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IAN LAVERY MP warns that decades of neoliberal policies have left former industrial communities behind — but a renewed Labour commitment to working people could change the political landscape
Free drummer on a roll
Chris Searle reviews Boom Boom Cat by Sunny Murray, John Edwards and Tony Bevan (Foghorn)
PAOLO SANTALUCIA reports on how an Italian region defies US pressure to end a Cuban doctors programme
HENRY FOWLER outlines the GFTU’s new 2026-27 education programme and argues that investing in trade union education is essential to building worker power, developing leaders and strengthening collective action
We need a government that invests in saving lives not destroying them, argues SOPHIE BOLT
More expensive by weight than gold, saffron is surprisingly simple to grow. MAT COWARD explains
The public inquiry is the result of more than a decade of determined campaigning. Now, those who fought for justice want the full story of government involvement and police conduct to be told, says KATE FLANNERY
The Durham Miners’ Gala is a celebration of working-class culture, but also a call to action — to rebuild workers’ collective strength, says KIM JOHNSON MP
Before he became a percussion pioneer of the avant-garde, the Oklahoma-born drummer Sunny Murray had played with jazz musicians from almost every tradition of the music.
With the New Orleans horn of Red Allen, the New York stride piano of Willie “The Lion” Smith and the bebop alto saxophone of Jackie McLean, he had kept approved time and rhythm.
But when he began playing with the “new” musicians such as pianist Cecil Taylor (from 1959) and rasping tenorist Albert Ayler (from 1964) as well as Ornette Colman and Don Cherry, he began to create a new drum architecture, dispensing with the erstwhile rhythmic regularity and being the accompanist, to forging the drums as a free, surging, improvising force in their own right, liberating the concepts of time and flow and helping to create new musical freedom for the new horn innovators including David Murray and Charles Gayle.
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