Cultural highlights 2025: Brooding, rioting and a little self promotion

Nigel Jarrett

Let’s hear it for jazz. That’s not so much routine championing as an exasperated clarion call. I was pleasurably ensnared by this music when I was 14 and decades later remain a besotted listener.

Why, though, does it reach every corner of the world while playing mostly to audiences whose numbers resemble the survivors of a decimating plague? We’ll never know.

What we do know is that Britain boasts some of the world’s best jazz musicians. A few of them came together to record an unusual homage to Duke Ellington, who gave his final concert in 1973 at the improbable location of the Congress Theatre, Eastbourne. Bassist Arnie Somogyi, pianist Mark Edwards and friends perform a re-charge on the album The Ellington Piano Project (Rubicon Jazz RJZ 1004), taking that 52-year-old seaside gig as an event to inspire the re-assertion of what Ellington meant to jazz as standard-bearing composer, band-leader, and cultural icon. Edwards plays on the very piano Ellington used at the concert. The Ellingtonian echoes are multi-hued.

The best of anything in twelve months mostly passes us by, because we have neither the time nor the opportunity to seek it out. There’s too much of it anyway.

Of the Guardian’s top 50 films of 2025, I, as mad about film as I am about jazz, saw but one – The Brutalist, directed by Brady Corbet and starring Adrien Brody as a misunderstood modernist architect and Holocaust-survivor.

Mr Burton, directed by Marc Evans, with Toby Jones as Richard Burton’s mentor-guardian Philip Burton and Harry Lawtey as the actor, was not a Guardian choice.

We like films, books, theatre, and music etc., for different reasons. Only after a while did I appreciate how well Lawtey was ventriloquising the brooding Burton.

Let’s hear it for live theatre

While attending a matinée performance at the Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff, of To Kill A Mocking Bird, the stage play by Aaron Sorkin adapted from Harper Lee’s book, it was not so much the sharp direction of Bartlett Sher that impressed – the industrial scene-shifting was a distraction – as the sight of a full house. Let’s hear it for live theatre, too.

There may have been better books published in 2025 than Crooked Cross, by Sally Carson, but few more topical or newly-prescient.

The prescience, of course, was from a resurrected source: Surrey-born Carson’s book was written in 1934 and charts the rise of Nazism as seen from the viewpoints of an unprepossessing family.

It was re-published this year by the re-publisher par excellence, Persephone Books. Bath-based Persephone is also a bookshop; it specialises in reprinting forgotten women writers, mainly from the middle of the 20th-century.

On TV, Sally Wainwright’s Riot Women (BBC) transcended an unlikely plot about a menopausal rock band to explore themes of sexual abuse, gratuitous violence, paternity, motherhood, and the rupture and repair of relationships.

It was riotous and it was about women.

The spear side fared poorly, even those of its unlovely tribe who didn’t actually appear.

It was a feel-bad story that finally felt good. More to come, surely.

Inspired by Anthony Burgess, who reputedly reviewed at least one of his own books under a pseudonym, I’m recommending my own Never Lost for Words: Selected Essays (Cockatrice Books), not for its merits or otherwise (‘a work of unparalleled genius’, it says here) but to encourage the reading and writing of essays in book form as an antidote to thrillers than don’t thrill, kids’ fiction written by ‘celebrities’, and navel-gazing poetry written by inveterately navel-gazing poets.