JAMIE BRITTON recommends that we all buy at least two copies of a remarkable book of poems
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Carving the Blues in Granite
Jazz musician and vocalist KATE WESTBROOK talks to Chris Searle about her unique new album, a tribute to those who quarried stone on Dartmoor
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
I FIRST heard Kate Westbrook back in 1973, when she played tenor horn in her husband Mike’s brass band at the E1 Festival in Stepney, east London. Since those days she’s become an outstanding jazz vocalist and now in her 80th year she’s delivered the album Granite, perhaps her most singular achievement.
On a universal quest: Kate Westbrook
The record is a deeply poetic soliloquy about a Dartmoor quarry worker — “a granite creature who has neither gender or scale but memories and longings,” she tells me — searching for the song of his/her life, the song of the curlew.
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