Back from a mini tour of Yorkshire and Stockport and cheering for supporting act Indignation Meeting
Mingus: forceful political engagement
CHRIS SEARLE signals the continued importance of Charles Mingus who infused contemporary jazz’s with uncompromising political comment
mingus
ALISTAR FINDLAY is mesmerised by this multiple ‘Visions of Scotland’ assault on the audience’s eyes and senses
The Star's critics ANGUS REID, ANDY HEDGECOCK and MICHAL BONCZA reviews I Am Love, The Penguin Lessons, Freaky Tales, The Thicket
MAYER WAKEFIELD has reservations about the direction of a play centered on a DVLA re-training session for three British-Pakistani motorists
New releases from Steve Knightley, Jupiter & Okwess, Jason Palmer, Lisa Knapp and Gerry Driver, Kin'Gongolo Kiniata, Ingrid Laubrock/Tom Rainey, Dan Sealey, Simin Tande, PAZ
JOHN GREEN relishes photography that unfolds a longstanding and poetic relationship with Leeds
A uncomfortably misogynistic authorial voice that sometimes seems to lack insight troubles FIONA O’CONNOR
APRIL marked the centenary of the birth of the great jazz bass virtuoso, Charles Mingus.
Born in Nogales, Arizona, on the US frontier with Mexico with a father who was a sergeant in the US army and a cosmopolitan lineage of African-American, Chinese and Native American, he grew up in Watts, Los Angeles, a tough and conflicted black neighbourhood.
His innovative music fused with the political realities of the times he lived through — compositions like Fables of Faubus, lampooning the racist buffoonery of the state governor of Arkansas, who in 1957 blocked the entry of black students into the high school of Little Rock with state troopers, or in 1964 his Meditation on a Pair of Wire Cutters, gave full support to the civil rights movement.
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