MARIA DUARTE, FIONA O’CONNOR and ANDY HEDGECOCK review Savage House, Enzo, Madfabulous, and Erupcja
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If Herbie Went West Coast, Cafe Oto, London
Jazz meeting of virtuoso minds
CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
KENNY MacASKILL relishes a fictionalised account of the life and death of the principled Irish anti-colonialist, executed for betraying his English imperial masters
FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
SOME of Britain’s finest and most audacious improvising musicians were in their own liberated zone at this gig.
Dubbed If Herbie Went West Coast by electronics wizard Phil Durrant, this session recalled an era when Herbie Hancock made his Crossings and Sextant albums and created an epochal rendezvous of acoustic and electronic sounds.
Durrant’s electric beat, generated by an array of switches, wires, modular synthesiser and plugs, combined with Mark Sanders’s pulsating drums and John Sanders’s plunging bass and fomented a pounding rhythmic vibration, while Pat Thomas — switching between iPad sonics and fervent piano runs — deepened the excitation.
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