Yazz Ahmed via giant steps through a matrix based in the phenomenon placing most of the 7.8 billion of us within 6 or fewer degrees — steps — of each other...
- Steps from Yazz Ahmed:
I'LL TAKE YOU THERE! ▶
'mātriks / "source" / from "mater", Latin for "mother". We're real mothers for ya!
I'LL TAKE YOU THERE! ▶
- Steps forward by: The Matrix
Who I Am & Where I Live
- Name: Yazz Ahmed
- City: London
- Country: United Kingdom
My Life & Work
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Bio:
Yazz Ahmed is a British-Bahraini trumpet player and composer who seeks to blur the lines between jazz, electronic sound design, bringing together the sounds of her mixed heritage. Her music has been described as ‘psychedelic Arabic jazz, intoxicating and compelling’.
In recent years she has led her various ensembles in concerts around the UK and abroad, including performances in New York, Toronto, Kuwait, Algiers, Berlin, Köln, Paris, Istanbul, Tunis and Amsterdam, and at major festivals such as WOMAD, Molde Jazz, Pori Jazz and Love Supreme.
Yazz has also recorded and performed with Radiohead, Lee Scratch Perry, Nile Rodgers, ABC, Swing Out Sister, Joan as Police Woman, Tarek Yamani, Amel Zen and toured the world with These New Puritans. She recently appeared as a guest soloist/composer with Arturo O’Farrill’s Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra.
In 2012, Yazz represented Bahrain in London’s Cultural Olympiad, joining renowned musicians from the Arabian Gulf in collaboration with Transglobal Underground. This project, In Transit, was supported by the British Council and was performed in Dubai and London.
Yazz was awarded a jazz fellowship from Birmingham Jazzlines in 2014, who supported her during the course of a year in writing a major new suite, Alhaan al Siduri, premiered in October 2015 at the CBSO Centre, Birmingham. One year later the second performance marked Yazz’s debut in her paternal homeland at the Bahrain International Music Festival.
In 2015, Tomorrow’s Warriors commissioned Yazz, with support from PRS Women Make Music, to write a suite inspired by courageous and influential women. Polyhymnia was premiered at the Purcell Room by a special all-female ensemble at the WOW! Festival in March 2015.
During her year as an LSO Soundhub composer in 2016, Yazz explored writing music for her newly developed quarter-tone flugelhorn, a unique instrument which enables her to get closer to the spiritual nature of the ‘blue notes’ in Arabic music.
2017 saw the release of her second album, La Saboteuse, on Naim Records. The album made a global impact, gaining 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). “..this is enchanting, late night music that floats on the liminal space between dreams and reality. And for sheer, unconquered beauty, there are few albums of any genre that reach these heady heights. Ahmed, in diving deep within herself, comes back up for air with a mysterious, wondrous artifact humming in her hands,” the2010s.net
In August 2018 Yazz released an EP of remixes from La Saboteuse, featuring collaborations with Hector Plimmer, DJ Khalab and Blacksea Não Maya, which has brought her music to a new audience.
Alongside seven other composers, Yazz was commissioned by the Ligeti Quartet, to write music inspired by modern astronomy, each focusing on a different planet in the solar system. The Planets 2018, created especially for planetariums, features Yazz’s composition Saturn and was performed around the UK during October 2018.
Continuing her explorations into space, Yazz was later commissioned by the Open University to write a solo piece inspired by the moon, which was performed at the OU Moon Night in December 2018.
In June 2019, Yazz will reveal the coda to La Saboteuse: A Shoal Of Souls. Composed as a reaction to Sophie Bass’s striking artwork for La Saboteuse, the piece is dedicated to the thousands of lives lost by those attempting to cross the Mediterranean Sea in search of a better future.
The special limited edition single will be released, via Bandcamp’s new vinyl fulfillment service, in association with Ixchel Records, bringing the La Saboteuse project to a close.
Yazz’s highly anticipated third album, Polyhymnia, will be released this October on Ropeadope Records.
Contact Information
- Email: lou@womeninjazz.co.uk
My Media & Markets
- ▶ Buy My Music (downloads/CDs/DVDs): http://yazzahmed.bandcamp.com
- ▶ Twitter: YazzAhmed1
- ▶ Instagram: yazzahmedmusic
- ▶ Website: http://www.yazzahmed.com
- ▶ YouTube Music: http://music.youtube.com/channel/UCsy7F4gW3DFIW8l_VN5B7rg
- ▶ Spotify: http://open.spotify.com/album/7wnkO3e8Hj7ECrSliO6qQs
- ▶ Spotify 2: http://open.spotify.com/album/0D9L3GIs2csJ7LOXtE9EXm
- ▶ Spotify 3: http://open.spotify.com/album/39GwDn0DuT2ii6s7oGuH2k
- ▶ Spotify 4: http://open.spotify.com/album/1dEvJEOV8fbDY2aOS6YbAf
- ▶ Spotify 5: http://open.spotify.com/album/2C1tSK9QcNjeS5I00ZyVOI
- ▶ Spotify 6: http://open.spotify.com/album/3raU2HYjCP5ltZ2TIaaZUb
- ▶ Article: http://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/jul/27/women-are-more-interested-in-collaborating-than-showing-off-jazz-trumpeter-yazz-ahmed
The world's artistry via giant steps through a matrix based in the phenomenon placing most of the 7.8 billion of us within 6 or fewer degrees — steps — of each other ...
... a project conceived and built in the fertile, fecund and atavistic ground zero of Bahia, Brazil initially for the discoverability of this singular region's dispossessed genius.
All explained in the window immediately below. Followed — beneath this window — by scores of magnificent artists, each leading to myriads more artists/categories. Inside this window also may be found our Brazilian record store radio, named by British journal The Guardian as one of 10 of the Best Radio Stations Around the World!
IF YOU CAN'T STAND THE HEAT
Brazil is not a European nation. It's not a North American nation. It's not an East Asian nation. It straddles -- jungle and desert and dense urban centers -- both the equator and the Tropic of Capricorn. It absorbed over ten times the number of African slaves taken to the United States of America, and much of its aboriginal population was absorbed into the general population-at-large. Its people have lived under oligarchy, plutocracy, dictatorships and massive corruption, with elements of these still strongly entrenched today.
But!
Brazil has buzz...not the shallow buzz of a fashionable moment...but the deep buzz of a population which in spite of -- or perhaps because of -- the tough slog through life they've been allotted by humanity's dregs-in-fine-linen, have chosen not to simply pull themselves along but to lift their voices in song and their bodies in dance...to eat well and converse well and much and to wring the joy out of the day-to-day happenings and small pleasures of life which are so often set aside or ignored in the European, North American, and East Asian nations.
For this Brazil has a genius perhaps unparalleled in all other countries and societies, a genius which thrives alongside peeling paint and holes in the streets and roads, under bad organization by the powers-that-be, both civil and governmental, under a constant rain of societal indignities...
Which is all to say that if you don't know Brazil and you're expecting any semblance of order, progress and light, you will certainly find the light! And the buzz of a people who for generations have responded to privation at many different levels by somehow rising above it all.
Raimundo Sodré, in a conversation ranging from New Orleans to Harlem and the South Side of Chicago ... through Appalachia and Irish villages and Russian shtetls and the unofficial symbol of Brazil's Bahian-born national music (the pandeiro) almost certainly having arrived in Brazil in the hands of Sephardic Jews (including conversos) fleeing the Inquisition, once remarked: "Where there's misery, there's music!"
A pandeirista on the roof. And it's not just music. And it's not just Brazil.
