A Paradise In The Hold Yazz Ahmed

• 1 She Stands On the Shore 05:13
• 2 A Paradise In The Hold 10:04
• 3 Mermaids' Tears 07:46
• 4 Her Light 08:04
• 5 Al Naddaha 07:57
• 6 Dancing Barefoot 06:59
• 7 Into The Night 01:44
• 8 Though My Eyes Go To Sleep, My Heart Does Not Forget You 08:35
• 9 To The Lonely Sea 08:16
• 10 Waiting For The Dawn 05:21
• Total Runtime 01:09:59

Info for A Paradise In The Hold

Kaleidoscopic jazz imbued with Bahraini folklore, poetry and an oceanic spirit: Yazz Ahmed, hailed as one of the most influential trumpet players of her generation. An Ivor Novello award winning composer who makes sweeping epics that are rich with storytelling, depicting evocative ancient worlds and mythological muses. With her fourth studio album, A Paradise in the Hold, the British-Bahrani musician dives even deeper into her dual heritage and has come up with a treasure trove that draws on traditional music and stories from her childhood home. Ahmed writes for the voice for the first time, with lyrics inspired by Bahraini wedding poems and the yearning songs of the pearl divers. Deeply textural, expansive and full of potent performances, the album charts the heroic voyages of the jewel-hunters of yore, who sailed home through rough seas with precious cargo, and Ahmed’s own voyage of self-discovery over the past decade.

“A thread in my work has been searching for, establishing and, now, finally embracing and celebrating my cultural identity,” she says. Whereas she explored Arabian music more generally with her earlier material, this release is more explicitly linked to her homeland. “If my first album, 2011’s Finding My Way Home, represents the first steps on this path then with A Paradise In The Hold, I’ve arrived at a deeper understanding of how my British and Bahraini heritage can co-exist, in personal as well as musical terms.”

Ahmed began A Paradise in the Hold’s journey back in 2014, on a research trip in Bahrain, during her Jazzlines Fellowship. She’d trawl local bookshops looking for poems and lyrical inspiration. Many came from wedding songs, which were “a lot about beauty and connecting beauty with nature,” she says. Deepening her connection to the tradition, her grandfather even sang her some songs from his own wedding day. At the same time, she became fascinated by the celebratory music of women’s drumming circles and how they contrasted the work songs of the pearl divers. The latter dangerous pursuit has since ceased, though the divers’ sorrowful music – sung and clapped in a polyrhythmic style known as fijiri – lives on.

“They were songs that encouraged the fishermen to stay in good spirits, or songs about missing your loved ones,” says Ahmed. Some of the former pearl divers have formed choirs that tour around the Gulf and she caught a performance by the Pearl Divers of Muharraq, the name of her former hometown. “It gave me an opportunity to connect on a deeper level with the music that I grew up with as a child, but didn’t really embrace at the time.”

Ahmed grew up in Bahrain until the age of nine and lived there during the Gulf War in the early 90s. While she has happy memories of her childhood, many were overshadowed by conflict, like “having a gas mask and not being able to go to school. We went to school in people’s garages,” she says. “I remember the sirens going off when there was a bomb threat, and closing the curtains, turning off all the lights, and covering the plughole in the bathtub so no poisonous gases could get in.”

She moved to London with her mother and sisters in 1992 but says, “I felt like I didn’t quite belong and I didn’t know why that was. For a long time, I would lie about my heritage because of how Arab and Muslim people were represented in American films and British dramas. When I was at school, I never said that I was half Bahraini.” Music, however, helped to strengthen her sense of identity. She saw links between the jazz she studied at university and Arabian classical music, and started to learn Arabic. “I started to rediscover my mixed heritage,” she adds. “And that’s when I started to remember all this music that I grew up hearing but never fully engaged with.”

The fruits of Ahmed’s 2014 research trip became a 90-minute suite, Alhaan Al Siduri, which she performed the following year in both the UK and Bahrain. It’s named for the character Siduri from folk tale the Epic of Gilgamesh: “a wise woman who lives on an island of absolute beauty, which some scholars have suggested may be Bahrain,” Ahmed explains.

She has reworked the suite’s main theme into album opener ‘She Stands On The Shore’, which sets the tone for an inky odyssey through mermaids, goddesses, sirens and, on ‘Dancing Barefoot’, a runaway bride; and love, loss, new beginnings and a newfound freedom.

Ahmed has always been drawn to stories of women in mythology – her last album, 2019’s Polyhymnia, was based on the Greek goddess of poetry and dance – but this time she has wider intentions. “I want to change the narrative about Arab women,” says Ahmed. “A lot of people think that Arab women are just oppressed. But in Bahrain there are plenty of creative women trying to do something different in the world.” Ahmed notes how Arabic music has been stereotypically used in western entertainment and she wanted to challenge that perception. “We hear it a lot in movies to represent the desert, or poor villagers,” she says, “but you rarely see it representing strong women, for example.”

Alhaan Al Siduri formed the basis of Ahmed’s album but it has evolved ambitiously over the following decade, during performances both solo and with orchestras. She expanded tracks with intricate sound design and added multiple trumpet parts. “I learned to think of them as antiphonal, so you can hear them from different angles,” she says. “And so it feels like you’re surrounded by this very majestic instrument.” The album’s texture, meanwhile, also stems from the field recordings she used to form loops and patterns, a technique Ahmed expanded upon with the track she made for US TV network Adult Swim’s jazz compilation New Jazz Century. On A Paradise in the Hold, ‘Dancing Barefoot’ is particularly exquisite, where vibraphonist Ralph Wyld played milk bottle tops and used cello bows made from coat hangers, “to conjure the feeling of a mind spiralling into a dream,” says Ahmed. Equally visceral, on ‘To The Lonely Sea’ collaborator Jason Singh created a “vocal sculpture” to echo the wind and waves.

Notably, Ahmed hadn’t written for the voice until now. For A Paradise In The Hold, she penned lyrics in English, which she then translated to Arabic, or, on ‘Though My Eyes Go To Sleep My Heart Does Not Forget You’, adapted the words from a pearl divers’ standard. She worked with a range of impressive singers to bring her vision to life: Brigitte Beraha, Natacha Atlas, Randolph Matthews and Alba Nacinovich. The voice of her father, meanwhile, can be heard on standout track ‘Into The Night’, which lands you in the centre of a percussive hubbub and which Ahmed intended as a celebration of female independence. “He was trying to conduct the recording session in the family house,” she says of her dad. “Everyone was gathered in the sitting room and I recorded some of the ululations and clapping that you can hear in the track. I’m so glad I got to have my family on the album.”

The collaborators on the album in particular, percussionist Corrina Silvester and the greatly missed giant of the jazz world and Yazz’s dear friend, drummer, Martin France, helped Ahmed to strengthen the connection between the two worlds; A Paradise In The Hold is a bold fusion that reveals its riches more with each rewarding listen. “It’s another step in my evolution of making music,” says Ahmed. “There’s so much beauty in Bahraini music. I hope this album gives people a flavour of how vibrant its culture is.”

Yazz Ahmed, trumpet, efx
Ralph Wyld, vibraphone
Dave Manington, bass
Joshua Blackmore, drums

Yazz Ahmed
Through her music, British-Bahraini trumpet player, Yazz Ahmed, seeks to blur the lines between jazz and electronic sound design, bringing together the sounds of her mixed heritage in what has been described as ‘psychedelic Arabic jazz, intoxicating and compelling’.

Over the last decade, Yazz has led her ensembles in performances across the UK & Europe, and further afield in Algeria, Bahrain, Beirut, Kuwait, Tunisia, Turkey, Ukraine, USA & Canada. She has also enchanted audiences at major festivals such as WOMAD, Love Supreme, NYC Winter Jazz Fest & Pori Jazz.

Her career is studded with high profile collaborations, which have seen her record and perform with the likes of Radiohead, Lee Scratch Perry, Transglobal Underground, Arturo O’Farrill, Natacha Atlas, and Obongjayar, including a world tour with These New Puritans.

It was Yazz’s self-released debut album, Finding My Way Home, 2011, which saw her first explorations of Arabic music, introduced her as an innovative performer and composer, and led Jazzwise Magazine to mark her out as ‘one to watch’. However, it was her second album, La Saboteuse, (Naim Records, 2017), which made a global impact, clocking up 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 artefact humming in her hands,”the2010s.net

In between releasing Finding My Way Home and La Saboteuse, Yazz received support from Jazzlines at Town Hall Symphony Hall Birmingham, to write her suite, Alhaan al Siduri, premiered in October 2015 at CBSO Centre, Birmingham. This music is influenced by Yazz’s Bahraini roots, drawing from the folk music of the Bahraini pearl divers and traditional wedding songs sung by the women drumming groups. The second performance of this suite marked Yazz’s debut in her paternal homeland, at the Bahrain International Music Festival, 2016.

During 2016, Yazz was accepted on the LSO Soundhub composer scheme, giving her the opportunity to explore writing music for her newly developed quarter-tone flugelhorn. This unique instrument enabled her to get closer to the spiritual nature of the ‘blue notes’ in Arabic music, deeply infusing her sound with that of her heritage.

In 2018 Yazz received two commissions with a cosmic theme. The Planets 2018, a work created especially for a tour of planetariums, is a celebration of the centenary of Holst’s suite and modern astronomy. Commissioned by the Ligeti Quartet, Yazz’s composition Saturn was featured and performed around the UK that October.Yazz was later commissioned by the Open University to write a solo piece inspired by the moon, Earth’s Reflection was performed at the OU Moon Night in December 2018.

Illustrating her growing fascination with electronic music, La Saboteuse Remixed, (Naim, 2018) features collaborations with three of Europe’s eminent electronic DJ’s – Hector Plimmer, DJ Khalab and Blacksea Não Maya. Four of the pieces from the original album have been reimagined, taking her music to a new realm.

June 2019 saw the coda to La Saboteuse revealed: A Shoal of Souls (IXCHEL Records). Composed as a reaction to Sophie Bass’s striking artwork for La Saboteuse, the piece, commissioned by the EFG London Jazz Festival, is dedicated to the thousands of lives lost in recent years by those attempting to cross the Mediterranean Sea in search of a better future. A Shoal of Souls was also featured as the soundtrack to an Apple iPhone 11 advertising campaign.

Yazz’s 2019 album, Polyhymnia, (Ropeadope Records) built on her growing reputation as a notable composer with a strong individual voice, a figure at the heart of the exciting UK scene. Evolving from a performance on International Women’s Day in 2015, commissioned by Tomorrow’s Warriors, the music takes the form of a suite written in celebration of courageous and inspiring women and features an extended ensemble of 25 musicians.

“Rich, powerful, colourful, exciting, and highly evocative. Ahmed’s most ambitious and most successful work to date has the feel of a ‘major statement’ about it.” –thejazzmann.com

The album was also picked up by Apple and has been highlighted in their 2020 Apple Music advertising campaigns.

In January 2020 Downbeat Magazine named Yazz as one of 25 artists set to shape the future of jazz over the next decade.

At the 2020 Jazz FM Awards, Polyhymnia was voted Album of The Year, with Yazz also winning UK Jazz Act of the Year.

The year culminated with the receipt of the highly prestigious Ivor Novello Award for Innovation.

During the pandemic, Yazz composed and recorded music for American streaming channel, Adult Swim, the Festival of New Trumpet Music – New York, and a sound installation commission by WOMAD to accompany Luke Jerram’s, Museum Of The Moon sculpture. She also performed ‘isolated sessions’ for the Boiler Room and streaming gigs for WOW! Istanbul, the Jazzed app, The EFG London Jazz Festival, Sage Gateshead and Tim Garland’s Spring Encounters series.

In November 2020 Yazz released Polyhymnia Remixed, teaming up with fast-rising underground producers, DJ Plead, Asmara and Surly. The EP expands on the themes of Polyhymnia, reflecting on the important stories of the women it celebrates, told by other voices, with a fresh perspective.

2021 saw the release of Solo 7”s Vol.1, a single featuring two tracks recorded at home, inspired by Yazz’s experience of performing solo sets during the pandemic.

As live work returned in 2021, she began performing again on the continent, but the year culminated in a spectacular collaboration with Yazz’s quintet and the BBC Concert Orchestra at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, performing new orchestrations of her works as part of the EFG London Jazz Festival for BBC Radio 3.

In 2022, Yazz was commissioned by Blue Note Records to arrange and record a track for the second Blue Note Re:imagined series. Yazz’s Turkish-proggy-jazz take on Chick Corea’s It, which featured his long-time collaborator, Tim Garland, on bass clarinet.

In December 2022, Yazz curated an evening at the Barbican Hall, London, where she shared the stage withlegendary Lebanese oudist, Rabih Abou-Khalil (whose album Blue Camel was a seminal influence on Yazz) and Emel – the avant-garde Tunisian-American singer and producer, whose soaring voice was a soundtrack to the Arab Spring and who has long been crafting a unique sonic universe, crushing stereotypes and forging a path all her own.

“I hope that through my music I can bring people together, building bridges between cultures, and changing perceptions about women in jazz and people of Middle Eastern heritage”

This album contains no booklet.