MJF: Yazz Ahmed

Through her music, British-Bahraini trumpet player Yazz Ahmed seeks to blur the lines between jazz and electronic sound design, bringing together the sounds of her mixed heritage in what has been described as ‘psychedelic Arabic jazz, intoxicating and compelling’.

Her career is studded with high profile collaborations, which have seen her record and perform with the likes of Radiohead, Lee Scratch Perry, Transglobal Underground, Arturo O’Farrill, Natacha Atlas, and Obongjayar, including a world tour with These New Puritans.

It was Yazz’s self-released debut album, Finding My Way Home (2011), that saw her first explorations of Arabic music and introduced her as an innovative performer and composer, leading Jazzwise magazine to mark her out as ‘one to watch’. However, it was her second album, La Saboteuse, (Naim Records, 2017), that made a global impact, clocking up multiple rave reviews and making many ‘best of 2017’ lists around the world, including Jazz Album of the Year in The Wire magazine, and achieving the number 18 spot in Bandcamp’s top 100 albums (all genres).

Ahmed began A Paradise in the Hold’s creation back in 2014 on a research trip in Bahrain, during her Jazzlines Fellowship. She’d trawl local bookshops looking for poems and lyrical inspiration. Many came from wedding songs, which were ‘a lot about beauty and connecting beauty with nature,’ she says. Deepening her connection to the tradition, her grandfather even sang her some songs from his own wedding day. At the same time, she became fascinated by the celebratory music of women’s drumming circles and how they contrasted with the work songs of the pearl divers. The latter dangerous pursuit has since ceased, though the divers’ sorrowful music – sung and clapped in a polyrhythmic style known as fijiri – lives on.

Yazz Ahmed trumpet, fx
Ralph Wyld vibraphone
Dave Manington bass
Joshua Blackmore drums