Best of 2017
31. 12. 2017 | Categories: Articles,Best of Year
[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. Th
[by Ken Hunt, London] This column brings together Maniucha Bikont and Ksawery Wójcinski, Jackson Browne, Olivia Chaney, Tracy Chapman, B.J. Cole/Emily Burridge, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Sandy Denny, Johnny Hallyday, Helena Matuszewska & Marta Sołek and, take a deep breath, Lars Moller & Aarhus Jazz Orchestra featuring The Danish Sinfonietta & Abhijit Banerjee. Now exhale. Apologies for the reminiscing so much.
Waxwing - Olivia Chaney
One Wednesday this October gone, Olivia Chaney and I met at Kew Gardens station. We had been writing to each other because we had a friend staying with us whose singing and artistry had been a real influence on her.
[by Ken Hunt, Venice and London] So much has been happening that it would be very hard and very boring to explain, let alone to know where to start. This column began and was concluded in London. Much of it was written during time in Venice on the outermost fringe of Cannaregio, a quiet part of the sestiere (as Venetian districts are called) remote enough to be away from the hustle and bustle of the tourist traipses. This assortment of music comprises a scattering of work, ancient and modern, from Judy Collins, Dick Connette, Bob and Ron Copper, Marlene Dietrich, Christy Moore, Severija, Sutari, Traffic, Marry Waterson & David A. Jaycock and Yorkston Thorne Khan
[by Ken Hunt, London] These are five influential LPs of Indian classical music that captured the imagination of listeners in the early years of the post-war boom.
Ali Akbar Khan Music of India - Morning And Evening Râgas (His Master's Voice ALPC 2, stereo, 1955)
Brother-in-law to Ravi Shankar, the musician Yehudi Menuhin considered the greatest on the planet, Ali Akbar Khan played sarod. In his celebrated jugalbandis (duets) with Shankar, this short-necked lute played the male role in conversations with the sitar's female voice. Menuhin had met them in 1952 and was so enraptured that he finagled this album's New York session - the first microgroove long-player dedicated to a principal Indian soloist. Menuhin is literally its master of ceremonies.
[by Ken Hunt, London] Regardless which of the nine Mousai (Greek mythology's Muses of the arts), their descendants or their modern-day mutant offspring anyone evokes, the ways of presenting Art remain ever-changing and ever-evolving. That's the nerve the German Jewish philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin exposed. It is in live performance and especially ones with extemporisation that a special kind of magic can occur. A cultural and multi-media extravaganza, „I Exist“ - nach Rajasthan ('to(wards) Rajasthan'), as the cliché goes, it ticks many boxes.
Two days before Berlin, „I Exist“ had premiered at Dresden's Festspielhaus Hellerau. Like any good touring production, straightaway a process of assessment and fine-tuning started. Dresden w
[by Ken Hunt, London] This interview with David Harrington of the Kronos Quartet took place on 11 July 2014 - long before Folk Songs (released by Nonesuch Records in June 2017) was even conceived. It is published for the historian-minded. This sliver ends with talking about Ukrainian composer-musician Mariana Sadovska.
So, 40th Anniversary. There's a venerable history of string quartets lasting a long time whether in Moravia or Budapest or wherever. What do you think worked for Kronos to last these decades?
You know, I think it's probably the energy that the members of Kronos have received from the music that we play and from the relationships that we have composers and other performers
[by Ken Hunt, London and Jalandhar] Visiting Nek Chand's life's work known as the Rock Garden of Chandigar - the union capital of the Indian states of Haryana and Punjab - must have once felt like being somewhere in a gigantic a work in progress. Since his death on 12 June 2015 at the age of 90 - and speaking more romantically - his Rock Garden of Chandigarh entered another phase.
It will now be a tourist attraction forever in a state of maintenance - and not in a bad sense. Even though it had long been in a state of constant maintenance - with major and minor repairs, cleaning and polishing occurring day in, day out - that won't finish as long as people appreciate it
[by Ken Hunt, London] 2016 proved to be, to soundbite Elvis Costello, a particularly good year for the roses. Well, the artistic ones at least. (Brexit notwithstanding, in England the garden roses and the garden as a whole suffered somewhat thanks to the English climate's vagaries of rain and sunshine.) Nevertheless, it truly was a year to remember musically. That was assisted by chance musical encounters that made me stop and stare and listen. The busker playing chromatic harmonica down below at Waterloo underground station one day in September was utterly spellbinding. A party bash outside the National Theatre in Prague celebrating a Czech national holiday was uplifting
[by Ken Hunt, London] One of the most life-changing discoveries of my life was being handed a linguistic skeleton key in the spring of 1971. Turning 20 working in the print on the German-Danish border, every day it was Hochdeutsch to management and Plattdütsch or Low German to nearly everybody else. Plattdütsch is a working-class language that straddles the Schleswig-Holstein boundary between Germany and Denmark. It enables its speakers to hold a form of bilingual conversation as far west as Flanders and into Scots-speaking Scotland. It represents a whole world of cultural intergrades rarely spoken of. Koen, Hartwin and Ward Dhoore, collectively the brothers Trio Dhoore (sometimes with Elene Leibbrand calling at festivals), epitomise that in their music-making, too.
[by Ken Hunt, London] The Sage is the hub of so much arts-related activity on Tyneside and the wider north-east England region. It was meet and right for the venue to host this much anticipated project. Its promotional literature described Eliza Carthy bringing together second-generation folk artists, like herself, from across Europe. Her accomplices were the genre-stretching Czech vocalist-violinist Iva Bittová, the Greek singer and lute player Martha Mavroidi, the frame drum player and violinist Mauro Durante from Italy's Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino, and the Finnish group Värttinä's core vocal trio of Susan Aho, Mari Kaasinen and Karoliina Kantelinen. A scaled-back Wayward Band acted as house musicians. K
