Lucky Oceans‘ new single, an exquisite, haunting take on Hank Williams Ramblin’ Man with Kasey and Bill Chambers gives me a good excuse to talk about his other legacy, and what it has meant to me.
I was fortunate enough to do a bit of work on Lucky’s unmatched and irreplaceable world music show The Daily Planet, for the final few months of his 20 year run, before it was brought to a close in the great cultural purge that Radio National underwent towards the end of 2016. Beyond what he taught me just by knowing more about his musical blind spots than I did about my areas of expertise, he taught me a lot about what it is to be a good listener, a good consumer of music. He would listen with warmth and curiosity and more than that, with intent: It was very easy to spark his interest, and pretty tough to impress him.
I generally don’t much like the phrase “World music” – at best more or less meaningless and at worst lazy Anglo-centric shorthand for “any genre not sung in English”. But the Daily Planet rendered it meaningful, a big idea, but a specific one. Any endeavor like Dancing to Architecture, anything that tries to look at music as much in historical/global /political terms as tones and techniques operates very nervously in it’s shadow.
He sums it up better than I could in the following video, a beautiful summation of music as history, music as exchange, music as possibility. There’s a broader discussion about what a public broadcaster is for, what they can do that no one else can, but that’s for another day; in the spirit of the talk, I’ll simply encourage you to listen.
Lucky’s new album – Purple Sky, a collection of Hank Williams songs — is out later this month.
Dancing to Architecture 