JAMIE BRITTON recommends that we all buy at least two copies of a remarkable book of poems
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Music bridges troubled waters
CHRIS SEARLE reports on a festival where musicians from around the world defied dark times with a sense of musical unity
MARIA DUARTE goes down a bilingual rabbit hole with an impressive Jodie Foster
DAVID HARVIE recommends a selection of Harry Cleaver’s writing that documents working-class activism and offers a method, and a way of understanding and investigating the world
DAVID YEARSLEY is fascinated by the account of four composers who transformed their experiences of the second world war and the Holocaust into deeply moving works of art
PETER MASON thrills to the sound of south London-born Yussef Dayes, and the galaxy of musicians drawn into his orbit
From post-human revolution in Puerto Rico to trans poetics and queer mythmaking, these three books that imagine new ways of being together
THE MENACE of the impending Trump presidency was reflected in the anxious soundscape created by many of the musicians at this year’s London Jazz Festival.
Tenor saxophonist Trish Clowes asked everyone at her free-stage Barbican performance to shake hands and hug each other in anti-Trump solidarity before she played her tune Blue Calm, while young pianist Elliot Galvin said it was “now very pertinent” to play Kurt Weill’s Mack the Knife, conjuring an aura of murderous dark forces at work as he did so.
And the diaphanous blues cadences of Are You Glad to Be in America? rang out from the slashing guitar of James Blood Ulmer at Rich Mix.
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