Reviews of A New Kind Of Wilderness, The Marching Band, Good One and Magic Farm by MARIA DUARTE, ANDY HEDGECOCK and MICHAL BONCZA
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One Caribbean!
CHRIS SEARLE is transported by a superfine tribute to James Baldwin
Neil Charles
SCOTT ALSWORTH foresees the coming of the smaller, leaner, and class conscious indie studio, with art as its guiding star
MARJORIE MAYO recommends an accessible and unsettling novel that uses a true incident of death in the Channel to raise questions of wider moral responsibility
MIK SABIERS wallows in a night of political punk and funk that fires both barrels at Trump
Reasonable radicalism, death in Abu Dhabi, locked-room romance, and sleuthing in the Blitz
SIMON DUFF recommends a new album from renowned composer and oud player Anour Brahem.
JAMES WALSH has a great night in the company of basketball players, quantum physicists and the exquisite timing of Rosie Jones
Neil Charles Dark Days Quartet
Tribute to James Baldwin
Cafe Oto, Dalston London
I REMEMBER being immersed in reading the first explosive 100 pages of James Baldwin’s epochal novel, Another Country, as I rode on a Greyhound bus to take part in the massive Poor People’s Campaign demonstration in Washington DC in July 1968, shortly after the assassination of Martin Luther King.
Baldwin’s words about racist oppression and the life and suicide of the jazz drummer, Rufus Scott, were a profound message of their times. So I was determined, now in 2024, to hear Neil Charles’s Dark Days Quartet in Dalston’s Cafe Oto, celebrating Baldwin’s centenary.
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CHRIS SEARLE translates the fusion of four jazz maestros into a mental image of Hackney Carnival
An exploration of Baldwin’s writing and travels that overlooks his political radicalism does no service to him or the movement says JENNY FARRELL
JENNY FARRELL traces the critical role that the CPUSA played in the education of Harlem’s greatest man of letters