John Mayer’s Indo-Jazz Fusions, Jazz Café, Camden Town, London, Tuesday, 8 January 2002
14. 3. 2015 | Categories: Articles,Live reviews
[by Ken Hunt, London] John Mayer's impact on hyphenated fusion exceeds calculability. Though the Jazz Café's 'Events Brochure' rebirthed him as Bombayite, Mayer is Calcutta-born. In the 1960s when he and the Jamaican-born saxophonist Joe Harriott combi-doubled their quintets, even more than Don Ellis, they were the defining ensemble shaking (up) the raag and jazz cocktail. Frankly, today's Indo-Jazz Fusions excels its Sixties namesake - undoubtably helped by today's availability of information but also because Harriott's ensemble probably never got raag. Chez Jazz Café, IJF numbered nine with Simon Colam (piano), Mayer (violin/tanpura), Dave Foster (basses), Andy Bratt (kit drums), James McDowall (flute), David Smith (trumpet/flugelhorn), Carlos Lopez-Real (saxes), Sandip Chakravarty [...]
Best of 2014
31. 12. 2014 | Categories: Articles,Best of Year,Feature
[by Ken Hunt, London] Like some old fart's misbegotten mantra, I typically say that the year started slow. Happens year after year after year after blooming year. For 2014 that applied particularly in terms of live performances. In the annual polls to which I contribute I am fully aware that what my bread-and-butter music diet will rarely register in anything anywhere apart from here.
To explain, as part of the whittling process, long-list 'holding entries' from the spring were largely gone by the summer and autumn. The summer festival season brought discoveries, consolidations and further winnowings. It is no coincidence that live performances numerically balance the recorded music entries. When all was done and dusted, it was live events - concerts and suchlike - that made 2014 so [...]
Giant Donut Discs ® – November 2014
30. 11. 2014 | Categories: Articles,Giant Donut Discs
[by Ken Hunt, London and Prague] This month's selection anticipates two December deaths: my father Leslie Lloyd Hunt (1912-1995) and Lubomír Dorůžka (1924-2013), the father of my co-host on this website's father. In my father's case it is through Acker Bilk's most famous vehicle. Among others providing the music are Amira Medunjanin, Vlasta Grycová, Robert Plant and the Sensational Space Shifters, the Incredible String Band, Kala Ramnath and Ali Akbar Khan, Martin & Eliza Carthy, Commander Cody And His Lost Planet Airmen and Acker Bilk.
Eleno Kerko - Amira Medunjanin
Amira's debut album Rosa, released in 2004, set many listeners on personal quests of discovery. The promise of Amira was wholly vindicated by the edgy music she revealed at her London debut opening for Taraf de Haďdouks in [...]
Giant Donut Discs ® – September and October 2014
31. 10. 2014 | Categories: Articles,Giant Donut Discs
[by Ken Hunt, London] Two months rolled into one, thanks to the aftermath of travelling and delivering copy. The choices refect work, death and making associations. The musical scatter cushions include Kishore Kumar, Carlos Paredes, Kavita Shah, Olga Bell, Abhishek Raghururam... And more.
Dil Aisa Kisi Ne Mera Toda - Kishore Kumar
13 October 2014 marked the 27th death anniversary of one of Bollywood's greatest male vocalists, Kishore Kumar. Dil aisa kisi ne. is a song from a relatively unknown Bollywood composer called Shyamlal Mitra. Kishore Kumar won the Best Male Playback Singer for this song at the 1976 Filmfare Awards and its lyricist Shyamalal Babu Rai, known professionally as Indeevar, Best Lyricist in the same awards. It is from the film Amanush which apparently translates as [...]
Iva Bittová and a Paper Cone (Paper Cone of Cherries)
10. 9. 2014 | Categories: Articles,Feature
[by Ken Hunt, London, updated 18 February 2017] It is a warm, sunny afternoon in September 2004. I am sitting on the steps outside Brno's railway station scrutinising each tram because one will bring my interpreter, Irena Přibylová. Trams come and trams go. As always, I am writing and observing. I scribble "The drunks hang round the station/Each begs his 'daily bread'."
It is now late July 2014 and I am crossing the tram and bus station outside Vienna's Praterstern station. I start doing something I have never done in my life before. I start singing one of my own songs. It begins, "The drunks hang round the station." That song - Paper Cone - represents a ten-year journey. In Brno I was sitting on those steps as a music critic specialising in improvised and non-Western classical music [...]
Giant Donut Discs ® – August 2014
30. 8. 2014 | Categories: Articles,Giant Donut Discs
[by Ken Hunt, London] A good deal of music this month came out following up new musical experiences gained over the summer. There was also prepping interviews and anticipating 2014's annual Darbar Festival, then about to take place between 18 and 21 September. (Before that festival there is generally a good measure of music to listen to by way of preparation or homework to be done. Much of this month's selections sprang from attending Colours of Ostrava. This month Jackson Browne, The Pogues, June Tabor & Oysterband, Velvet Underground, Ganesh-Kumaresh, Shirley Collins and Steve Ashley, Lo Còr De La Plana, Jackson Browne & Graham Nash, Alla Rakha and Aruna Sairam are in attendance. But there are many more discoveries waiting in the wings.
This column was updated on 30 November [...]
Political song in Britain I – The state of affairs in 2014
17. 8. 2014 | Categories: Articles,Feature
[By Ken Hunt, London] The Summer of 2013 saw the 30th Anniversary Edition of Billy Bragg's Life's A Riot With Spy Vs Spy. It counts as a landmark release in the history of British political song, even though its most enduring morsel in the wider popular consciousness is A New England - a song that Kirsty MacColl covered so well and took into the UK Top Ten in 1985. At the time of its release Margaret Thatcher was at the helm of her ship but hell-bent on stormy weather ahead. In 1984 the seismic Miners' Strike would forever reshape Britain's political contours.
Less prominent in the brouhaha following her death on 8 April 2013 was Chumbawamba's In Memoriam: Margaret Thatcher - a limited edition EP release celebrating good riddance to the Iron Lady sent out to subscribers the next day. [...]
Impressions from Colours of Ostrava, Ostrava, Czech Republic, 17-20 July 2014
1. 8. 2014 | Categories: Articles,Feature
[by Ken Hunt, Ostrava, Vienna and London] A fortnight before the yearly festival happened, The Prague Post informed readers that Colours of Ostrava was "the Czech Republic's top summer music event". Impressions from attending the festival serve to confirm that indisputably it is. Ostrava is in the top right of the country. Poland is 15 km away and the Slovak Republic 55 km distant. Inevitably therefore it is a festival that attracts an international audience. Ten years after the festival's founding, that is, in 2012 this "multi-genre music festival" switched locations across the city. Since then has taken place in Ostrava's Vítkovice district. Its new setting is one of preserved industrial 'dereliction' - aka a UNESCO heritage site. And to mangle the Four Seasons' comeback hit, 'Oh, what [...]
Giant Donut Discs ® – July 2014
31. 7. 2014 | Categories: Articles,Giant Donut Discs
[by Ken Hunt, London] Several of these listening selections came about thanks to travelling in the Czech Republic and Austria and meeting an extraordinary bunch of people, some of whom became new friends. The gathering here comprises Nishtiman, John Barry (featuring John Leach as soloist), Grateful Dead, Tommy McCarthy, Bonnie Dobson & Her Boys, Geirr Tveitt, Ado Abdelmasih, Aziz Günel and Ibrahim Aksim, Iva Bittová & Vladamír Václavek and CSNY.
This month's Giant Donut Discs is in memory of the jazz critic Jack Massarik, my fellow Jazzwise scribe and sometime tour guide to jazz spots in Soho (after the Jazzwise writers' Christmas get-togethers). I learned that Jack had died on 13 July 2015 while I was out East. Jack was a very good egg.
Nishtiman - Nishtiman
Nishtiman plays Kurdish [...]
