ANGUS REID, ANDY HEDGECOCK and MARIA DUARTE review On The Sea, A Useful Ghost, Brunello: The Gracious Visionary, and Pinocchio Unstrung
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‘The music goes beyond captivity... Tiyo was full of love for people and an example to all of us’
CHRIS SEARLE talks with Brazilian saxophonist Felipe Salles
Felipe Salles
[www.sallesjazz.com]
RON JACOBS enjoys a great tale, told by a US communist, of the lives of working-class New Yorkers
BRENT CUTLER searches a new history of contemporary Iran for an understanding of the Islamic Republic, finding both interesting detail and glaring omissions
MARIA DUARTE recommends the true story of the remarkable woman who sued Donald Trump for sexual assault not once, but twice
KENNY MacASKILL is disappointed by a polemical, rather than factual, account of the Lone Star State and its political path since the civil war
PAUL DONOVAN is fascinated by the lives of Charles and Mary Bagot, and the insight this biography shines on the morals of pre-Victorian society
GORDON PARSONS appreciates fine performances and a feel for ambiguity, but misses the music of the dialogue
IN June 2018 Tiyo Attallah Salah-El died at 85 while serving nearly 50 years of a life sentence without parole in Pennsylvania's Dallas State Correctional Institution.
He was a brilliant and innovative jazz musician and composer, a writer and prison abolitionist. He had fought in the US Army in Korea, and was awarded a Purple Heart. He returned to work in his father's plumbing firm, became involved in drug-related crime and prison life. An eventual life sentence for homicide in Delaware City Prison followed in 1977, after he had attempted to form a prisoners' union.
Throughout his half-century in jail, he played saxophone, composed many musical works, gained degrees and founded the Coalition for the Abolition of Prisons, becoming a quaker in 1993.
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