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.
Read the interview in Jazzwise Magazine.
[This piece was published on 20/02/25]
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