DOUGLAS FIELD relishes the hard-boiled language, satire and humour of the third and last of the Harlem trilogy
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An exemplary human
CHRIS SEARLE marvels at the musical and scientific passions of one of Britain’s great polymaths
A page from The Way Things Work, by Neil Ardley and David Macauley
[DK Children]
STEPHANIE BROWN draws attention to the hidden labour of the female embroiderers, and how a 19th century replica made no such error
MIK SABIERS revels in a band that ploughs an idiosyncratic furrow of expletive laden, guitar-driven alt rock
ANDY HEDGECOCK, MARIA DUARTE and ANGUS REID review Synthetic Sincerity, Our Hero, Balthazar, Heartstopper Forever, and A Year In London
The bard invites readers to a gig, raps for Clacton, and lays out the Burnham-Hurzeler conundrum
RON JACOBS recommends an important book that enhances the oppositional theories put forth by Fanon and, in doing so, remakes psychology itself
Neil Ardley: Kaleidoscopes and Rainbows,
Vivien Ardley, Jazz in Britain Books, £19.99
VIVIEN ARDLEY’s biography of her protean writer-musician husband, Neil, is just about as full as any biography could be.
Sometimes you feel you are delving through a personal archive of this grammar-school boy from Wallington, Surrey, so detailed is this life-story and so full of documentation and illustrations from his books, family photographs, press packs and reviews of his records, letters, transcripts of radio broadcasts, discographies, blurbs and lists and reproduced pages from his copious books — here is the virtual entirety of an author/musician, fully setting down the features and details of a multifaceted life.
I know Ardley mostly as a brilliant orchestrator, jazz composer and arranger, an English “pastoral” artist closest in his musical inventiveness to the great Gil Evans, orchestral partner of Miles Davis.
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