Ken Hunt (music journalist)

Ken Hunt (born 11 April 1951) is a bilingual English music critic, journalist, broadcaster and translator who specialises in world music, folk and improvised musics. He has written for Mojo, Q, History of Rock and AllMusic, contributed to titles in Rough Guides' Music Reference Series, and is a musical consultant on the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. He is also an obituarist for The Guardian, The Independent, The Scotsman, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Times.^[1]

Of him, the British folk fiddler Dave Swarbrick wrote in a letter to R2 magazine in 2011, "I think Ken Hunt has a style, a recognisable style. Very clever and informative, readable and honest."^[2]

An authority on Indian classical music, Hunt has helped compile albums by Ravi Shankar, Lata Mangeshkar and Asha Bhosle, and has written liner notes for albums by many other artists, including Ali Akbar Khan, Shivkumar Sharma, Hariprasad Chaurasia, Yehudi Menuhin, Bert Jansch, Davy Graham and the Kronos Quartet.^[3] Ravi Shankar once described Hunt as "unique" in his understanding of the music of the Indian subcontinent.^[4]

Career

Hunt was born in Surrey in the south of England in April 1951.^[3] His father was a jazz saxophonist and clarinettist.^[1] During his youth, Hunt was regularly exposed to the music of artists such as Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday and Artie Shaw.^[3] His first published writing appeared in 1967, after which he moved to West Germany and worked for magazines published by the company Gruner & Jahr.^[3]

After returning to England, in 1975 he began writing music criticism. He wrote for several underground music publications that furthered the alternative style introduced by ZigZag magazine, including Dark Star and Omaha Rainbow. From 1979 to 1989, Hunt was the editor and publisher of Swing 51,^[1] a magazine dedicated to "folk, bluegrass and beyond".^[5] During that time he interviewed and profiled Paul Brady, Anne Briggs, Martin Carthy, Jerry Garcia, Alan Garner, Mickey Hart, Dagmar Krause, David Lindley, Christy Moore, Ralph Steadman^[3] and Robin Williamson, among others.^[6] In the 1980s, he also contributed reviews to the magazines Folk Roots and Folk International.^[1]

Hunt was a contributor to The Penguin Encyclopedia of Popular Music, which was edited by Donald Clarke^[3] and published in 1989, with a revised edition following in 1998.^[7] He also wrote extensively for Rough Guides' book World Music, first published in 2000. For the third edition of this title, in 2009, Hunt supplied seven chapters on India and one each on Bangladesh and Germany.^[3] Between 1996 and 2010, he served as the compiler for many of Rough Guides' CD releases, issued on the World Music Network label, and for releases by Ravi Shankar.^[3]

Coinciding with the 50th anniversary of Indian and Pakistani independence in 1997, Hunt organised a representative musical programme for the Tanz&FolkFest Rudolstadt festival in Germany.^[4] In 2000 he programmed the festival's England content of music, film, exhibitions and talks. He became the festival's English-language text writer, editor and translator for its festival programme (and CD/DVD releases) from July 1994.

During this period, he also reviewed non-Western classical releases for Gramophone magazine.^[8]

Since 2000, Hunt has been a writer and consultant for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, having contributed to both its Millennium edition and the project's ongoing supplements. By 2017 he had become the most published essayist for folk music subjects in the work's 200-year history, but also with entries on Kevin Ayers and John Mayer (composer).

His connections with the Kronos Quartet began in the early 1980s. He would write the CD booklet notes for their albums Kevin Volans: Hunting:Gathering, Five Tango Sensations, Pieces of Africa and Caravan. He was instrumental in conceiving and bringing to violinist David Harrington a project to do with the music of Bollywood and Bengali film composer R.D. Burman, and, already knowing Asha Bhosle through Ali Akbar Khan, brought them together for the Kronos Quartet's 2005 album You've Stolen My Heart, which received a Grammy nomination.^[1]

He has also collaborated, as a lyricist, with the Czech avant-garde singer and composer Iva Bittová,^[1] including writing the title song "Entwine" / "Proplétám" in English and Czech (released 2014, Pavian Records). He also runs the website World Music with Czech journalist and broadcaster Petr Dorůžka.^[4][9] Petr Dorůžka is the son of Czechoslovakia's foremost jazz critic and musicologist Lubomír Dorůžka (1924–2013)^[10][11] and father of the guitarist David Dorůžka.

Hunt was one of the contributors to the 2012 book The Album: A Guide to Pop Music's Most Provocative, Influential, and Important Creations on the subject of the Grateful Dead's album American Beauty, edited by James E. Perone.^[1][9]

As of 2015, he continued to write for international music and other publications such as fRoots, Folker, Jazzwise, Penguin Eggs, the UK-based Indian arts magazine Pulse, Sing Out!, R2 and Times Literary Supplement, in addition to several UK newspapers.^[3]

He is twice married. He was first married to Dagmar Brown (1951-1997), with whom he had two children, and, second, to the human rights activist Santosh Dass MBE.

References

External links

• Obituaries by Ken Hunt for The Guardian (2002–2009)