JAMIE BRITTON recommends that we all buy at least two copies of a remarkable book of poems
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‘There are many ways to counter the state of the state’
Jazz musician MARK DRESSER gives the lowdown on his new album Ain't Nothing but a Cyber Coup and You to Chris Searle
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
MARK DRESSER, one of jazz’s foremost double-bassists, is Professor of Music at the University of California in San Diego, at the same Mexican frontier where legendary bassist Charles Mingus was born in Nogales.
Dynamic spirit: Mark Dresser
Dresser’s musical life has included many years playing with Anthony Braxton, Henry Threadgill and numerous other jazz boundary-breakers but Mingus has had a profound influence. “As a teenager I was moved by Mingus’s recordings — the brilliance and audacious originality of his bass playing, the power and directness of his music,” he tells me.
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Re-releases from Bobby Wellins/Kenny Wheeler Quintet, Larry Stabbins/Keith Tippet/Louis Moholo-Moholo, and Charles Mingus Quintet