NEWS BY KEN HUNT
NEWS BY KEN HUNT
September 2000
Charlie Parker remains a beacon for anyone with any aspirations about playing the saxophone-alto or otherwise. Parker was recorded far more frequently than anyone ever imagined. Indeed, far, far more frequently than anyone, even a saxophobe would ever have realised. It may therefore come as no surprise to discover that another work by the man who transformed the world of the saxophone is in the pipeline. Apparently none of the material scheduled for release in what is a proposed 8-CD set will be have never been released before. Indeed much of it has been issued several times before. However, the release being prepared in the USA for release this autumn will gather together his work for Dial, that is, much of his early work cut in the studio in one place. The material will be cleaned by Sonic Solutions and Cedar technology.
The Calcutta-born composer John Mayer, one of the first musicians to work in the Indo-jazz fusion field, has released a new album called Inja on the FMR label. Indo-Jazz Fusions was a term coined by the band's manager Don Norman as well as being a term that Mayer and the Jamaican jazz saxophonist Joe Harriott virtually mapped the landscape. Mayer is one of the major, largely overlooked pioneers of East-West fusion in the twentieth century. It would be easy to write reams about John Mayer but for more information try www.fmr-records.com. For those with greater patience and a love of books, there will be a history of the entry on Mayer in the forthcoming Baker's Biographical Dictionary of World Musicians.
Martin Carthy and Dave Swarbrick, two of the foremost musicians of the British folk revival, are planning to release a recording made in June 1966 in Nottingham, in other words, relatively early into their career. The live album, as yet untitled, for an as yet unnamed label (meaning they haven't yet decided what to name their new label) is scheduled for release to coincide with their tour dates towards the end of the year. It was an eventful concert, not least because on the journey to the concert in Nottingham the train they were travelling on ran over a cow and was nearly derailed! Unsurprisingly, the cow figured large in their minds that evening. Neil Wayne of Free Reed Records is putting together a Martin Carthy retrospective set, currently slated to run to four CDs. Norma Waterson has completed her next album for Topic Records. This album focuses on a traditional repertoire, including "The Blacksmith", "The Banks of the Dee", "Three Maids A-Milking", "One Bright Shiny Morning", "Barbary Allen", "Sheepcrook and Black Dog" and "Green Grows The Laurel". The album was produced by Eliza Carthy and Ben Ivitsky (the Peatbog Faeries), both of whom play on the album, and engineered by Norma's nephew Oliver Knight. The other contributing musicians are Martin Carthy, Nadine Elliot, Julian Goodacre, Martin Green, Alice Kinloch, Martyn Lewington, Mary McMaster (Sileas and the Poozies), Chris Parkinson, and Norma's brother, Mike Waterson. Set for release in September, the likely title is Bright Shiny Morning. Eliza Carthy has finished mixing her debut album for Warner Brothers. The title is Angels and Cigarettes. The band is set to tour from October to December to support the album's September release. Mrs. Casey Music is putting together a compilation album of material by Eliza Carthy and Nancy Kerr with added, hitherto unavailable tracks. For updates on tour information for Martin Carthy & Dave Swarbrick, the Eliza Carthy Band, Martin Carthy & Norma Waterson, Waterson: Carthy or Brass Monkey and updated information about these releases visit http://folkicons.co.uk and www.elizacarthy.com
Ken Hunt is currently working on the first of two volumes on Martin Carthy and the English Folksong Revival. The resurrected Swing 51 publishing house will publish this in September 2001. The first volume takes the story up to 1969, a decisive year in the history of the post-war folk revival. To obtain further information, write to Ken Hunt, PO Box 301, Feltham, Middlesex, TW13 5QQ, England. Details of available back issues of the Swing 51 magazine (published between 1979 and 1989) are also available from that address.
Jane Ray from BBC Radio 4 has been putting together a radio programme on the history of Topic Records with the working title of Little Red Label, an acknowledgement of the label's Marxist foundation. Topic Records, the subject of Ken Hunt's "This Was - Erinnerungsstücke aus dem englischen Folkrevival" exhibition at the Schillerhaus at the Tanz&FolkFest Rudolstadt in July 2000 (complementing the photography of Brian Shuel), is considered the world's oldest independent record label. It traces its roots back to 1939.
David Suff of Fledg'ling Records is at the early stages of putting together a career retrospective of one of Britain's most important folksingers, Shirley Collins. Shirley Collins became a mainstay of the folk club scene in the mid 1950s. During 1959 and 1960 she accompanied Alan Lomax collecting in the South of the USA, at the end of which a series of remarkable albums appeared on Atlantic in the USA. The set was reissued as Sounds of the South in 1993 as a 4-CD boxed set on Atlantic. Shirley Collins' career is a road map of the twists and turns of the British folk revival. She went through an American folk phase in part under the influence of Jean Ritchie, dropped the American phoniness bit after a few releases (including one on Moe Asch's New York-based Folkways label), and emerged as a singer of Sussex songs in the early 1960s. Thereafter she became one of the country's most influential vocalists, working with her sister, the composer and arranger, Dolly Collins, early incarnations within the Albion Band extended family, the Etchingham Steam Band and others. She retired from singing for around twenty years, a great loss to the folk scene, but re-emerged in the late 1990s as a speaker. Her experiences with Lomax in 1959 and 1960 formed the subject of a series of talks under the heading "England Over The Water". The Fledg'ling release will include rare recordings and there is even talk of her being coaxed back into the studio to record again. Keep in touch with developments through www.thebeesknees.com or write to Fledg'ling Records at PO Box 547, London, SE26 4BD, England or e-mail nest@fledgling.demon.co.uk.
The Iranian video installation and photomontage artist Shirin Neshat's exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in London's Hyde Park (in association with Austria's Kunsthalle Wien) opened on 28 July (and remains there until 3 September). The exhibition features three video installations entitled "Turbulent" (1998), "Rapture" (1999) and "Fervor" (2000). Neshat's fellow Iranian Sussan Deyhim provides the music for these films exploring various Islamic themes. "Fervor", in many ways the least ambiguous of the three video installations, has a theme of attraction between the sexes. Its protagonists are a man and woman who pass at a crossroads, perhaps an allusion to the old superstition about the Devil appeared at crossroads. Later they are seen in a segregated Islamic religious service. Here the preacher is preaching about Satan and the wages of sin. As if some form of telepathy is occurring - for men and women have a screen dividing them - the camera shows them reacting to invisible glances. In Neshat's "Turbulent" Sussan Deyhim features as the vocalist on the 'female' screen, indicative of another theme of segregation and isolation. (On the opposite screen a male singer opens the 'recital' before 'handing over' to Sussan Deyhim.) Deyhim's Madmen of God - Divine Love Songs of the Persian Sufi Masters (Crammed World CRAW22) goes beyond her work with her countrywoman. The other contributors to this album are Dawn Bukholtz Andrews (cello), Will Calhoun (percussion). Reza Derakhshani (on tar, setar, kamancheh and ney), Hearn Gadbois (zarb), Michael Harrison (tanpura), Richard Horowitz (strings), Karsh Kale (tabla and percussion), Raz Mesinai (zarb), Dave Soldier (violin), Glen Velez (daf and other percussion) and Reggie Workman (string bass).
Deaths The prolific Indian film lyricist and poet Majrooh Sultanpuri (a pen name loosely translatable as 'the wounded soul of Sultanpur'), born Asrar Hasan Khan in Sultanpur in Uttar Pradesh October 1919, died on 24 May 2000. Sultanpuri was one of the mainstays of the Hindi film industry. He certainly did his time on the filmi treadmill, working on some 300 or so films during his career and producing some 2000 films during that time. Estimates vary as to numbers but the main point is volume and longevity. According to Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Paul Williams' Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema (British Film Institute Publishing/Oxford University Press, 1994), his debut was with Abdul Rashid Kardar's film Shahjehan in 1946. (That book gives his date of birth as 1924.) He was awarded the Dada Saheb Phalke Award for his songwriting in 1993, the first songwriter to be so felicitated.
The country musician and songwriter Raymond LeRoy Clark, better known as Yodeling Slim Clark died in St. Alban's, Maine on 5 July 2000. Born in Springfield, Massachusetts on 11 December 1917, he was drawn to the allure of the trail and became fascinated with cowboy songs. By 1946 he was recording for Continental Records out of New York. Later he would record for other American and Canadian labels and would cut tribute albums to Wilf Carter (aka Montana Slim) and Jimmie Rodgers. He was still recording in his eighth decade.
The Trinidadian calypsodian and soca musician Ras Shorty I, an ironic stage number because of his height (he was about 1.93m tall), died on 12 July 2000. Originally known as Lord Shorty, he became Ras Shorty I in the 1970s, a name with Rastafarian resonance. He was born plain Garfield Blackman in Lengua on the island of Trinidad on 6 October 1941. He grew up in a district with a strong East Indian population, as people from the Indian subcontinent as known in many places in the Caribbean. (One of his later hits was "Om Shanti", which supposedly became something of a crossover hit in India.) In 1963 his personal breakthrough came with "Cloak and Dagger". He made a name for himself as a hard-living, outrageously unorthodox calypsodian, but his lifestyle caught up with him. The death of his close friend and colleague Cecil Hume, whose stage name was Maestro, in 1977 shook him. It caused him to reflect anew on his life and the purpose of life. He settled into Rastafarianism but finally found peace with Christianity. He continued to make music but now his songs warned of the perils of hedonism, loose living, drugs (most notably in the message song "Watch Out Children") and the sins of the flesh. His songs reflected his more spiritual outlook. He championed chutney (an Indianised brand of soca) and bewailed the smut and sex that was passed off as contemporary calypso - a mirror image of the so-called 'slackness' that began to bedevil Jamaican popular music in the 1990s. Where once calypso had been a finely pointed rapier, he felt now it was a cudgel of sleaze and vulgarity (for he knew the pitfalls from bitter personal experience after the sexually suggestive and sexually charged "Lesson in Love" had got him into deep trouble in the early 1970s). With admirable simplicity the weapon he chose for this assault on declining standards was called "Latrine Singers". The word soca was often said to derive from the first two words of his "Soul Calypso Music", in 1973 hailed as the genre's first hit. Soca was an attempt - and a successful one at that - to rejuvenate and render pertinent calypso in the face of Jamaican musical supremacy in the West Indies. Ras Shorty I was the musician who saw the way forward. The Mighty Sparrow put it aptly after Ras Shorty I's death, recognising him as the Father of Soca.
Ken Hunt, Sepytember 2000
