Reviews of A New Kind Of Wilderness, The Marching Band, Good One and Magic Farm by MARIA DUARTE, ANDY HEDGECOCK and MICHAL BONCZA
Latest editorial
Well-crafted mosaic of a great jazz innovator
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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
Mosaics: The Life and Works of Graham Collier
by Duncan Heining
(Equinox, £39.95)
GRAHAM COLLIER once pithily explained that “jazz happens in real time, once.” True, but there is more than enough fine music on his records, from 1967's Deep Dark Blue Centre to the posthumous Luminosity of 2014 to keep on playing the marvellous sounds that he and his bandmates created.
The life of the composer, bassist, bandleader, jazz author and educator, who was born in Tynemouth in 1937 and died in Crete in 2011, was one singularly marked with contrasts and brave innovations and they are ably set down in Duncan Heining's biography.
Raised in Luton in a working-class home — his father worked in Vauxhall Motors — Collier joined the army on leaving school, was stationed in Hong Kong, learned bass and trombone and played in military bands. On demob he migrated to Boston in the US, studied at Berklee College and began a life in jazz.
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