From their prophetic debut New Jazz Imagination which was released on Umlaut Records back in 2017, the quartet of the pianist Pat Thomas, the double bassist Joel Grip and the drummer Antonin Gerbal – who previously founded the cross-pollinatory trio اسم [ism], whose most recent album Maua blossomed on 577 Records this past February – plus Seymour Wright on the alto saxophone have sought to navigate and recuperate the spurned catalogue of the double bassist and oud player Ahmed Abdul-Malik.
Born as Jonathan Tim, Jr. in Brooklyn in the first flush of 1927 to parents who had arrived from Saint Vincent in the Caribbean, the young Abdul-Malik took up the bass after first training in the violin, fell in with a jazz crowd and converted to the Ahmadiyya branch of Islam, then changed his name and as his musical career took off in the fifties, increasingly traced his lineage to the Northeast African nation of Sudan. He played on a trio of 1956 recordings by the pianist Randy Weston, an early ambassador of African music within the pantheon of contemporary jazz, then was scooped up by Thelonious Monk before playing on the raga-inspired ‘India’ as part of John Coltrane’s seminal 1961 residency at the Village Vanguard. He would subsequently play alongside the flautist Herbie Mann and the civil rights singer Odetta, but in the meantime at the instigation of Coltrane and Monk, he established a career as a leader starting with the evocative Jazz Sahara which was released on the Riverside Records label in 1958.
Jazz Sahara pioneered the use of the pear-shaped, fretless and short-necked oud in the context of jazz, with Jack Ghanaim on the box zither qanun establishing a rhythmic counterpoint, Mike Hemway playing the goblet-shaped Egyptian darabuka drum and Naim Karacand’s violin tuned in the fourths and fifths, a system traditional to maqam and other forms of Arabic music. Also accompanied by hard bop stalwarts like the trumpeter Lee Morgan and the tenor saxophonist Johnny Griffin, the foundational flautist Jerome Richardson, the perfectly poised free jazz spirit of the drummer Andrew Cyrille and the reed player Bilal Abdurahman, who alongside the clarinet and percussion also blew breathtaking spells on the Korean daegeum and piri, between 1958 and 1964 across his six albums as a leader, Abdul-Malik continued to broach new frontiers, serving as something of a missing link between innovations in modal jazz and the first forays of what would become known as world music.
Sometimes dismissed as a pastiche before fading from view and turning his hand to teaching, the British pianist Pat Thomas says that Abdul-Malik’s original composition ‘Nights on Saturn’, the opening track from the 1961 album The Music of Ahmed Abdul-Malik, changed his life when he first heard it sometime around 1981. A crucial touchstone which retained the capacity to shock, it was nevertheless a chance encounter with Seymour Wright in 2014 which led to the creation of أحمد [Ahmed], with Thomas citing the percussive tone clusters and polyrhythms of Cecil Taylor and the calypso stylings of Taylor’s early collaborator Dennis Charles as influences as he set about reinterpreting Abdul-Malik’s sound on the piano.
Three records down with a live concert in Hong Kong deepening their commitment to the groove, now أحمد [Ahmed] embrace their moment courtesy of two simultaneous live releases. Wood Blues, a double vinyl on Astral Spirits, sees the quartet tackle for the first time ‘Oud Blues’ from The Music of Ahmed Abdul-Malik, stretching out a four-minute piece with a dark and viscous swing described in the liner notes by the Black Audio Film Collective founder Edward George as ‘like a Brownian bridge, an A&J Tranean train, a Byrdian plane or a Blountian space-time myth-machine’. The performance stems from the Counterflows festival which was held in the long and narrow warehouse space of The Glue Factory in Glasgow in the spring of 2022, with the cover of the album, a dusky palm tree depiction of the blue city of Chaouen in northwest Morocco, fittingly drawn from the archive of the photographer and writer Val Wilmer whose first book Jazz People featured interviews with Weston, Monk and Taylor.
A few months later, the quartet embarked for Stockholm and the Fylkingen festival of other music, where they played for five successively balmy nights as the Swedish capital sweltered during a rare heatwave. Each night was given over to a separate tune, beginning with their own stonking and serpentine rendition of ‘Nights on Saturn’ and climaxing on the fifth and final night with ‘El Haris (Anxious)’, something of a signature piece for أحمد [Ahmed] as it served as their introduction to the world on New Jazz Imagination. A reimagining of the track ‘El Haris’, which roughly translates to ‘cautious’ or ‘guarded’ in Arabic, from Ahmed Abdul-Malik’s debut album Jazz Sahara, the quartet inscribed their own version with the title ‘Anxious’ as an indication of both their excitement and apprehensiveness as they set about their new undertaking, explaining in the notes for New Jazz Imagination that:
أحمد [Ahmed] make music about the music of Ahmed Abdul-Malik. They excavate, reinhabit and use anew the now overlooked documents, and fragmentary plans, of his mid-20th century synthetic vision to produce a new jazz imagination for the 21st century.
The opening minutes of ‘El Haris (Anxious)’ from the Fylkingen festival capture something of a peacock’s proud strut, with Pat Thomas’s piano leading a staggered march as the bass and drums of Joel Grip and Antonin Gerbal wobble and shimmer and the staccato of Seymour Wright’s alto saxophone splays like the furling and unfurling of a train of covert feathers. As the title suggests, the playing evinces a certain anxiousness, an iridescent display which stands in wont of a response as the band are forced to plough their own furrow. Soon muddied and roiled, they never let up until breathless saxophone and scattered drums are joined around the 15-minute mark by cascading arpeggios as Pat Thomas plots another devious course, jolting ahead like a raft down a wild water rapid. Amid the clangorous din, أحمد [Ahmed] renew their sense of swing. The 27th minute marks a shift to triple time and a sort of backslide characterised by the whinnying of Wright’s saxophone, and by the 33rd minute a short and ominous piano motif is leading the piece but nothing stays on top for long as ‘El Haris (Anxious)’ constantly shifts shape, its players pushing and pulling each other along while always ready to instigate another rumble. Then in the closing moments the track falls into a tango rhythm, before quavering tremulously to a halt.
The five long tracks of Giant Beauty, packaged as five compact discs in a ribboned box with extensive liner notes by the festival’s publishing imprint Fönstret, were performed each night following a programme by the continuous composer Éliane Radigue, the tributaries of whose Occam series are intended to highlight the individual styles of an array of acoustic instrumentalists. Artists like Silvia Tarozzi, Enrico Malatesta, Nate Wooley, Julia Eckhardt and Deborah Walker performed Occam pieces during the festival, their subtle gradations and watery aspects finding a mirror in the torrents, drones and repetitions of the أحمد [Ahmed] quartet.
Elsewhere on the second night of Fylkingen – part of an old brewery complex with a Renaissance façade on the waterfront of Södermalm, which also houses Stockholm’s trailblazing Elektronmusikstudion – the quartet returned to ‘Oud Blues’ with its walking bassline and woodsy accents. ‘African Bossa Nova’ proved a driving example of the form replete with shakers and saxophone squibs, while the rubbery bass-led ‘Rooh (The Soul)’ from the album East Meets West channelled the work of the cellist Abdul Wadud, who died at the age of 75 during the week of the festival.
