Jan 21, 2025 7:54 PM
Southern California Fires Hit the Jazz Community
Roy McCurdy and his wife had just finished eating dinner and were relaxing over coffee in their Altadena home, when he…
Yazz Ahmed is among the 25 artists DownBeat thinks will help shape jazz in the decades to come.
(Photo: Seb JJ Peters)On the three studio albums flugelhorn player Yazz Ahmed’s released, there’s a very clear unfolding of singular ideas—an expansion of color and intent.
“I think I’m on the sort of outskirts, really,” Ahmed said about where she fits into the London jazz scene, a loose cohort of players who have come to impact the global understanding of how identity interacts with genre. “Shabakah [Hutchings] and I, we went to music college together, so that’s how I know him—I’ve known him for a very long time. But there are connections, even though my music, it’s not sonically similar to the people who are grabbing the headlines.”
What might cement her link to London’s current crop of players is a willingness to engage popular forms of music. As with La Saboteuse, Ahmed’s latest album is set to receive the remix treatment. “My friend, Charlie Jungle-Schaber, he sent me a list of a load of electronic artists that he thought I might like,” Ahmed said, discussing Polyhymnia Remixed, due out Nov. 6. “I wouldn’t have thought that I would have liked electronic or electronic experimental music, but I got into a lot of it. ... I chose the [producers], because I thought they would represent and respect my music. And also, they all have different backgrounds, so I thought it’d be interesting to hear my music through a different perspective.”
On Polyhymnia, Ahemd wrote for an ensemble of more than 20 musicians, etching in choruses and chanted vocal sections, but also space for improvised spotlights. As her approach to composition has continued to develop, the ensemble she’s worked with has grown, too, adding in instrumentation when she hears it in her mind. But the album’s premise—each song detailing the story of a woman who pushed against societal expectations—entailed a different kind of exploration for the bandleader.
“Polyhymnia, it was kind of very outward looking, you know? I was finding inspiration from these women that I was reading about,” said Ahmed, who lived in Bahrain until she was 9. “That really gave me the opportunity to learn about their stories and the music that they were brought up with. That really informs and inspires my writing, and you take that into your art.” DB
This story originally was published in the November 2020 issue of DownBeat. Subscribe here.
Gerald and John Clayton at the family home in Altadena during a photo shoot for the June 2022 cover of DownBeat. The house was lost during the Los Angeles fires.
Jan 21, 2025 7:54 PM
Roy McCurdy and his wife had just finished eating dinner and were relaxing over coffee in their Altadena home, when he…
“She said, ‘A lot of people are going to try and stop you,’” Sheryl Bailey recalls of the advice she received from jazz guitarist Emily Remler (1957–’90). “‘They’re going to say you slept with somebody, you’re a dyke, you’re this and that and the other. Don’t listen to them, and just keep playing.’”
Feb 3, 2025 10:49 PM
In the April 1982 issue of People magazine, under the heading “Lookout: A Guide To The Up and Coming,” jazz…
The Old Country: More From The Deer Head Inn arrives 30 years after ECM issued the Keith Jarret Trio live album At The Deer Head Inn.
Jan 21, 2025 7:38 PM
Last November, Keith Jarrett, who has not played publicly since suffering two strokes in 2018, greenlighted ECM to drop…
“With jazz I thought it must be OK to be Black, for the first time,” says singer Sofia Jernberg.
Jan 2, 2025 10:50 AM
On Musho (Intakt), her recent duo album with pianist Alexander Hawkins, singer Sofia Jernberg interprets traditional…
“The first recording I owned with Brazilian music on it was Wayne Shorter’s Native Dancer,” says Renee Rosnes. “And then I just started to go down the rabbit hole.”
Jan 16, 2025 2:02 PM
In her four-decade career, Renee Rosnes has been recognized as a singular voice, both as a jazz composer and a…
