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Yazz Ahmed with Emel and Rabih Abou-Khalil at Barbican Hall
by Chris May
Yazz Ahmed With Emel And Rabih Abou-Khalil Barbican Hall London 13 December, 2022 The intersection of jazz and classical Arabic music, both of which have improvisation and rhythm at their core, has long been fertile ground for exploration. Tonight's concert featured two adepts in the field, the British-Bahraini trumpeter Yazz Ahmed and the Lebanese oudist Rabih Abou-Khalil. Since her first album in 2011, Ahmed has blended jazz with Arabic music, with the accent on jazz, ...
Continue ReadingOlive Branch or Pat Nip?
by Patrick Burnette
After the “politicapocalypse" (Mike's coinage--ask him) of the previous episode, the boys decide to gently transition away from that minefield by looking at two artists more obliquely engaged with political discourse and two artists more or less removed from it entirely (by temperament and timing). To soothe Pat's scalded nerves, Mike brings a couple “cool" cats to the party, though by the end he agrees that one of them just might have been satirizing a certain mid-sixties obsession with Latin ...
Continue ReadingYazz Ahmed: The Inclusive Saboteuse
by Ludovico Granvassu
Pretty much from the beginning of her career, trumpet and flugelhorn player Yazz Ahmed has been intent on sabotaging the walls and fences that divide the jazz world, championing an inclusive vision in which Arabic traditions blend seamlessly with loops and electronics, and rock and pop can offer jazz plenty of inspiration. Two years after the success of the album that brought her under the limelight, La Saboteuse (Naim, 2017), her latest release, Polyhymnia (Naim/Ropeadope, 2019), confirms her ...
Continue ReadingYazz Ahmed: Polyhymnia
by Chris May
The British-Bahraini trumpeter, flugelhornist and composer Yazz Ahmed went clear in 2017 with La Saboteuse (Naim). The album is an otherworldly mix of jazz, electronics and Arabic folk music which carries traces of Miles Davis' In A Silent Way (Columbia, 1969) and Bitches Brew (Columbia, 1970) and Jon Hassell's Dream Theory In Malaya: Fourth World Volume 2 (E.G., 1981), all wrapped in a modern sensibility. With it, Ahmed outstripped Ibrahim Maalouf as the high priest of psychedelic Arabic jazz.
Continue ReadingNYOS Jazz Orchestra Featuring Yazz Ahmed @ The MAC
by Ian Patterson
NYOS Jazz Orchestra Featuring Yazz Ahmed The MAC Belfast, N. Ireland July 22 , 2019 It was a pretty decent crowd for a Monday night. An older crowd, drawn to big-band jazz. Few, it seemed, were Belfast jazz gig regulars, at least, not the usual suspects who pitch up to watch the likes of Sons of Kemet, Instant Composers Pool or Get The Blessing. But if any in the audience expected the National Youth ...
Continue ReadingBristol International Jazz and Blues Festival 2019
by Mike Collins
Bristol International Jazz and Blues Festival Bristol, UK March 22-24, 2019 Pee Wee Ellis is an alternative spelling of 'funk' for many people, but on the last night of Bristol International Jazz and Blues Festival, we got a reminder of his roots deep in jazz. In the full to capacity St. George's in Bristol, a one-time chapel now converted to a concert hall, Ellis delivered a set of the choicest standards with a flawless band and ...
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