Fownhope’s Heart of Oak Society traces its roots to the age of friendly societies, when communities provided their own safety net. Its anniversary celebrations reveal a tradition still very much alive, says MARK SEDDON
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Free drummer on a roll
Chris Searle reviews Boom Boom Cat by Sunny Murray, John Edwards and Tony Bevan (Foghorn)
ANGUS REID explains the significance of Cuba’s egalitarian in letter and spirit Family Code and the pertinent lessons it holds for democracies anywhere in the world
Special report by PEOPLE’S WORLD
NICK WRIGHT considers how the isolation of Israel and a new film on the controversial Italian communist leader are creating new reference points for Italy’s left
CARLOS MARTINEZ says Cuba’s achievements in the face of a criminal blockade are startling, but the island’s future if the United States succeeds in crushing it looks bleak
AMNON BROWNFIELD STEIN reports that far-right MPs who mobbed the event organised by Hadash may have helped raise awareness of the brutality of the Israeli right
Before he became a percussion pioneer of the avant-garde, the Oklahoma-born drummer Sunny Murray had played with jazz musicians from almost every tradition of the music.
With the New Orleans horn of Red Allen, the New York stride piano of Willie “The Lion” Smith and the bebop alto saxophone of Jackie McLean, he had kept approved time and rhythm.
But when he began playing with the “new” musicians such as pianist Cecil Taylor (from 1959) and rasping tenorist Albert Ayler (from 1964) as well as Ornette Colman and Don Cherry, he began to create a new drum architecture, dispensing with the erstwhile rhythmic regularity and being the accompanist, to forging the drums as a free, surging, improvising force in their own right, liberating the concepts of time and flow and helping to create new musical freedom for the new horn innovators including David Murray and Charles Gayle.
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