The Tories introduced the 50% strike ballot threshold to make industrial action harder. MATT WRACK argues that a Labour government has no justification for leaving it on the statute book
Leila Olivesi Quartet (featuring David Binney)
Utopia (Jazz and People JPCD 815002)
IT’S not customary for a jazz musician to record an album directly inspired by a 17th-century philosopher. Freethinking author and polemicist, but Leila Olivesi’s Utopia is just that.
Cyrano de Bergerac (1619-1655) the philosopher, was not the character created in the late 19th century play by Edmond Rostand, but the writer of the posthumously published The States and Empires of the Moon and The States and Empires of the Sun, jointly titled The Other World. I don’t know whether Sun Ra of Birmingham, Alabama, the first iconoc jazz space traveller and man of Saturn, ever read de Bergerac’s works, but with his Arkestra he imagined a soundscape in the stars, a universe which Olivesi forms and creates in an entirely contrary way with this album.
CHRIS SEARLE urges you to listen to two new albums by the US Indian pianist VIJAY IYER
CHRIS SEARLE speaks to US saxophonist CAROLINE KRAABEL
As part of the 2025 London Jazz Festival Rich Mix offered intriguing sessions titled 'Persian Jazz,' CHRIS SEARLE was there
GORDON PARSONS is blown away by a superb production of Rostand’s comedy of verbal panache and swordmanship


