(Blue Note)
The US saxophonist pulls back the vocals of his last record to present a new ensemble and all-original repertoire, resulting in an ideal balance of ingenuity and rapport

Joshua Redman has been such a brilliant saxophone improviser for more than three decades that his unerring flawlessness at a spontaneous art almost becomes a tic. But his playful delight in music-making, a quality that swept from his eponymous debut release in 1993, has never faded. Redman’s 2023 first album for Blue Note was the covers-packed Where Are We, his first predominantly vocal venture, featuring the frail, borderline-tearful voice of young New Orleans-based singer Gabrielle Cavassa, herself a new Blue Note signing.

Perhaps to deflect this from looking like a label-steered career reset, Redman has cannily entitled its successor Words Fall Short, and included only one Cavassa vocal. Even more smartly, he has introduced a terrific new young road band on an all-original repertoire, and added acclaimed Chilean saxophonist Melissa Aldana and 19-year-old west coast trumpet phenomenon Skylar Tang as guests. The result is an album that feels more like an ideal balance of Redman’s own ingenuity and his ensemble rapport.

The much-loved painter, designer of stamps and creator of anti-war posters shares tips from a 90-year career

You know the art of David Gentleman even if you don’t know you know it. Anyone who’s passed through London’s Charing Cross tube station has seen his life-filled black-and-white mural of medieval people, enlarged from his woodcuts, digging, hammering, chiselling to construct the Eleanor Cross that once stood nearby. His graphic art has graced everything from stamps to book covers to Stop the War posters in a career spanning seven decades. He says he’s been making art for 90 years, since he was five.

His parents were also artists, and in his latest book he reproduces a Shell poster by his father to show he follows in a modern British tradition of well-drawn, well-observed popular art. Perhaps it is because he learned from his parents as naturally as learning to speak – “Seeing them drawing tempted me to draw” – that Gentleman dislikes pedagogy. He’s proud that he never had to teach for a living, always selling his art. So his guide to the creative life, Lessons for Young Artists, is anything but a how-to manual or didactic textbook.

Ahead of her hotly anticipated new film Materialists, dive into Celine Song’s tremendous, heartbreaking tour de force – or try the new Hunger Games musical … the best in the franchise yet

With Celine Song’s new film Materialists on the brink of release, now is the perfect time to revisit the film that put her on the map. Past Lives is an extraordinary piece of work about a woman forced to re-examine her entire sense of self when an old love reappears, long after she has moved on. It’s a film that aches with longing. It’s knotty with the mess of cultural identity. All three of its leads do tremendous, heartbreaking work, but Greta Lee deserved an Oscar for her outstanding central performance. That she didn’t even receive a nomination is utterly baffling. Nevertheless, consider this an update to Brief Encounter, only with a less infuriatingly paternalistic ending.
Sunday 29 June, 10pm, BBC Two

After singing with everyone from Tina Turner to the Small Faces, she takes your questions on her Glastonbury plans, life as an Ikette and getting a leg up from Mick Jagger

You’ve played with a lot of incredible artists – Tina Turner, the Small Faces, Nick Drake, Dr John, George Harrison, Peter Gabriel, Roger Waters, the KLF, Ocean Colour Scene and so many more. If you could collaborate with absolutely anyone, who would it be? Harrison1986
I love to collaborate – basically, I like collaborating with people who want to collaborate with me. I’ve just worked with Paul Weller and Cast, but a lot of people I’d love to have worked with are no longer with us. Top of my list on a production level would be Quincy Jones . Vocally, how about something with Prince?! And I love Mavis Staples , who’s still with us; I’ve met her. It would be great to do something with Mavis.

Of all the artist s you’ve collaborated with, who stands head and shoulders above the rest? Aubrey26
Tina Turner. Simply the best – and what a joy to have her start a career I never planned on. I was in a very abusive teenage marriage. I said a prayer to ask God to take me out of that situation and a couple of hours later I was in Tina’s living room, singing Dancing in the Street. I’d gone there to help some other ladies – Gloria Scott and Maxine Smith – get the gig, but another girl didn’t show up for the audition. Maxine remembered I used to sing in church and the rest is history. My whole career is all about the unexpected. It think it has a lot to do with manifesting dreams, although being called a “legend” doesn’t pay the bills.

After a wild new player is forced to join the game without consent, the action gets even more operatic and bloodthirsty. But if you can get on board with the twists – and that’s a big if – you will not believe what happens in the last minute

The two main talking points of the third and final season of Squid Game are both massive spoilers. This means that I won’t be able to mention the final minute of the whole thing, which contains a moment so WTF and genuinely surprising that I bet my editor a serious amount of money she wouldn’t be able to guess what happens. She couldn’t, thankfully, but such reckless gambling is the sort of behaviour that would land me in Squid Game in the first place, so it just shows that nobody here has learned any lessons from it whatsoever.

Nor should I talk about another key development, though in this case, it becomes so central that it needs to be mentioned somehow. So, vaguely speaking, a new player is forced to enter the games, without being capable of giving their consent, and becomes the focus of later episodes. It is odd to criticise Squid Game for not being credible, given that it is a hit show about an underground tournament in which children’s games are played until many or most of the participants die, but introducing this new player is completely out there, even by the standards of “hide-and-seek … but with knives?”

A revelatory cultural history of our relationship with native wildlife, from newts doing handstands to Mrs Tiggy-Winkle

When newts go a-wooing, sometime in the spring, their signature move is the handstand. Girl newts cluster round to watch, while the boy newts flip on to their creepily human hands and shake their tails in the air. The waggiest newt is the winner, although the actual act of love is a strictly no-contact sport. The male deposits a packet of sperm on an underwater leaf for the female to collect and insert into her own reproductive tract. The whole business is best thought of, says Karen R Jones, as a “sexually charged game of pass-the-parcel”.

This kind of anthropomorphising often strikes naturalists as unscientific or even downright distasteful. But Jones is an environmental historian and her methodology allows, indeed impels, her to start from the principle that Britain’s human and animal populations are culturally entwined. Consequently, we cannot “see” a fox, hedgehog or newt without bringing to it a rich stew of presumptions and fantasy, drawn from childhood picturebooks, out-of-date encyclopedias and, in my case, the 1970s TV classic Tales of the Riverbank, in which small critters say funny things in the West Country burr of .

A documentary about the devastating events of 20 years ago will really stick in your mind, while Neil Gaiman’s fantasy series wraps up for good

There has been no shortage of documentaries and dramas commemorating the 20th anniversary of the awful events around the 7/7 bombings in 2005. So while they were clearly a pivotal moment in British history, it’s a challenge to find a point of difference. Liza Williams’s series benefits from taking a considered view of how the attacks felt to British Muslims and also hears from former PM Tony Blair and Eliza Manningham-Buller, director general of MI5 at the time of the attacks. The big-picture insights are fascinating, but it’s the tiny details – such as the first responder who, out of respect, resolved to move victims’ bodies “as if they were asleep” – that really stick in the mind.
Netflix, from Tuesday 1 July

The presenter’s Kiwi Adventure continues as bad weather takes its toll. Plus: The Great Sex Experiment plunges into a pool party. Here’s what to watch this evening

9pm, ITV1
“I think I might have found my paradise,” says Noel Edmonds, gazing out across the majestic New Zealand landscape as this barmy series continues. In truth, this is an episode that pushes Noel’s Zen calmness to the limit. Rain has kept visitors away from the bar-restaurant and a sharp frost could destroy the vineyard. It’s a good job he has his voluminous collection of motivational catchphrases (“When it rains, look for the rainbows”) to make sense of it all. Phil Harrison

Exclusive: The Irish rap trio have recently faced censure and a court case, but have also had support for their pro-Palestine stance. Ahead of a Glastonbury appearance deemed ‘inappropriate’ by Keir Starmer, they argue the backlash against them is a deliberate distraction

In April, the Irish-language rap trio Kneecap performed two sets at Coachella, the California music festival attended by 250,000 people. As is commonplace at the group’s shows, Kneecap displayed a message stating: “Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people,” and the words “Fuck Israel. Free Palestine”. Mo Chara, one of the group’s members, told the audience: “The Palestinians have nowhere to go. It’s their fucking home and they’re bombing them from the skies. If you’re not calling it a genocide, what the fuck are you calling it?”

Within a week, Kneecap’s US booking agent had dropped them, Fox News had likened the statements to “ Nazi Germany ”, a handful of summer shows had been cancelled, and two videos from 2023 and 2024 had resurfaced of the group on stage saying: “The only good Tory is a dead Tory,” and “Up Hezbollah, up Hamas”. The former statement attracted criticism from the families of murdered MPs Jo Cox and David Amess, leading the band to apologise – “we never intended to cause you hurt” – and to reject “any suggestion that we would seek to incite violence against any MP or individual”. While saying “we do not, and have never, supported Hamas or Hezbollah”, they also described the recirculation of the videos as a “smear campaign” against them, with the footage “deliberately taken out of all context”.