Dec 17, 2024 9:58 AM
Tabla Master Zakir Hussain, 73, Succumbs to Illness
Tabla master Ustad Zakir Hussain, one of India’s reigning cultural ambassadors and a revered figure worldwide…
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.
“Watching people like Max Roach or Elvin Jones and seeing how they utilize the whole drum kit in a very rhythmic and melodic way and how they stretched time — that was a huge inspiration to me,” Hussain said in DownBeat.
Dec 17, 2024 9:58 AM
Tabla master Ustad Zakir Hussain, one of India’s reigning cultural ambassadors and a revered figure worldwide…
“I love doing ballads,” Mike Stern says. “It’s just a part of me, some part of emotionally how I feel sometimes.”
Dec 3, 2024 12:52 PM
Stories of major shifts and rebirths among musicians during the past five years are common, from weathering the…
Queen Latifah extols Harlem and the Apollo Theater at this year’s Kennedy Center Honors.
Dec 12, 2024 1:58 AM
Cuban-American jazz trumpet legend Arturo Sandoval and Harlem’s Apollo Theater were among the honorees at the 2024…
“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…
Robertson had a penetrating, pliant sound with a remarkable softness at its center.
Dec 11, 2024 10:34 AM
Herb Robertson, a trumpeter and flugelhornist known for his wide-lens explorations of the avant-garde, died Dec. 10. He…
