MICK MCSHANE is roused by a band whose socialism laces every line of every song with commitment and raw passion
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Mingus: forceful political engagement
CHRIS SEARLE signals the continued importance of Charles Mingus who infused contemporary jazz’s with uncompromising political comment
VISIONARY: Charles Mingus, Lower Manhattan July 4 1976
New releases from Mountain, Soul Asylum and Michael McDermott
ALEX HALL is disgusted by the misuse of ‘emotional narratives’ to justify uninformed geo-political prejudice
SUE TURNER welcomes a thoughtful, engaging book that lays bare the economic realities of global waste management
JOHN GREEN welcomes an insider account of the achievements and failures of the transition to democracy in Portugal
SIMON PARSONS applauds an imaginative and absorbing updating of Strindberg’s classic
PETER MASON is enthralled by an assembly of objects, ancient and modern, that have lain in the mud of London’s river
APRIL marked the centenary of the birth of the great jazz bass virtuoso, Charles Mingus.
Born in Nogales, Arizona, on the US frontier with Mexico with a father who was a sergeant in the US army and a cosmopolitan lineage of African-American, Chinese and Native American, he grew up in Watts, Los Angeles, a tough and conflicted black neighbourhood.
His innovative music fused with the political realities of the times he lived through — compositions like Fables of Faubus, lampooning the racist buffoonery of the state governor of Arkansas, who in 1957 blocked the entry of black students into the high school of Little Rock with state troopers, or in 1964 his Meditation on a Pair of Wire Cutters, gave full support to the civil rights movement.
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