Ali Akbar Khan: Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, 7 April 2003
[by Ken Hunt, London] 
Ali Akbar Khan shuffled on stage with a walking stick, reasonable given he was one week away from 81. By night’s end, all memories of the frail character that had mounted the dais at the concert’s beginning had vanished. Swapan Chaudhuri, one of the most exceptional tabla players alive, provided the percussive accompaniment - a job a bit like catching eels with bare hands. He has an uncanny knack of being able to match and bat back this sarodist’s glorious spontaneity. Alam Khan was the second, junior sarodist but he coped brilliantly with his father’s senior waywardness.
21. 6. 2010 | read more...
[by Ken Hunt, London] Say you woke up one morning and the smell wasn’t coffee but the stench of something having gone off. What would you do? It happened to Leonard Cohen while he was on retreat at the Mount Baldy Zen Center in southern California’s San Gabriel Mountains. With a sheaf of law suits behind him, Cohen’s remedy was to hit the road, drumming up new interest by touring and giving audiences what they wanted. He picked himself up, brushed himself down and started all over again - sensibly chronicling the process with the revenue-injecting CD and DVD Live in London from the O2 venue in London in July 2008.
[by Phil Wilson, London] Dr. Ralph Stanley - as he’s proud to be called these days - isn’t someone you’d necessarily describe as ‘82 years young’, but he’s still in great form. There was a precautionary chair on stage at the Barbican, but he only draped his jacket over it, and even for the band members’ solo numbers and the instrumentals he remained standing and merely stepped back to allow them the spotlight.
[by Ken Hunt, London] Brass Monkey was a band that unfurled before my eyes. Or so it seemed. From their varied beginnings consolidating in the trio of Martin Carthy, Howard Evans and John Kirkpatrick that performed from January to December 1980 to the establishment of the powerhouse acoustic quintet, Brass Monkey proper, in January 1981 of Carthy, Evans and Kirkpatrick with Martin Brinsford and Roger Williams, their impact was never less than revelatory.
[by Ken Hunt, London] One of high-flyingest jugalbandis (duets) in Indian music it has ever been my utter pleasure to witness took place on 25 December 2008. It occurred on the opening day of the 133rd Harballabh Sangeet Sammelan in Jalandhar City in the northwest Indian state of Punjab. It was a North-South jugalbandi. The North was represented by the transverse bamboo flute or bansuri maestro Ronu Majumdar and the tabla virtuoso Ram Das Palsule. The South was represented by the alto saxophonist Kadri Gopalnath and Hari Kumar on the South’s double-headed barrel drum, mridangam.
[by Ken Hunt, London] India has a long tradition of music festivals of the classical kind - often called music conferences - to compare with few places on the planet. Harballabh Sangeet Sammelan showed off everything that is typical and revealing about Indian audiences’ attitudes, including their waywardness, to its art music traditions. The December 2008 festival was its 133rd gathering in an unbroken sequence since 1875. The annual festival takes place in deepest winter. There were few concessions to comfort and that sense of musical austerity works brilliantly for a festival grounded in dhrupad - one of the more austere forms of Hindustani art music. People come wrapped in shawls, untold layers of clothing and carrying snacks. Tellingly, it is still a free festival.
[by Ken Hunt, London] Szilvia Bognár, Ágnes Herczku and Ági Szalóki’s album Szájról szájra - first released in Hungary in 2007 but invisible to the outside world until early in 2008 - ranks as one of the benchmark albums to emerge from the pan-European folk scene this decade. It is a master-class in the subtlety and power of interwoven voices as well as being a torrent of lessons on how to draw on traditional folk music and make it both now and timeless. But the wondrousness of Szájról szájra only really comes across in live performance when you match lips to sound.
[by Ken Hunt, London] To declare an interest, Tom Constanten and I are addicts of bilingual punning and are old friends. Indeed we started our correspondence when I lived in Sutton, a town that I have no reason to return to in many years. As opener for Jefferson Starship, the audience got a magic show of multivalenced allusion, illusion and wordplay from the former keyboardist of the Grateful Dead during their wonderful experimental period as a septet in the late 1960s that produced Anthem of the Sun, Aoxomoxoa and Live Dead.
[by Ken Hunt, London] The sixth London Mela returned to its spiritual homeland on the borders of Hounslow and Ealing to the west of London once again and once again it was a celebration cum fair, which is all mela means in several of the subcontinent’s languages. The blurb on the front of the programme proclaimed: “Eight zones with urban, classical and experimental music, DJs, circus, dance, visual arts, comedy, children’s area, food from around the world and a giant funfair.”