27. 1. 2008 |
Categories: Articles,Live reviews
[by Ken Hunt, London] London's embassies regularly host exhibitions, talks, artist showcases and recitals. Generally speaking, these events are free. The Czech Embassy situated on the leafier fringe of London's Notting Hill district is no exception. Its showcase featuring the classical violin maestro Pavel Šporcl stands out in my memory. But British Sea Power launching their new album Do You Like Rock Music? on embassy grounds? It neither conformed to embassies promoting their own nation's artists, nor, on the face of it, did it seem the likeliest venue.
I approached reviewing British Sea Power's album launch gig in a way seldom possible for a full-time freelance journalist. I treated it and them as a blank canvas and deliberately went with, as near as possible, no preconceptions of any [...]
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27. 1. 2008 |
Categories: Articles,Lives
[by Ken Hunt, London] A native Californian, the singer and songwriter and one-time member of the Kingston Trio folk group, John Stewart was born in San Diego on 5 September 1939. Stewart's album California Bloodlines (1969) and Cannons in the Rain (1973) were major additions to a literature of America in song. Major milestones too. His Mother Country typifies the reflective nature of his finest songs. Like the work of the Canadian songwriter Ian Tyson, Mother Country is the past lodged in the present looking out to the future. It was a reflection on the pioneers who opened up the land. It touched deep down. One of the movies for the mind in Mother Country that Stewart ran concerned a blind man riding his horse for the final time.
It frequently seemed as if John Stewart was appreciated [...]
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8. 1. 2008 |
Categories: Articles,Lives
[by Ken Hunt, London] The Telugu singer, dancer-choreographer and actress Tangutoori Surya Kumari - also rendered Suryakumari - was born in Rajamundry in November 1925. She became part of the Raj-era independence movement against the British that eventually triumphed with the end of colonial rule in 1947. She was a child-actress in Telugu films as early as 1937 when a part was written for her in Vipranarayana. Thereafter she juggled cinematic acting and playback singing roles in a variety of languages including Telugu, Tamil and Hindi. She also sang freedom songs and was particularly extolled for a patriotic song that is still sung called Maa Telugu Talliki Mallepoodanda - a reminder and exhortation to cherish and preserve Telugu culture. Much of her recorded work appeared on the Odeon [...]
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8. 1. 2008 |
Categories: Articles,Lives
[by Ken Hunt, London] Back in the 1960s, our understanding of the world's varied musical traditions was woefully ignorant by today's standards. If buying American blues or bluegrass albums was an expensive undertaking involving the adventure of a day's expedition to the nearest big city or crossing fingers or sending money to a mail order specialist, maybe in another country, then tracking down what was then called "International folk" - like Japanese court music - was similar to shopping on the moon. It could take decades to track down some choice morsel.
Hearing shakuhachi player Gorō Yamaguchi's Shakuhachi Music: A Bell Ringing in the Empty Sky was like having the top of one's cranium precisely sliced off with sound. It made any number of round-eyes go wild with contemplative [...]
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27. 12. 2007 |
Categories: Articles,Live reviews
[by Ken Hunt, London] Founded in 1968 in Czechoslovakia, the Plastic People of the Universe finally made their UK début in January 2007. No founding members played but the spirit of the band that commandeered its name from a Mothers of Invention track remained intact and strong. The Communist regime vilified the "psychedelic band of Prague" nicely captured in Cesar di Ferara's 1970 black-and-white romp of a film - very post-Help! - that linked then and now at their Queen Elizabeth Hall opening. In Václav Havel's words they were "layabouts, hooligans, alcoholics, and drug addicts". Members of the circle were gaoled. PPU recordings were banned, though circulated in samizdat form. They became counter-culture in ways quite different from the general way the term is understood when rockin' in [...]
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14. 12. 2007 |
Categories: Articles,Best of Year,Feature
Ken Hunt
Favourite or most-played new releases of 2007 / alphabetical order
[by Ken Hunt, London] Getting paid for something you'd be doing anyway is a rare privilege. Making
a decent living doing it is an altogether different mater, which is
why we present the fine things from 2007 that made our lives finer and
nourished our minds. These are the things that gave us the greatest
pleasure musically speaking.
Sylvia Barnes / The Colour of Amber / Greentrax
Kaushiki Chakrabarty / Kaushiki / Sense World Music
Fraunhofer Saitenmusik with Haugaard & Høirup / Dreissig / Trikont
Trilok Gurtu & The Arke String Quartet / Arkeology / Promo Music
David Lindley / Big Twang / DL Inc
George Mraz + Iva Bittová / Moravian Gems / Cube-Metier
Jiří Pavlica, Hradišťan and Filharmonie [...]
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14. 12. 2007 |
Categories: Articles,Lives
[by Ken Hunt, London] Chanson is often construed as literate song. Even German, the language that brought us Schubert's Lieder, treats chanson as a class apart from Lied. Just like Czech invokes chanson's spirit in the phrase Česky Šanson. Chanson offers other species of commentary on the human condition and for one of the finest examples of chanson's otherness, hearken to the exemplary work of Francois Béranger. He made his mark as what can only be described as a protest chansonnier.
He described the life of the average workingman, the iniquities and injustices of the system in songs of rare power and political virility like Tranche de vie (Slice of life) and his unimpressed take on Mitterrand's socialist election victory, Le vrai changement c'est quand (The real change is coming [...]
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14. 12. 2007 |
Categories: Articles,Lives
[by Ken Hunt, London] The photographer and technical diver Keith Morris went missing off Alderney, one of the Channel Islands in the English Channel, on 17 June 2005. Born in the South-west London district of Wandsworth on 15 August 1938, he was responsible for some of the most enduring and unwavering images of British and American music. His subjects included John Cale and Elvis Costello, BB King and Jimi Hendrix, Fairport Convention and The Damned, Sandy Denny and Marc Bolan.
However, he was drawn back over and over again to a series of photo shoots he had done of a cult - as in little-selling - singer-songwriter called Nick Drake. "Although I knew Nick on and off for four years, I photographed him only three times, each time linked to one of his albums," he said at the time of his [...]
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27. 11. 2007 |
Categories: Articles,Lives
[by Ken Hunt, London] Likely as not, few of you reading this will have ever heard of Alain Daniélou. In terms of mystery and influence, Daniélou was among the 20 most influential characters from twentieth-century ethnomusicology and one of the characters who signposted the way into the world music labyrinth. He worked on such consciousness-shaping series and volumes as Anthologie de la Musique de l'Inde for Serge Moreux' Ducretet-Thomson label, Religious Music of India for Moe Asch's Folkways label, Folk Music of India for Columbia and the Unesco Anthology of the Orient for Karl Vötterlee's Bärenreiter Verlag/Musicaphon. He had a hand in over 100 albums. After Daniélou's death on 27 January 1994, Rounder Records and Auvidis have continued re-releasing the work of a man who shaped our [...]
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27. 11. 2007 |
Categories: Articles,Book reviews
[by Ken Hunt, London] In a hoary old quote that pops up in Patrick Humphries' The Many Lives of Tom Waits, Waits, that lovable whey-faced geezer in black with a pork-pie hat, quips, "Marcel Marceau gets more airplay than I do!" Things may have improved marginally in the meantime - Marceau dying in 2007 will have given Waits a chance to cut in - but Waits has proved tenacious when it comes to avoiding anything so vulgar as a whiffette of becoming a popular singing star. Waits is a man of many threads. He has regaled us with many mythologies, mostly hand-woven and threadbare enough for the unwary dupe to be taken in and buy him that figurative drink out of pity.
Suckers! To call Waits a singer-songwriter would be like damning him with faint praise. Buying into that singer-songwriter job [...]
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