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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Aki channels Ellington
Chris Searle reviews My Ellington by Aki Takase (Intakt Records 213)
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
Looking back over the nigh century of jazz recording, the huge musical stature and canon of Edward “Duke” Ellington (1899-1974) remains as the music’s most powerful and original summation.
To hear the Ellington Orchestra live was to be uplifted not only by a unique amalgam of extraordinary musicians, many of whom had played together for decades and were unified by the maestro’s humanity and genius, but by an artistic intelligence and imagination so rarely fused across the entire realm of 20th-century culture.
Ellington was composer, arranger and orchestrator, and a pianist who grew through the stride of traditions of James P Johnston and Fats Waller to become the prompter of modernists and beboppers like Monk and Bud Powell.
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