(Biophilia Records)
Ambrose Akinmusire and Tyshawn Sorey join the bassist-composer on originals featuring top-end squeals, bass flurries and a guilelessly delicate highlight
The power of three has had a great press for a long time, embedded as it’s been in the tenets of Christians, witches, Buddhists, or just the beginnings, middles and ends of fireside stories. And in the thrifty music-making years after the second world war, the economical appeal of the jazz trio – often led by piano virtuosi such as Bill Evans or Ahmad Jamal, occasionally by such sax giants as Sonny Rollins – also revealed just how much spontaneous creativity could fly from minimal gatherings.
Linda May Han Oh, the Malaysia-born, New York-based Australian bassist and composer whose star employers have included Vijay Iyer and Pat Metheny, leads this standout example, composing everything except for covers of Geri Allen and Melba Liston tunes. Her trio partners are those stellar inventors of contemporary jazz, Ambrose Akinmusire (trumpet) and Tyshawn Sorey (drums).
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© Photograph: Shervin Lainez
© Photograph: Shervin Lainez
© Photograph: Shervin Lainez
With Leverkusen and Dortmund in transition after losing key players, the stage is set for champions to reign again
The newly named Franz Beckenbauer Supercup has many uses. Unlike some of its continental counterparts, this curtain-raising meeting between league and cup winners tends to brim with a pleasing intensity. It unfolds in a partisan atmosphere too, taking place at one of the two competitors’ stadium rather than at a neutral venue, so we feel the real straight away.
Telling us what to expect for the coming nine months in the Bundesliga, however, isn’t often one of the Supercup’s strengths. Bayer Leverkusen gave a faithful impression of their double-winning form in emerging victorious in last year’s edition by punking Stuttgart with a late Patrik Schick goal before winning on penalties, having played a huge chunk of the match with 10 men. The year before, Harry Kane made an inauspicious Bayern Munich debut at the end of “a crazy 24 hours”, entering the field to tumultuous acclaim only for his new team to subsequently be flattened by Dani Olmo’s hat-trick for Leipzig. Pep Guardiola, meanwhile, never won it in his three years at Bayern.
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© Photograph: Christian Kaspar-Bartke/Bundesliga/Bundesliga Collection/Getty Images
© Photograph: Christian Kaspar-Bartke/Bundesliga/Bundesliga Collection/Getty Images
© Photograph: Christian Kaspar-Bartke/Bundesliga/Bundesliga Collection/Getty Images
Farrah thinks the aroma is calming and culturally important. Rasheeda says it’s nauseating and spoils the vibe. Who should stop kicking up a stink?
• Find out how to get a disagreement settled or become a juror
The smell is intense, persistent and makes me nauseous. If she knows I hate it, she should stop
I open windows and don’t burn it when Rasheeda’s home. Stopping entirely isn’t a compromise
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© Illustration: Igor Bastidas/The Guardian
© Illustration: Igor Bastidas/The Guardian
© Illustration: Igor Bastidas/The Guardian
Shearing off extraneous matter is how the featherless chicken was hatched. But ditching field events is too much plucking
You don’t hear much about the featherless chicken any more, which on reflection is probably for the best. The idea was simple enough: for poultry-rearing purposes feathers are a nuisance, bearing significant costs in labour and industrial plant, so by breeding genetically modified feather-free chickens you could save the industry billions. Just imagine if you could also convince the chicken to eat sage and onion stuffing. Perhaps even baste itself in lemon butter at regular intervals.
Alas, when it was unveiled in 2002 by scientists at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the featherless chicken failed to take flight for one simple reason: it looked freaky as hell. It turned out that the feather layer, while gastronomically extrinsic, provided vastly underrated context. Above all, people did not want to see their Sunday dinner walking around in front of them. “It’s a normal chicken,” pleaded the geneticist Avigdor Cahaner, “except for the fact it has no feathers.”
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© Photograph: NurPhoto/Getty Images
© Photograph: NurPhoto/Getty Images
© Photograph: NurPhoto/Getty Images
Kidnappings, terrorists, blackmail: this globetrotting political thriller is a rollicking, propulsive yarn … and its take on female leaders is deeply refreshing
You know how it is. One moment you’re on a romantic walk in the woods with your saintly, supportive husband as he convinces you to stand for election as prime minister, the next you are that prime minister (with the shorter but still flattering haircut to prove it). You’re knee-deep in a cancer drug supply crisis and about to meet with the French president who alone can solve your problem, when news arrives that your saintly, supportive husband – who is, of course, a doctor with Doctors Without Borders – and his team have been abducted by unknown terrorists in French Guiana. What is a Suranne Jones with a Netflix budget behind her to do?
That is the set-up from which five punchy hours – Hostage fully swerves the curse of streamer-bloat – of great, globetrotting fun proceeds. Jones is the no-nonsense (in a good way, not a Thatcher way) politician-turned-PM Abigail Dalton; Julie Delpy is the icy president and master strategist Vivienne Toussaint; and Ashley Thomas is Dr Alex Anderson, Dalton’s blameless and soon deeply traumatised husband. Before news of the kidnappings arrives, Dalton is hoping to cut a deal with Toussaint that will involve the UK taking in a boatful of Ebola-ravaged refugees that were refused entry at Calais in return for France giving the UK a large amount of lifesaving medicine. Deux political crises averted with une stone, you see. Then the terrorists step in and demand as their ransom Dalton’s resignation by 1pm the next day.
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© Photograph: Des Willie/PA
© Photograph: Des Willie/PA
© Photograph: Des Willie/PA
USA center was ‘the kid in the pink scrum cap’ then soared with a winning blend of speed, power and body positivity
One Saturday in September 2014, the women’s rugby team from Quinnipiac University in Connecticut travelled to Norwich, Vermont. On the home team, a powerful 18-year-old prop scored three tries in a convincing win.
Quinnipiac coach Becky Carlson turned to her assistant. “Oh man,” she remembered saying. “Who’s the kid in the pink scrum cap? I’d give my right arm to have her.
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© Photograph: Andrew Kelly/Reuters
© Photograph: Andrew Kelly/Reuters
© Photograph: Andrew Kelly/Reuters
Host of TV show Caught in Providence billed his courtroom as a place ‘where people and cases are met with kindness’
Frank Caprio, a retired municipal judge in Rhode Island who found online fame for his compassionate nature as host of the reality courtroom series Caught in Providence, has died aged 88.
Caprio’s official social media accounts said that he “passed away peacefully” after “a long and courageous battle with pancreatic cancer”.
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© Photograph: Michelle R Smith/AP
© Photograph: Michelle R Smith/AP
© Photograph: Michelle R Smith/AP
In Glass Mountain, Michael Lundgren captures remote American landscapes with a haunting stillness, revealing the hidden rhythms and enthralling mystery of the natural world
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© Photograph: Michael Lundgren
© Photograph: Michael Lundgren
© Photograph: Michael Lundgren
A sculptor and his unlikely soulmate navigate the political turmoil of the 20th century in a prize-winning blockbuster
In a remote monastery perched perilously on top of a crag in Piedmont, Italy, an old man lies dying. Thirty-two monks stand vigil at the deathbed; “Mimo” Vitaliani has lived among them for 40 years, yet few of them know exactly why. Nor did Vitaliani come alone, but with a mysterious statue that is kept under lock and key in the depths of the Sacra di San Michele, a pietà depicting the Virgin Mary mourning over the body of Christ, whose faces must not be seen. And all the while, the abbot tiptoes around the dying man, waiting for a word. These and others are the mysteries French writer Jean-Baptiste Andrea’s prize-winning fourth novel sets out to solve, mapped on to the course of an extraordinary century in the history of a resilient, self-sabotaging and remarkable nation.
Born in France to Italian parents in 1904, at the dawn of a new world order, Mimo is destined never quite to fit (nor, incidentally, ever to grow taller than 4ft 6in). His father was a stone carver who had hubris enough to christen the boy Michelangelo before getting himself conscripted and blown to bits; Mimo refuses the name, and yet finds himself taking up the art all the same.
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© Photograph: Karl Allen Lugmayer/Alamy
© Photograph: Karl Allen Lugmayer/Alamy
© Photograph: Karl Allen Lugmayer/Alamy
I’ve met wonderful people here who make me feel that I belong – but there are now many who see asylum seekers as an easy political target
Hardly a day goes by without a new insult being hurled in the faces of asylum seekers and refugees. We’re scroungers, rapists, fighting-age men who shouldn’t have left our home countries. Sometimes we’re simply “illegals”, the most dehumanising term of all. When did it become a crime to run for your life?
The people levelling these accusations are superb at making themselves heard. Mud sticks – and most of us are too scared to try to set the record straight. I don’t know how many of our accusers have sat down with us, human to human, and listened to our stories. Here’s mine.
As told to Diane Taylor
Ayman Alhussein is a Syrian film-maker based in London
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© Photograph: Hasan Belal/Anadolu/Getty Images
© Photograph: Hasan Belal/Anadolu/Getty Images
© Photograph: Hasan Belal/Anadolu/Getty Images
Start with Andy Goldsworthy’s earthy installations at the Royal Scottish Academy, then head outdoors to discover more of his work, alongside pieces by Barbara Hepworth, Antony Gormley and Charles Jencks
A distinct farmyard smell lingers near the muddy Sheep Paintings. People walk slowly between two dense hedges of windfallen oak branches, or stand silently in a fragile cage of bulrush stems with light seeping through the mossy skylight overhead. I’m visiting the largest ever indoor exhibition of work by Andy Goldsworthy, one of Britain’s most influential nature artists. His recent installations have a visceral sense of rural landscape: hare’s blood on paper, sheep shit on canvas, rusty barbed wire, stained wool, cracked clay.
The show is a sensory celebration of earth – its textures and temperatures, colours, character. The seasons cycle through an ongoing multidecade series of photos featuring the same fallen elm. There are leaf patterns and delicate woven branches, crusts of snow, lines of summer foxglove flowers or autumn rosehips. Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years is a National Galleries of Scotland (NGS) exhibition in the neoclassical Royal Scottish Academy building.
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© Photograph: Stuart Armitt
© Photograph: Stuart Armitt
© Photograph: Stuart Armitt
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