KEVIN DONNELLY suggests that the task of transforming cultural spaces is far from over and that photography still has a key role to play
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‘I aim for a sound that conjures up vistas of sunrises and wide open landscapes’
CHRIS SEARLE speaks to self-taught tenor saxophonist Nat Birchall
Tenor saxophonist Nat Birchell and the Unity Ensemble
[Richard Kaby]
RITA DI SANTO talks to Scottish-Irish filmmaker MARK COUSINS about his new series The Story of Documentary Film
ALAN MORRISON welcomes a new collection from the most imaginative and committed ecopoet of our time
CAL McBRIDE relishes the lyrical truth of an unstable identity in an over-tidy and conventional social realist treatment
New releases from Shearwater, Florry, and Navy Blue
CHRIS SEARLE welcomes a startling vision of contemporary Newport from a veteran photographer of the British working class
ANGUS REID recommends a very unusual documentary: a love story between two disillusioned journalists
WHEN Chorley, Lancashire-born tenor saxophonist Nat Birchall brought his septet, the Unity Ensemble, to the Cafe Oto in the teeming, cosmopolitan heart of Hackney, it was as if he had brought the ancient majesty and mystery of the Pennines in the beauty of his horn, so much is the rural north of England endemic to his sound.
With fellow Coltrane-loving veteran hornman Alan Skidmore supplementing pianist Adam Fairhall, thunderous drummer Paul Hession, bassist Michael Bardon and percussionists Mark Wastell and Lascelle Gordon, they played live the music on their serene, almost hymnal new album, New World, to hugely receptive London listeners.
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