Fownhope’s Heart of Oak Society traces its roots to the age of friendly societies, when communities provided their own safety net. Its anniversary celebrations reveal a tradition still very much alive, says MARK SEDDON
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A truly evocative salutation
Chris Searle on jazz
ANGUS REID explains the significance of Cuba’s egalitarian in letter and spirit Family Code and the pertinent lessons it holds for democracies anywhere in the world
Special report by PEOPLE’S WORLD
NICK WRIGHT considers how the isolation of Israel and a new film on the controversial Italian communist leader are creating new reference points for Italy’s left
CARLOS MARTINEZ says Cuba’s achievements in the face of a criminal blockade are startling, but the island’s future if the United States succeeds in crushing it looks bleak
AMNON BROWNFIELD STEIN reports that far-right MPs who mobbed the event organised by Hadash may have helped raise awareness of the brutality of the Israeli right
The John Law Quartet
Exploded on Impact (Slam CD204)
The John Law Cornucopia Ensemble
Out of Darkness (Slam CD264)
John Law’s Congregration
Three Leaps of the Gazelle
(33 Records 33JAZZ228)
WHEN I first heard John Law playing a very free and brilliant piano alongside the veteran South African drummer Louis Moholo-Moholo on the 1995 album The Boat is Sinking, Apartheid is Sinking, I’d no idea that he’d been a classical piano prodigy in his youth.
He’d begun learning piano at four, given his first public performance at six and later won a scholarship to London’s Royal Academy of Music and followed that by gaining another scholarship, awarded by the Austrian government to continue his classical studies in Vienna.
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