Fownhope’s Heart of Oak Society traces its roots to the age of friendly societies, when communities provided their own safety net. Its anniversary celebrations reveal a tradition still very much alive, says MARK SEDDON
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Guitar over Gaza
ANGUS REID explains the significance of Cuba’s egalitarian in letter and spirit Family Code and the pertinent lessons it holds for democracies anywhere in the world
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NICK WRIGHT considers how the isolation of Israel and a new film on the controversial Italian communist leader are creating new reference points for Italy’s left
CARLOS MARTINEZ says Cuba’s achievements in the face of a criminal blockade are startling, but the island’s future if the United States succeeds in crushing it looks bleak
AMNON BROWNFIELD STEIN reports that far-right MPs who mobbed the event organised by Hadash may have helped raise awareness of the brutality of the Israeli right
John McLaughlin and the 4th Dimension
Live at Ronnie Scott’s
(Mediastar2)
JOHN McLAUGHLIN’S Gaza City, from his March 2017 album Live at Ronnie Scott’s is one of those very few and precious recorded jazz performances that resonate with the living reality of epochal moments of people’s struggles.
It is comparable to John Coltrane’s Alabama, the tribute to the four girls murdered by racists’ dynamite in the basement of a church in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963 in the midst of the civil rights campaign, or Hugh Masekela’s Sharpeville, exposing the deathly violence of South African apartheid, or Freddie Hubbard’s 1971 threnody Sing Me A Song of Songmy, an album dedicated to the families slaughtered by rampaging US troops in a Vietnamese village.
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