WILL STONE fact-checks the colourful life of Ozzy Osbourne
Listening to the machines made him want to conduct them!
CHRIS SEARLE speaks to saxophonist, composer and orchestrator JULIAN SIEGEL
Jacquard lace-making machines, 1968; Julian Siegel, 2018
[Ages/CC; Schorle/CC] 
JAMES CROSSLEY applauds a lucid biography of the German radical preacher who reemerged as a hero in the GDR
Prizes all round: the Bard hands plaudits to the Miners Gala, OT&JC, Joe Solo, Black Sabbath’s frontman and the Lionesses
Star cartoonist JAMIE BRITTON is in awe of a graphic novel of epic proportions that explores class, religion and globalisation via the strange cultivation of Ginseng in the US Midwest
GUILLERMO THOMAS is intrigued by a history of the Middle East that demonstrates how promising post colonial beginnings were snuffed out by Western imperialist interests
MARIA DUARTE recommends the intricate study of a high-performance and highly dysfuntional German family
I’VE always argued that jazz grew and bloomed out of multiple acts of work.
The great blues singers like Bessie Smith (Washwoman’s Blues) or Big Bill Broonzy (Plowman’s Blues) sang about their aversion to alienating forms of labour, and some of the earliest jazz recordings invoked hard-working lives, including New Orleans pioneers Louis Armstrong and Sidney Bechet in Coal Cart Blues — where Armstrong sings of his boyhood hard labours of hauling sacks of coal — or trumpeter Freddie Keppard’s Chicago cattle abattoir narrative, Stockyard Strut, or Joe “King” Oliver’s paean to all Windy City workers, Working Man Blues.
Even early Duke Ellington tracks like Stevedore Stomp told of the travails of Harlem-based dockworkers.
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CHRIS SEARLE speaks to vocalist Jacqui Dankworth
CHRIS SEARLE pays tribute to the late South African percussionist, Louis Moholo-Moholo
Re-releases from Bobby Wellins/Kenny Wheeler Quintet, Larry Stabbins/Keith Tippet/Louis Moholo-Moholo, and Charles Mingus Quintet
CHRIS SEARLE speaks to Ethiopian vocalist SOFIA JERNBERG
