Best of 2019
9. 1. 2020 | Categories: Articles,Best of Year
[by Ken Hunt, London] Another year of writing, though ever fewer outlets didn't bother me unduly. 2019 still meant masses of musical discoveries, reaffirmations and new historic explorations. The last quarter of the year turned golden with the prospect of concentrating more or less exclusively on the approved Martin Carthy biography Prince Heathen in 2020. I returned to Venice to work on the book in the spring of the year and managed to pick up a little Italian and vèneto in side-moments.
2019 saw me once again writing, reading and researching at U Zavěšenýho Kafe ('At the Hanging Coffee') in Prague. This July's visits (with the Rudolstadt Festival as the sandwich filler in the middle) coincided with the birth of Franz Kafka (1883-1924) and I went prepared. I was not prepared, however, [...]
[by Ken Hunt, London] The year went very well indeed with masses of musical discoveries and reaffirmations. For decades I have written in U Zavěšenýho Kafe ('At the Hanging Coffee') in Prague 1. The image is of me when it was on Úvoz with its Jakub 'Kuba' Krejčí mural of Czechoslovak historical and literary figures behind me. (I went past and it had been renamed something to do with Rilke but when I looked through the window more recently the fate of Kuba's fantastical mural was unclear.) I used to write and read at a table in the adjoining room at the rear of the tavern. Still, times change. It moved around the corner and up the hill to Loretánská 13. In 2018 I got to sit and write at its new premises' tables inside and on the veranda on two separate visits to Prague giving me the chance [...]
Jean R. Freedman
University of Illinois Press
978-0-252-04075-7
[by Ken Hunt, London] Peggy Seeger wrote an autobiographical self-portrait in song overnight between Sheffield and London in 1973. In the booklet notes to her CD, The Folkways Years 1955-1982, she clarified: "It was intended to answer those people who come up during the interval or after a concert, those who interview you on radio or want to do write-ups. It is an answer to the question about why a middle-class female from a comfortable background sings about working-class people and revolution." In one discussion of ours - interviews have evolved into day-long or weekend-long conversations on occasion -, she expanded, "I get sick of it. God, you get sick of it! It's like they have to hear you say what they have read [...]
[by Ken Hunt, London] With any selection of new Richard Thompson songs, there's no knowing in whose company and in what straits listeners will be plunged. There might be a long-awaited cheap-suited estate agent or the borderline apocalyptic. 13 Rivers opens with the one of his finest recent songs, The Storm Won't Come. He sings in bible-bashing fashion: "I am longing for a storm to blow through town/Blow these sad old buildings down/Fire to burn what fire may/Rain to wash it all away."
Things soon curdling and souring splendidly. By the third track, Her Love Was Meant For Me, he jabs a middle finger up at that bugbear of his about lazy journalism banging on about doom-and-gloom. (At the beginning of my writing career, he took me aside and put me straight.) He sings, "Armageddon's in the [...]
[by Ken Hunt, London] Much of Shelter was composed, if not conceived, in the relative seclusion of a cottage on the North Yorkshire Moors. Its accent is on self-written songs. Like the songs here, the artwork photos capture rural English scenes, Roman antiquities - as if reflecting her Florence (Firenze) birthplace (and the song Roman Holiday) - and, as with the visual backdrop to A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, a smidgeon of citified ways. Conjuring a sense of solitude and her classical music training, the seventh track is an adaptation of the English composer Henry Purcell's O Solitude to her plain-speaking guitar and Jordan Hunt's violin accompaniment. Tapping into another sort of (defiant) loneliness, the Everly Brothers' Long Time Gone ("...when I leave, I'll be a long time gone...") is [...]
[by Ken Hunt, London] John Barlow became a cyber-guru and free speech advocate but when I first got to know him some - thanks to Eileen Law in the Grateful Dead office in the early 1980s, he was the second lyricist for San Francisco's Grateful Dead. He wouldn't have bleated about that that.
In late 1979 the opportunity arose to interview the Grateful Dead's principal lyricist Robert Hunter. He was then living with Christie and their son Leroy in an apartment in a street between Earl's Court tube station and the Troubadour on Old Brompton Road. The in-depth interview, then the longest he had ever had published, eventually stretched across three issues of the magazine Dark Star. Back in San Francisco it was received very well. It lifted the latch. Extensive interviews with key members of [...]
[by Ken Hunt, London] This is an adapted article, based on a joint interview with Zoe and Idris Rahman that we did yards away from the Royal Festival Hall on London's Southbank in 2008 for Jazzwise (a magazine I've written for since January 2001). The focus was the newly released Where Rivers Meet.
O, River also titled O nodi re opens Zoe and Idris Rahman's Where Rivers Meet. It starts with a water ripple of piano. A consolidating flourish with shake-rattle percussion begins to purl beneath it. A reed takes up the watery melody. Melodic consolidations follow and the piano playing takes on a percussive guise - more cimbalom-like than santoor-like though. Then the sluice gates open and the ensemble pitches headlong into the melody. O, River ebbs and flows like a tidal river. It is flowing [...]
[by Ken Hunt, London] This column brings together Najma Akhtar, Iva Bittová & Čikori, The Byrds, DAgADAnA, Dillard & Clark, Dick Gaughan, Rhiannon Giddens, Kaia Kater, Eddie Reader and Wilson & Swarbrick.
From February 2018 another source of information is https://twitter.com/KenHunt01
Both Sides The Tweed - Dick Gaugham
As somebody whose entire adult life has been lived as a bilingual European of unknown parentage, let alone bloodlines, I chose European as an identity. I believe the absolute folly of Brexit will haunt my grandchildren and their grandchildren. The only way to reform the European Union's many and various failings was to remain part of the European Union.
In January 2014 I talked to Dick Gaughan about Scotland's the proposed succession from the United [...]
[by Ken Hunt, London, Burns Night 2018] David Crosby is a musician whose influence is paramount to the way my musical tastes developed. Directly or indirectly. This interview snippet is drawn from a far longer one conducted in September 2012 for an article in R2 that appeared at the time of the release of the 2012 DVD set.
Here we discuss, among other subjects, a range of possibilities to do with writing songs and the influence of the Nubian oud player Hamza El Din. Hamza, it turned out serendipitously, had also been an influence on Crosby. And mirroring my own experience in a similar way to Ravi Shankar he opened my head to another set of possibilities with his Nonesuch Explorer LP Escalay. I would later interview him for the Kronos Quartet project Pieces of Africa and in his own right. [...]
[by Ken Hunt, London] The music I love music best tends to be music that needs to be played live, the better for it to evolve, blossom, thrive and survive. Music you know or suspect is never going to be performed exactly that way again. In Britain, compared to the Indo-Pakistani subcontinent's music, concert-goers get relatively few chances to see Persian classical music reveal its merits and mysteries. It is often better on mainland Europe. Mahsa & Marjan Vahdat revealed that with a marvellous concert at the Parisian Théâtre des Abbesses in Paris. (One of the Théâtre de la Ville's temporarily relocated venues.) The common link was they all left me thinking.
Compared to recent years, little by way of street music or busking made me stop and listen. The band at the Dar Essalam in [...]
