] Bang On A Can (BOAC) is an ensemble that blurs the boundaries between rock, the avant-garde and contemporary composition. Their concert in the Blauwe Zaal ('Blue Room') at DeSingel - a modernistic complex, founded, so to speak, on the deal that art is the basis and concrete of a culture - featured in its second half the headlining Czech vocalist-violinist Iva Bittová on her own or performing with BOAC. Note the hyphen because she does both at once and sometimes creates a third voice from the two elements in a manner that has to be seen in order to believe. The sextet comprised Victoria Bass on cello, Robert Black on string bass, David Cossin on drums and percussion, Derek Johnson on electric guitar, Ning Yu on grand piano and Evan Ziporyn on clarinet and bass [...]Harballabh Sangeet Sammelan, Shree Devi Talab Mandir, Jalandhar City, Punjab, 25-29 December 2008
30. 1. 2009 | Categories: Articles,Live reviews
[by Ken Hunt, London] India has a long tradition of music festivals of the classical kind - often called music conferences - to compare with few places on the planet. Harballabh Sangeet Sammelan showed off everything that is typical and revealing about Indian audiences' attitudes, including their waywardness, to its art music traditions. The December 2008 festival was its 133rd gathering in an unbroken sequence since 1875. The annual festival takes place in deepest winter. There were few concessions to comfort and that sense of musical austerity works brilliantly for a festival grounded in dhrupad - one of the more austere forms of Hindustani art music. People come wrapped in shawls, untold layers of clothing and carrying snacks. Tellingly, it is still a free festival.
Over the course of [...]
Best of 2008
30. 1. 2009 | Categories: Articles,Best of Year,Feature
Ken Hunt
2008 was one of the greatest music years of my life, full of fresh discoveries and confirmations of vision and talent still shining brightly.
New releases
Bellowhead / Matachin / Navigator
Szilvia Bognár, Ágnes Herczku and Ági Szalóki / Szájról szájra / FolkEurópa
Arun Ghosh / Northern Nameste / Camoci
Barb Jungr / Just Like A Woman / Linn
Sultan Khan and Manju Mehta / Umeed / Sense World Music
Mariza / Terra / EMI
Beáta Palya / Adieu Les Complexes / Naive Sony/BMG (Hungary)
Alim and Fargana Qasimov / Spiritual Music of Azerbaijan / Smithsonian Folkways
Zoe & Idris Rahman / Where Rivers Meet /Manushi Records
Kala Ramnath and Ganesh Iyer / Samaya / Sense World Music
Márta Sebestyén / Nyitva látám mennyeknek kapuját / SM
Peggy Seeger / Bring Me Home / Appleseed [...]
A talk with Lev ‘Ljova’ Zhurbin
31. 12. 2008 | Categories: Articles,Interviews
How New York City was seized by the East European invasion
[by Petr Dorůžka, Prague] New York is a cosmopolitan city with very rich musical landscape. Do you think there is something special the Russian, East European, or Slavic musicians living in New York can offer that musicians from elsewhere lack?
Absolutely. In the folk scene, New York arguably has amongst its citizens the best Slavic/Balkan/Russian musicians that I've ever met. Not only are they strong as performers, they are incredibly open as musicians, adapting the Western musical styles in much more genuine and honest ways than happens in the East. There's a great symbiotic relationship that happens all the time - the American players learn from the Eastern, and vice versa. We all go to each other's performances, learn the [...]
Peter ‘Cäsar’ Gläser (1949-2008)
5. 12. 2008 | Categories: Articles,Lives
[by Ken Hunt, London] One of the former German Democratic Republic's most notable and most famous rock musicians, guitarists and bandleaders Peter 'Cäsar' Gläser died in Leipzig on 23 October after a long illness. Gläser was born in Leipzig on 7 January 1949 and came to people's attention as a member of the Klaus Renft Combo. Having joined them as a founding member in 1967, he was called up soon after to do national service in the army and he rejoined them afterwards in 1969. Peter 'Cäsar' Gläser (the nickname says a great deal) might be described as Renft's shadow. After Renft effectively got banned for social criticism in 1975 (helped along by singing the lyrics of Gerulf Pannach who found himself exiled to the West), Gläser co-founded the splinter band Karussell. In 1976 it was largely [...]
Peter Maiwald (1946-2008)
5. 12. 2008 | Categories: Articles,Lives
[by Ken Hunt, London] The German writer Peter Maiwald died on 1 December in Düsseldorf. Born in Grötzingen in the West German state of Baden-Württemberg on 8 November 1946, he gravitated to the left. He moved to Munich in 1968 before moving to Neuss in 1970. During this period he was establishing himself as a freelance writer before going on to co-found the magazine Düsseldorfer Debatte. Parenthetically, one has only to think of the Putney Debates during the English Revolution for a sense of the meaning of debate.
Maiwald's writings were in part under the sway of the Brechtian model and he wrote agitprop poetry, songs and lyrics for Kabarett ensembles such as the Düsseldorf-based Kom(m)ödchen and Stuttgart's Renitenz-Theater. Over the subsequent years he would produce a body of work [...]
Ivan Rebroff (1931-2008)
1. 12. 2008 | Categories: Articles,Lives
[by Ken Hunt, London] On 27 February the best-disguised Russian superhero Ivan Rebroff, a singer and star of stage, film, musical and television died. Rebroff kept his origins a closely guarded secret but he had been born Hans-Rolf Rippert in the Spandau district of Berlin on 31 July 1931. He created, to go faux-designer, a huge peasant chic and Cossack bravado that became his trademark for the friendly face of Russia during the Cold War era. It is impossible to estimate what he did for rapprochement during the period. "I brought Russian soul to Germany," he said once. Controversially and fittingly, Rebroff and the Balalaika Ensemble Troika got to play at the 1967 Burg Waldeck Festival in West Germany - a byword for cultural integrity. Their work, collectively and alone (in the case of [...]
Szilvia Bognár, Ágnes Herczku and Ági Szalóki – “World music from Hungary”
13. 11. 2008 | Categories: Articles,Live reviews
H'ART Festival, Centre of Contemporary Art, Glasgow, Scotland, 8 November 2008
[by Ken Hunt, London] Szilvia Bognár, Ágnes Herczku and Ági Szalóki's album Szájról szájra - first released in Hungary in 2007 but invisible to the outside world until early in 2008 - ranks as one of the benchmark albums to emerge from the pan-European folk scene this decade. It is a master-class in the subtlety and power of interwoven voices as well as being a torrent of lessons on how to draw on traditional folk music and make it both now and timeless. But the wondrousness of Szájról szájra only really comes across in live performance when you match lips to sound. Revealing how they do it was nothing less than awe-inspiring in the way that seeing the Watersons - when Lal Waterson was with them - brought home [...]
Tom Constanten, Boom Boom Club @ Sutton Utd FC, Sutton, Surrey, England, 22 May 2005
4. 11. 2008 | Categories: Articles,Live reviews
[by Ken Hunt, London] To declare an interest, Tom Constanten and I are addicts of bilingual punning and are old friends. Indeed we started our correspondence when I lived in Sutton, a town that I have no reason to return to in many years. As opener for Jefferson Starship, the audience got a magic show of multivalenced allusion, illusion and wordplay from the former keyboardist of the Grateful Dead during their wonderful experimental period as a septet in the late 1960s that produced Anthem of the Sun, Aoxomoxoa and Live Dead.
His curtain raiser was Jorma Kaukonen's Embryonic Journey which dissolved into Bonnie Dobson's anti-/post-nuclear holocaust hymn Morning Dew before finishing on a sight-gag piece of theatre with his right hand falling off the keyboard whilst reaching for the [...]
