FEATURE: Spotlight: Yazz Ahmed — Music Musings & Such

FEATURE:

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: Alex Bex

Yazz Ahmed

__________

ONE of the good things…

about the Spotlight feature is getting to feature a range of artists. I am quite new to Yazz Ahmed. I am very keen to explore the wonderful music of a musician, composer and artist who I feel should be getting more exposure on mainstream radio. This British-Bahraini trumpet player aims to blur the lines between Jazz and Electronic sound design. I am going to start out with an interview from 15 Questions. Although I am not including all of the questions and responses, there were a few that caught my eye:

“Name: Yazz Ahmed
Occupation: Trumpeter, flugelhornist, composer, improviser
Nationality: British-Bahraini
Current release: Yazz Ahmed's new album A Paradise In The Hold is slated for release on February 24th 2025 via Night Time Stories. The second single off the album, “Into the Night,” is out now. The LP features her longtime band as well as a cast of collaborators, including vocalists Natacha Atlas, and Brigitte Beraha as well as percussionist Corrina Silvester.

Just like you, I grew up in between two cultures and always thought it had a huge impact on almost every aspect of my life. What was this like for you – how, would you say, did your bicultural background affect your views on life, art and music in particular?

I moved from Bahrain at the age of nine to South London with my mum and sisters. It took a long time to adjust to this new culture and I didn’t feel as if I belonged, so much so, I hid my identity for most of my childhood and into my teens.

It wasn’t until a reached my early 20s that I became more aware of my identity and started to embrace my mixed heritage. I became curious about the music I had left behind and began to regret that I had not been taught to speak Arabic. I felt detached. However, once I started to explore Arabic scales and rhythms, fusing them with elements of jazz, I began to feel whole.

One thing I was hungry for was to connect with other female instrumentalists with a Middle Eastern heritage who were embracing jazz. It was difficult enough finding women trumpet players to aspire to, but it seemed that Arabic jazz musicians simply did not exist. This made me feel insecure as to whether it would be possible to make a success of myself.

Art and beautiful artifacts are everywhere in Arabic culture, but being an expressive artist, or a creative musician, is not really considered a respectable career. This meant it was a struggle for my Bahraini family to appreciate the path I had chosen.

On my mother’s side of the family, it was very different. I come from a line of bohemian artists, musicians and dancers, so they were very supportive in allowing me to follow my heart.

A Paradise In The Hold deals with your heritage through music. After finishing the album, what would you say is universal in music – and what may, conversely, be very specific?

You don’t need words to convey your message or to spell out the narrative behind the music. Music has that unique ability to evoke deep emotions, on a primordial level, and this is what I hope to achieve – to be genuine, to compose and perform from the heart and leave the listener free to interpret their experience in their own way. I love listening to songs in a language I’m unfamiliar with, because it lets my imagination paint pictures.

However, on A Paradise In The Hold I do utilise some elements that are very specific to Bahrain. When a Bahraini listener hears certain rhythms, certain instruments or vocal timbres in my music, these will resonate in a very specific way, compared to how a listener from outside the culture will react. There are also Arabic lyrics in this album which to a non-Arabic speaker will be evocative, beautiful sounds, but which do carry an intentional meaning, which again will give listeners from different cultures their own experience.

I do include translations of all the text in the album booklet and in fact on one song, Waiting For The Dawn, we hear both Arabic and English versions of the lyric sung in counterpoint.

What was the starting point for A Paradise In The Hold?

In 2014 I was nominated to apply for a Jazzlines Fellowship in collaboration with Birmingham THSH, funded by the Jerwood Foundation. As part of this process, I had to present a concept for an extended composition to be researched and developed over the course of a year, culminating in a live performance at the CBSO Centre in Birmingham.
My idea was to create a suite, based around the folklore and folk music of Bahrain and happily I was awarded the commission. The first stage was a research trip to Bahrain from which I returned full of inspiration, bringing home books of poetry and songs, histories of Bahraini music and instruments, DVDs of performances and my own notebooks and field recordings.

Paradise In The Hold still has many characteristics of jazz, but it plays with and expands on them. As of today, what does the term jazz mean to you?

There are many sub-genres in jazz and hundreds of individual voices who bring their own stories to this ever-evolving music, perhaps more so than ever. To me, jazz is an ancient oak with deep roots, sprouting hundreds of branches. New shoots emerging all the time.

However, I do feel that some artists have lost touch with the essence of jazz, where it springs from, the history and the human struggle at its heart. But of course, there are those who are fully aware of the legacy and highlight social inequality and make protest through their compositions and improvisation.

Saxophonist, Matana Roberts, for example, is a leading light in amplifying this message through the power of jazz.

One of the instantly notable expansions of your sound are the vocal pieces. Since both the voice and the trumpet are inherently connected to the breath – how do you see and feel the connection between your instrument and your voice?

I do see them going hand in hand.

I actually composed many of the vocal lines by singing to myself and then perfecting the melodies on my trumpet. I hope this made the vocal lines feel natural to the singers who recorded on the album

What kind of vocalists do you personally prefer and what were some of the criteria for whom to include on A Paradise In The Hold?

I appreciate all kinds of singers, from Björk to Fairuz, or from D’Angelo to Donald Fagin. What I like is authenticity, a feeling that the singer is revealing something of themselves.

When planning the recording I knew I needed to find artists with great passion, a deep musical understanding of many styles and a clarity of tone. I had to convey to them that the written vocal parts were integral to the composition. These are not songs in which the band is just accompanying the singer. All the parts are equally important.

I also enjoy working with vocalists who will surprise me with sounds I would never have imagined. Brigitte Beraha and Randolph Matthews proved to be perfect choices in this regard. At the end of “Mermaids’ Tears” for example, you hear them engaging in an improvised duet where Randolph conjures up sub aquatic sounds of the ocean’s swell whilst Brigitte seems to be channelling some long-lost dolphinesque language of the mermaids.

The title track, released as the first single off the album, is astounding, a ten-minute composition unfolding like a fantasy. How did it come together?

I began by processing short fragments of ceremonial sounds from my field recordings of the Pearl Divers and morphed them into an undulating beat which emulates the rise and fall, the breathing of the ocean and the creaking of the boat’s timbers. By repeatedly listening to this groove on loop as an inspiration, I was able to compose the melodies and bass lines which suggested themselves to me.

With all my compositions, I begin by writing down between five and ten short ideas - melodies, chords, patterns, forms – and then sift through these structural cells, choosing the ones I’m drawn to, the ones with potential for development. I sometimes have to write a lot of ‘bad stuff’ to get to the good! I then develop my ideas and often the piece transforms into something very different to what I imagined when started.

With this track, the whole piece is a gradual development from the initial statements with new elements being added throughout. All my ideas come together in the final passage but along the way I sort of break things down and show the listener exactly how the piece is constructed by dissecting the ensemble into its individual parts”.

I am going to move to an interview with Bandcamp. Talking around her extraordinary album, A Paradise in the Hold, I would advise everyone to seek it out. Even if Yazz Ahmed might be reserved more for Jazz stations or independent stations, I can see her being more of a mainstream on more eclectic digital stations like BBC Radio 6 Music. An artist that has created this incredible sound:

“For anyone else, the task of conveying a country’s rich culture through a run of albums would be daunting. For British-Bahraini trumpeter and composer Yazz Ahmed, it’s something that summons more hope than anxiety. “It gives me confidence to carry on,” Ahmed says. “I wouldn’t say I feel any pressure. It just fills me with inspiration. I feel like I’m on the right path.” Ahmed’s fourth album, A Paradise in the Hold, tells stories of her home country Bahrain, drawing for inspiration on wedding poems and the songs of pearl divers.

The record first began taking shape back in 2014, when Ahmed was given a fellowship by Birmingham Town Hall and Symphony to research for her Alhaan Al-Siduri suite. Over the course of her weeklong study, she attended private concerts with Bahraini musicians, pored over academic research by a Norwegian music professor who’d visited the island many years ago, and had a “lovely exchange of music” with a fellow artist serving on the Ministry of Culture, who presented her with one of his own compositions on sheet music.

Two years later, with the support of the British Council and Bahrain’s Ministry of Culture and Antiquities, Ahmed returned to Bahrain and performed the finished piece before a live audience. It was a success, and her bass player Dudley Phillips encouraged her to record it for an album. At the same time, Ahmed’s career was starting to get hectic; she was hard at work crafting two other albums, La Saboteuse and Polyhymnia, simultaneously. “[I was] putting things in my diary, making sure to dedicate one week to one project and another week to another project,” she recalls. With her schedule packed, the suite fell by the wayside until 2020, when she finally got an opening—and then the pandemic struck, bringing everything to a halt yet again.

The delays provided an opportunity for Ahmed to rethink the work. “Before the end of 2020,” she says, “I revisited the compositions and went through all the takes. It gave me inspiration and a clearer idea of how to complete the album. Piece by piece, step by step, I started editing and rearranging the parts, because I had given myself so much time to reflect and forget about what happened. I came back with fresh ears, which gave me opportunities to try out new things.”

A Paradise in the Hold’s biggest highlights are the results of this period. On album opener “She Stands on The Sea Shore,” legendary Egyptian-Belgian singer Natacha Atlas’s intense voice crashes against cymbals like waves on the coast. London-born jazz singer Randolph Matthews (on “Mermaids’ Tears,” “To the Lonely Sea”) and Croatian singer Alba Nacinovich (on “Dancing Barefoot,” “Though my Eyes Go To Sleep, My Heart Does Not Forgive You”), who Ahmed met through a cultural exchange many years ago, are among the other dazzling collaborators who lent their efforts to the record.

The album’s lyrics—which borrow from Ahmed’s daydreams as well as folk songs—showcase her knack for storytelling. On the captivating “Dancing Barefoot,” George Crowley’s piercing bass clarinet and Ralph Wyld’s dissonant prepared vibraphones underscore the taboo themes of which Turkish vocalist Brigitte Beraha sings; in this song’s case, a hesitant bride gets dolled up for her wedding only to run off into the night. Elsewhere, “Though My Eyes Go To Sleep My Heart Does Not Forget You” is a reworking of a traditional folk song about a woman who yearns for her lover—a pearl diver—to return home. As an artist dedicated to changing negative mainstream perceptions of the MENA region, Ahmed gravitates toward the stories from the region that often go untold; the end goal, she says, is “a modern take on Bahraini music, which a lot of people have no idea about”.

I am going to end with a review for the transcendent A Paradise in the Hold. Jazzwise spoke with Yazz Ahmed earlier in the year. Someone who has always wanted to write about the rich tradition of Bahrain, this is such a compelling, spellbinding and evocative album. I do hope that her music gets much more love across multiple stations and media sources. Some of the bigger music websites and papers:

“Over the past 15 years, trumpeter and composer Yazz Ahmed has been using her music to connect with her Bahraini heritage. Finding her melodies in quarter-tone Arabic scales and her grooves in complex polyrhythms, Ahmed’s three albums (2011’s Finding My Way Home, 2017’s La Saboteuse and 2019’s Polyhymnia) have produced a distinct blend of jazz improvisation with the echoes of music from her homeland, providing a sonic trace of her ongoing relationship with a cross-cultural identity.

Yet, throughout the span of this recording career, Ahmed has also been working on another project that delves further into her personal history than ever before. Featuring recordings of her family, reinterpreted Bahraini folk music and high-energy ensemble compositions, her latest album, A Paradise in the Hold, has been more than a decade in the making, with versions reworked and honed during live performances across the globe. Now finally ready for release, it shines a new light on Ahmed’s British-Bahraini jazz fusion to produce some of her most expansive and exciting music to date.

“I left Bahrain in 1992 when I was nine years old to move to London and once I did, I left my culture behind so I could fit into Britain,” Ahmed says over a Zoom call from her Bedfordshire home. “I would keep my identity hidden because having an Arabic Muslim father, I didn’t feel accepted – there were so many negative perspectives of Middle Eastern people and Muslims at the time. It was only when I was older that I started to rediscover my mixed heritage and I felt a deep homesickness and hunger to learn about that culture I abandoned. Ever since, my music has been my way of bridging that gap.”

In 2014, following the acclaimed release of her independent debut Finding My Way Home, Ahmed travelled to Bahrain on a research trip to reconnect with these roots.

“I’ve always wanted to write about the rich tradition of Bahrain, which includes the music sung by the pearl divers, as well as women’s drumming groups that would sing at festivals and celebrations,” she says. “People from other parts of the world often assume that Bahraini women are oppressed but I wanted to shine a light on the strong, incredible women who are forging new creative paths in the country.”

During her trip, Ahmed discovered traditional poems and lyrics used by female drumming groups in local bookshops, as well as listening to her grandfather singing the songs performed at his own wedding and attending a concert of pearl diving music from the pearl divers of Muharraq, her family’s hometown.

“It was a beautiful, entrancing experience,” she says with a smile. “The singers silenced the whole room with their melodies and I found it so inspiring. I recorded the performance on my phone and when I came back home, I began separating sections of their songs into loops that would eventually form the ideas on A Paradise in the Hold.”

“Being a female bandleader and instrumentalist, inclusivity and equality is an issue that has always been close to my heart,” Ahmed explains. “When I was starting out, I had no one to look up to who looked like me and it instantly made me assume that maybe women weren’t good enough to play this music. Now, organisations such as Tomorrow’s Warriors, PRS Foundation and Women in Jazz are making a real difference, working with communities of women to develop their voices, but we still have a way to go. It will always be an issue I will champion in all of my work.”

Ultimately, with her decade-long passion project finally released, Ahmed is carving out a distinct path not only as a woman in jazz, but also as a British-Bahraini musician aiming to express the many facets of her heritage.

“I feel more whole now with my identity, like I can embrace both sides of my culture, since the music has been a healing process,” she says. “It brings me a lot of joy and when I go back to Bahrain the feedback is wonderful too. It’s a real privilege to keep shining a light on this music and to do it through my own lens. All that’s left is for people to listen and to lose themselves in the songs”.

I am going to finish off with a review of A Paradise in the Hold from The Guardian. If anything shared above does not sound like your kind of music or artist then I would say to listen to A Paradise in the Hold. You will connect with and fall under the spell of Yazz Ahmed very quickly. Someone who I was unfamiliar with until recently.

“Since the release of her 2011 debut album, Finding My Way Home, British Bahraini trumpeter Yazz Ahmed has been exploring her heritage through jazz improvisation. Using Arabic quarter-tone scales with guitar, horns and traditional percussion such as the darbuka drum, Ahmed’s music is a fiery blend of instinctive soloing with melodic lyricism. While 2019’s Polyhymnia took inspiration from formidable women such as Saudi Arabian film-maker Haifaa al-Mansour, Ahmed’s fourth album turns towards folk traditions to produce 10 tracks of atmospheric intensity.

Drawing on the polyrhythmic Arab sea-music fijiri and wedding poetry, the album marks the first time Ahmed has collaborated with other singers. On opener She Stands on the Shore, vocalist Natacha Atlas’s warm tenor interweaves seamlessly with Ahmed’s plaintive trumpet melody, swelling over bowed bass to evoke the undulating waves, while Randolph Matthews’ lower register on To the Lonely Sea artfully embodies an eerie sense of hard winds and crashing waves.

Some features are less effective, with the droning bass of Though My Eyes Go to Sleep, My Heart Does Not Forget You jarring against Alba Nacinovich’s keening melody, and the group vocalisations of Al Naddaha struggling to be heard amid Ahmed’s doubling trumpet lines. Instead, Ahmed excels when her compositions play fast and free. The fierce polyrhythms of wedding song Her Light spiral into an ecstatic dance, while the joyous Into the Night features Ahmed’s extended family performing traditional ululations and hand-clapping to continue the sense of celebration.

The 10-minute title track is another highlight. Pearl-diving music is an a cappella vocal tradition for guiding ship workers by blending rhythmic droning with high-register melody, and Ahmed uses a processed sample of one such performance to build a vamping groove alongside bass clarinettist George Crowley’s expressive solo and percussionist Corrina Silvester’s extended darbuka break. The effect is infectiously jubilant, drawing the listener into Ahmed’s distinct and modern imagining of Bahraini tradition”.

Go and experience the wonderous Yazz Ahmed. Not only is A Paradise in the Hold a sublime and moving listening experience. After reading interviews from Ahmed where she talks about that desire to connect with Bahrain and her heritage, it made me think more widely about the country and the music from it. Few albums and artists get you to think beyond the music and open your mind to new cultures and countries. That should be reason enough for you to seek out…