''Mediums for change'': Shaping up to be an event release here's the extraordinarily powerful beautifully-arranged, incendiary latest and sheer oratory from the May Heavenly Sweetness release The Rich Are Only Defeated When Running For Their Lives by Anthony Joseph. Recorded in August 2020, with poet-vocalist-leader Joseph are: on bass Andrew John; guitar Thibaut Remy; drums Rod Youngs; keys Florian Pellissier; alto and bari saxophones Jason Yarde; on tenor Shabaka Hutchings and Colin Webster; percussion Crispin Robinson. A must listen. Check when Shabaka kicks in from exploratory beginnings after 3 mins 31 secs and when the track later gains a whole lot more Fahrenheit. There's some outrageously compelling playing here.

'Calling England Home' the gorgeous lead-off is already streaming, a track that rides on an aching introductory instrumental vamp that leads into a brooding Anthony Joseph spoken word poetic testament of a radical vision, a scathing, oblique lament straddling despair at the absence of being accepted to truly belong and the unique perspective of an outsider from the Caribbean coming to London both tracking back to the late-1940s and more recently to the end of the 1980s. The album title is drawn from C. L. R. James' 1938 book The Black Jacobins. Anthony Joseph, top. Link