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‘I almost always play it in hiding, alone’: can anyone get into free jazz, history’s most maligned music?

‘I almost always play it in hiding, alone’: can anyone get into free jazz, history’s most maligned music?

Even though he’s partial to hideous noise, free jazz is mostly unknown to the Guardian’s pop critic. A new guidebook from Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore may change his mind In the 1980s, Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore asked his friend, the writer Byron Coley , to furnish him with a selection of jazz tapes to listen to on tour. Moore had experienced New York’s fabled avant-garde jazz loft scene first-hand in the late 1970s but “wasn’t so clued in”, he says. “Perhaps I was too young and too preoccupied by the flurry of activity in punk and no wave.” Now, he was keen to learn more. The tapes, “of Coltrane, Mingus, Dolphy, Sun Ra, Monk et al”, led him by degrees to free jazz: the style of jazz unmoored from standard rhythms and phrasings, resulting in arguably the most challenging and far-out music one can listen to. “A music both liberated and yet wholly indebted to the learned techniques of its tradition” is how Moore enthusiastically describes it. “In some ways, it’s similar to noise and art rock, where the freedom to experiment with open form comes from a scholarship of the music’s historical lineage … truly a soul music, both political and spiritual.” Continue reading...

Iga Swiatek: ‘I didn’t want to give any points for free – it’s a Wimbledon final and I wanted to win’

Iga Swiatek: ‘I didn’t want to give any points for free – it’s a Wimbledon final and I wanted to win’

SW19 champion baffled by post-match suggestions she should have let Amanda Anisimova win one game in grand slam final as she turns focus to Australian Open in 2026 In the coming months, if and when her schedule allows, Iga Swiatek will make a pilgrimage to London and the All England Club, the scene of her biggest and, she admits, most surprising triumph. In July, the 24-year-old won her first Wimbledon title and sixth grand slam title in all, crushing a hapless Amanda Anisimova 6-0, 6-0 in the final. It was the undoubted highlight of an up-and-down year for the Pole, who struggled on her best surface of clay but who will end 2025 ranked No 2, her fourth year in a row finishing inside the world’s top two. Continue reading...

HTRK: String of Hearts (Songs of HTRK) review – friends from Liars to Kali Malone rework their noisy gems

HTRK: String of Hearts (Songs of HTRK) review – friends from Liars to Kali Malone rework their noisy gems

(Ghostly International) Sharon Van Etten, Stephen O’Malley, Perila and more transform the duo’s gloomy, sensual songs on an album of covers and remixes HTRK have been making their gloomy, sensual brand of music, at the intersection of electronic pop and noise rock, for 22 years. To mark the milestone comes String of Hearts, a collection of covers and remixes featuring an all-star cast of friends and collaborators, from next-gen underground favourites like Coby Sey to fellow old-school experimentalists Liars. This brilliant, genre-agnostic record allows you to trace the breadth of the Melbourne band’s shapeshifting sound, echoes of which can now be found all over underground and commercial music, without leaning too hard on nostalgia. The record spans HTRK’s early hits right up to their most recent album Rhinestones , a period in which they’ve shifted from a darker, industrial palette to warmer territory. Not that you’d be able to tell here: instrumentals are reshaped by Loraine James’s IDM-style glitches and Zebrablood’s atmospheric breaks, while Jonnine Standish’s disaffected vocals are transformed into desperate alien wails by Liars. Continue reading...

Jury trials are flawed and unwieldy – but vital for justice being seen to be done | Gaby Hinsliff

Jury trials are flawed and unwieldy – but vital for justice being seen to be done | Gaby Hinsliff

The independence of UK courts and public confidence in the legal system could be the victims of David Lammy’s plan for justice on the cheap Simon Jenkins: David Lammy is right to slash the use of juries – it’s an open-and-shut case For the sake of British justice, something has to give. Everyone knows that the courts are in crisis, that we can’t go on like this. Traumatised victims can’t keep being told that the earliest available date for a trial is 2029 , so they’re either going to have to live with it hanging over them for another four years or drop out. (And nor can defendants put their lives endlessly on hold, worrying that witnesses’ memories will only fade with time.) Something obviously needs to change. But the idea that the only solution is to scrap jury trials in all but the most serious cases of rape, murder and other offences with sentences longer than five years – as a leaked letter from the justice secretary, David Lammy, suggests – should ring alarm bells nonetheless. Anyone who has sat in a courtroom for long enough, never mind on a jury, will know that it isn’t exactly 12 Angry Men out there. Members of the public obliged to dispense amateur justice have the same flaws, limitations and tendency to fall asleep in the boring bits – or, as on one memorable occasion at the Old Bailey, repeatedly ask if the hot witness is single – as the rest of us, and unlike judges they aren’t obliged to give their reasons for sometimes baffling decisions. Juries are notoriously resistant to convicting in all but the most straightforward rape trials, and expert doubts raised over Lucy Letby’s murder conviction make a strong case for removing them from cases with very complex medical evidence. All that said, however, they’re absolutely vital to justice being seen to be done. Continue reading...

David Lammy is right to slash the use of juries – it’s an open-and-shut case | Simon Jenkins

David Lammy is right to slash the use of juries – it’s an open-and-shut case | Simon Jenkins

Barristers and criminals may not like the idea, but it’s key to reforming Britain’s antiquated and overloaded justice system Gaby Hinsliff: Jury trials are flawed and unwieldy – but vital for justice being seen to be done Juries are an archaic and inefficient feature of Britain’s collapsing justice system. They survive only in some English-speaking countries as quaint relics of medieval jurisprudence. They deserve dispatch to the world of ducking, flogging, drawing and quartering. As it is, criminal courts have built up a hopeless backlog in England and Wales of almost 80,000 cases, with some hearings postponed to 2029. A surge in rape cases has led to a two-year delay, with twice the number of complainants withdrawing as five years ago. Britain’s prison population threatens to break the 100,000 barrier, or twice its size in the 1990s. These are not just convicts. A fifth of cells contain remand prisoners spending months awaiting trial. This is a parody of justice. Continue reading...

Lachenmann: The String Quartets review – Quatuor Diotima draw you into his strange and compelling soundworld

Lachenmann: The String Quartets review – Quatuor Diotima draw you into his strange and compelling soundworld

Quatuor Diotima (Pentatone) The instruments mutter and shriek, dissolving the line between noise and music on this authoritative and fascinating disc Helmut Lachenmann is 90 this week, but the event has gone largely unmarked in the UK, where his music remains little understood and rarely performed . Elsewhere in Europe he is recognised as one of the important and influential composers of our time, whose music has opened up a wholly new sound world with its forensic exploration of the way instruments are played and the further possibilities they might offer. At the heart of that exploration has been Lachenmann’s three string quartets – Gran Torso, composed in 1971-72 and revised in 1988, Reigen Seliger Geister (Round of Blessed Spirits, 1989), and Grido (Cry, 2002) – which exploit every part of the string instruments, from scrolls to tailpieces, for their sound possibilities. They mutter and shriek, slide and scrape, dissolving any distinction between what is traditionally noise and what music, yet always following formal schemes that are very much musical. Continue reading...