MARIA DUARTE, FIONA O’CONNOR and ANDY HEDGECOCK review Savage House, Enzo, Madfabulous, and Erupcja
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Mingus: forceful political engagement
CHRIS SEARLE signals the continued importance of Charles Mingus who infused contemporary jazz’s with uncompromising political comment
VISIONARY: Charles Mingus, Lower Manhattan July 4 1976
[Tom Marcello/Creative Commons]
CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
KENNY MacASKILL relishes a fictionalised account of the life and death of the principled Irish anti-colonialist, executed for betraying his English imperial masters
FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
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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