(ECM)
Backed by pianist Marcin Wasilewski’s group, the US sax elder plays freely around a song-rooted approach, resulting in sparkling, spontaneous exchanges

Joe Lovano, that giant American elder of jazz reeds-playing, nowadays seems – rather like the equally eminent saxophone master Charles Lloyd – to be simmering all his decades of timeless tunes and exquisite passing phrases down to essences. The 72-year-old Ohio-born sax star and occasional drummer’s partners here are Polish pianist Marcin Wasilewski’s collectively freethinking trio – Homage’s shape was formed on extensive tours with them, and a week in 2023 at New York’s Village Vanguard club that acted as an impromptu rehearsal.

Song-rooted American jazz-making and give-and-go European free-jazz have become intertwined within Lovano’s later-life soundworld. Wasilewski’s compatriot Zbigniew Seifert’s Love in the Garden is reworked as a rapturous tenor-sax ballad with every soft horn outbreath embraced in silvery keyboard streams. Lovano’s Golden Horn evokes the iconic four-note hook of John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme before his tenor sax eases in on hints and fragments, then sweeps into fast linear post-bop. There’s a driving, McCoy Tyneresque solo from Wasilewski and Lovano switches to hand drums, animatedly joining percussionist Michal Miskiewicz – but there’s an exhilarating surprise when the leader whoops back in on the soprano-sax-like Hungarian tárogató.

Will Gaitok go rogue? Might there be an incest-related shooting? Could primates do it? Here’s a rundown of the top rumours around the last episode’s looming death (or deaths)

It all began with a dead body, before the HBO hit flashed back to a week earlier. Now satirical spa drama The White Lotus is set to solve all its mysteries in the third season finale, titled Amor Fati (which translate as “love of fate”, Latin fans).

The Thailand-set series opened with Zion’s meditation session being interrupted by gunfire. As the panicking student waded through the resort’s ponds to look for his mother, Belinda, an unidentified corpse floated past him face-down. Who was it? Who pulled the trigger? And will anyone squat over a suitcase?

The Alex Rider author on being put off Dickens for a decade, why he reads poetry in the mornings, and how reading Sherlock Holmes made him want to be a crime writer

My earliest reading memory
I started with a comic: Valiant. Hardly great literature – but it provided escapism from my prep school. The tales of Kelly’s Eye and the Steel Claw enthralled me and I still dream of them now.

My favourite book growing up
I was always a fan of Peter O’Donnell’s Modesty Blaise. She was a sort of female James Bond, a criminal turned government agent. My parents used to read each new book as it came out and then hand it on to me. It was one of the few things that brought us together as a family.

The marmalade-loving bear returns to his homeland to hunt for his missing aunt, and Viola Davis turns action hero – and has to single-handedly save the free world

A South American immigrant in London has to return to home. But this isn’t a Reform political broadcast, and the marmalade-addicted bear in question has a shiny new British passport. Aunt Lucy has gone missing from her Home for Retired Bears in the Peruvian rainforest, so Paddington and the Browns (with Emily Mortimer taking over as Mrs Brown) fly off to find her. Less a fish-out-of-water comedy than a fish-back-in-water quest, Dougal Wilson’s film gives Paddington a few slapstick pratfalls but it’s more of a spoof Indiana Jones tale, revolving round the myth of El Dorado, with Antonio Banderas as a boat captain and Olivia Colman as a nun joining the fun.
Tuesday 8 April, Netflix

Its lab buildings have a rusticated air while its sleek, paper-thin louvre windows are reminiscent of a luxury ocean-liner. More importantly, the people of Arklow in Ireland can finally go swimming without fear of floaters

It is not often that the arts section of a newspaper finds itself concerned with the aesthetic merits of a sewage works. But then there are few facilities designed with the finesse of the new €139m (£117m) wastewater treatment plant in Arklow, which stands like a pair of minty green pagodas on the edge of the Irish Sea. Nor are there many architectural firms who have thought so deeply about the poetics of effluent as Clancy Moore .

“There’s a wonderful passage in Ulysses,” says practice co-founder, Andrew Clancy, summoning James Joyce as we tiptoe along a metal gantry above a gigantic vat of bubbling brown sludge. “The narrator turns on the tap to fill a kettle, sparking a lengthy rumination on where the water comes from, how it flows from reservoirs, through aqueducts and pipes, describing each step in minute detail, from the volume of the tanks to the dimensions and cost of the plumbing.”

The director of One to One: John & Yoko reveals how he was given access to a trove of intimate and family archive material that changes how we see the star couple

People are usually at their most interesting when they are in flux – uncertain of the way forward, of what life they ought to build. That was the case with John Lennon and Yoko Ono when they arrived in New York in 1971. They were both fleeing England – the recriminations around the Beatles breakup; the terrible misogyny and racism levelled at Ono – but also running towards the optimism and creative excitement of the New York art scene.

This is the period I have tried to recreate in my film One to One: John & Yoko – using a plethora of previously unheard phone recordings, home movies and archive. It’s an unconventional film in many ways, pitching the viewer headfirst into the life, politics and music of the time without the usual music documentary guardrails. At its heart is the One to One concert that the couple gave at Madison Square Garden in the summer of 1972 – a concert that turned out to be Lennon’s only full-length concert after leaving the Beatles.

From Anna Wintour’s table manners to Oscar party hijinks, the former editor of Vanity Fair tells all

There are lines in When the Going Was Good, Graydon Carter’s memoir of his swashbuckling career as an editor during the heyday of magazines, that will make any journalist laugh (bitterly) out loud. “There was a bar at the end of each corridor,” writes Carter of his first job at Time magazine in the mid-1970s, where expense accounts were huge, oversight relaxed and, “I went five years without ever turning on my oven”. At Vanity Fair, where Carter took over the editorship in 1992, “the budget had no ceiling. I could send anybody anywhere for as long as I wanted.” For a commission on the collapse of Lloyd’s of London, one Vanity Fair hack ran up expenses of $180,000 – and the piece didn’t run.

These are the details most readers will come for and Carter, who at 75 remains a symbol of magazine glamour and excess – a fact somehow vested in the whimsy and extravagance of his comic-book hair – doesn’t short-change us. His years at Vanity Fair entailed as much sucking up to the worlds of Hollywood and fashion as it did publishing great journalism, and this book reminds us that, like all hacks, he is a gossip at heart; casting an eye back on his life, he can’t help but dish the dirt.

(Asylum Records)
After a couple of earthy, rootsy albums, Sheeran emphatically returns to pop with another of his indelible hooks, surrounded by Middle Eastern instrumentation

Ed Sheeran’s new single arrives at an interesting point in his career. His last albums, 2023’s Subtract and Autumn Variations, felt not unlike a riff on Taylor Swift’s pandemic-era Folklore and Evermore: two albums released in the same year, produced by the National’s Aaron Dessner, a little woodier and more understated in tone than usual. Subtract in particular enjoyed the kind of critical acclaim that Sheeran’s work seldom attracts. They were also the first Sheeran albums not to yield a billion-streaming track: his commercial zenith, 2017’s Divide, contained five, among them Shape of You, one of only two songs in history have to topped 4bn streams on Spotify.

Maybe a muted commercial response was part of the plan (or rather, a relatively muted commercial response by Sheeran’s standards: Subtract still went to No 1 in 13 countries). Having spent a decade voraciously pursuing vast success – and shifting 200m albums in the process – perhaps Sheeran had decided the moment was right to deliberately pull back, to do precisely what he wanted regardless of the sales figures.

The UK indie-rockers won two Grammys for their debut album. Ahead of their second, they explain how they protected one another amid sudden fame – and how queer love and Davina McCall inspired them

Wet Leg’s Rhian Teasdale looks like a pop star from a different era. She walks into a bar in east London wearing a giant, floor-length pale-pink padded coat. She has bleached eyebrows, dip-dyed hair, drawn-on freckles and jewels stuck to her nails and teeth. For a moment, Top of the Pops could be on primetime TV and a copy of Smash Hits in my bag. But then Wet Leg’s story always did feel anachronistic. In 2021, they managed what indie bands don’t often manage any more and became an overnight success. That June, they released their first single, Chaise Longue, a deadpan, perfectly simple and cheerfully daft megahit; they conquered the US and Japan, toured arenas and topped the album charts with their scathing, self-titled debut, scoring two Brit awards and two Grammys.

They were still touring that album last summer, supporting Foo Fighters in stadiums. But eventually they found time to make a new one. Trailed by the punchy, indie-sleazy Catch These Fists, Moisturizer otherwise largely ditches their trademark death-stare sarcasm in favour of stompy but soppy love songs. Teasdale lives in London and we are meeting in person, but Hester Chambers, the band’s co-founder and lead guitarist, lives on the Isle of Wight, where Wet Leg met and formed. (Having written their debut alone, this time, they co-wrote with drummer Henry Holmes, guitarist Joshua Mobaraki and bassist Ellis Durand.) Tracking Chambers down will prove a trickier task, but more on that later.