STEVE ANDREW enjoys an account of the many communities that flourished independently of and in resistance to the empires of old
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Carving the Blues in Granite
Jazz musician and vocalist KATE WESTBROOK talks to Chris Searle about her unique new album, a tribute to those who quarried stone on Dartmoor
TOM STONE urges you to catch the last dates of a New York singer/songwriter, never afraid to challenge her audiences musically or politically
JAN WOOLF examines work that aims to give viewers a material experience of the environments in the polar north and Britain equally affected by the climate crisis
The bard recalls advice received 50 years ago from his TRB muse, and sorts out appropriate legislation for football club ownership
MICHAL BONCZA and MARIA DUARTE review Facing War, Kontinental ’25, Bugonia, and Relay
MAYER WAKEFIELD is frustrated by a production of Ibsen’s classic study of an anti-heroine that fails to elucidate her motivations
PETER MASON tunes his ear into the domestic affairs of a Carribbean couple with a troublesome son
I FIRST heard Kate Westbrook back in 1973, when she played tenor horn in her husband Mike’s brass band at the E1 Festival in Stepney, east London. Since those days she’s become an outstanding jazz vocalist and now in her 80th year she’s delivered the album Granite, perhaps her most singular achievement.
On a universal quest: Kate Westbrook
The record is a deeply poetic soliloquy about a Dartmoor quarry worker — “a granite creature who has neither gender or scale but memories and longings,” she tells me — searching for the song of his/her life, the song of the curlew.
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