Seventeen years after losing her council job due to needing endometriosis surgery, Michelle Dewar’s campaign for paid menstrual leave gained 50,000 signatures in a week, reports ELIZABETH SHORT
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Ebullient songs of boppish swing
Chris Searle on Jazz: Eddie Jefferson
From 35,000 troops in Talisman Sabre war games to HMS Spey provocations in the Taiwan Strait, Labour continues Tory militarisation — all while claiming to uphold ‘one China’ diplomatic agreements from 1972, reports KENNY COYLE
White racist rioting has many an infamous precedent in Britain, writes DAVID HORSLEY
The SNP might dissemble over the meaning of ‘nationalism,’ but it can’t disguise the fact that it is no left-wing party, says ELAINE SMITH
Castro became one of the first leaders to denounce Israeli genocide against Palestinians at the UN, comparing zionist persecution to Nazi crimes while Cuba trained PLO cadres and awarded Arafat state honours, writes PABLO MERIGUET
The summer saw the co-founders of modern communism travelling from Ramsgate to Neuenahr to Scotland in search of good weather, good health and good newspapers in the reading rooms, writes KEITH FLETT
Eddie Jefferson
The Jazz Singer (Inner City 1016)
The Main Man (Inner City 1033)
Eddie Jefferson, born in Pittsburgh in 1918, was a true jazz original. He began working as a tap dancer in the ’30s, but by the late ’40s he had developed a singing approach called “vocalese,” in which he took the recorded solos of jazz horn players, wrote lyrics to them and sang them as tributes to their creators.
One of the first of these was James Moody’s tenor saxophone solo in a recording of I’m in the Mood for Love. Jefferson recreated it as Moody’s Mood for Love, which became a big hit when recorded by the rhythm and blues man King Pleasure in 1952.
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CHRIS SEARLE speaks to Chris Laurence, bassist and bandmate of saxophonist TONY COE
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Re-releases from Bobby Wellins/Kenny Wheeler Quintet, Larry Stabbins/Keith Tippet/Louis Moholo-Moholo, and Charles Mingus Quintet
