Yazz Ahmed – A Paradise in the Hold
In 2011, the year that Yazz Ahmed released her debut album Finding My Way Home, she also played a contributing role on one of that year’s highest profile records. Ahmed played flugelhorn on “Bloom,” the opening track on Radiohead’s The King of Limbs, subtly cutting through its distorted bluster of drum loops and synth shudder with a graceful, organic injection of melody. Six years after that auspicious pairing, as Ahmed increasingly came to be recognized as a uniquely talented figure in the London jazz scene, she repaid the favor by covering that same song on her sophomore album La Saboteuse, updated with a warmer and more holistic sense of groove, recognizable but blanketed in analog jazz-funk strut. Yet surrounding this moment of game recognizing game were tributes to a much more personal, much older form of music—standouts such as the title track, “Jamil Jamal” and “Al Emadi” incorporating Arabic melodies into their gorgeously layered arrangements in an embrace of Ahmed’s Bahraini roots and “the music my grandfather played to me,” as she explained in 2017.
Ahmed’s fourth album, A Paradise in the Hold, takes a deeper survey of her onetime home overlooking the Persian Gulf through inspiration she took from songs of pearl divers, characters from the Epic of Gilgamesh and the strength and creativity of other Arab women. With its roots in a composition initially written in 2014, titled “Alhaan Al Siduri,” Paradise draws from a similarly rich and complex well of inspiration as its predecessors, intertwining the personal with the mythical in a breathtaking suite of sounds that brings added dimension and finer detail to her expanding repertoire.
Ahmed invites us into this complex and rich tangle of cultures and eras by channeling a familiar myth. On opening track “The Siren on the Shore,” Ahmed sets her lone trumpet against a desolate backdrop, reverberating like the titular siren against the surface of the water and rocks that would tear open a ship’s hull. Ahmed’s solo performance gives way to a mystical ensemble like oncoming vessels emerging through a dense fog, Egyptian-Belgian singer Natacha Atlas lending her own expressive and mesmerizing siren song to guide the armada through the strait.
Emerging from that swirling mist of an opener, A Paradise in the Hold begins to fully take shape in its 10-minute title track, the longest and most elaborate of the album’s nine dazzling tracks. It features motifs inspired by Bahraini folk music and a narrative reflective of the voyages of pearl divers—it’s a progressive epic in both an exploratory sense as, well, being kinda prog. It merges the ancient with the contemporary, its rhythmic sway mimicking the rise and fall of the ocean’s tides, while bass clarinetist George Crowley and keyboardist Naadia Sheriff on Rhodes provide the journey with an ambience of nocturnal mystery. While Ahmed has previously crafted works of this scale, particularly 2019’s “Barbara,” “A Paradise in the Hold” carries an even greater sense of adventure while showcasing the combined talents of her incredible ensemble of musicians.
The sequence of A Paradise in the Hold, as a whole, feels like a heroic journey, coming down from the climactic heights of the title track into the low-key meditation of “Mermaids’ Tears,” recharging into a frantic flurry of activity in the percussive maelstrom of “Her Light,” and reestablishing a quiet tension via the stark fusion noir of “Al Naddaha.” “Dancing Barefoot” and “Into the Night” comprise a connected suite of sorts, the former not a Patti Smith cover but rather a gorgeously twinkling bit of vocal jazz in which voice, trumpet and piano are interconnected in an intricate dance. Yet the latter, the shortest track here, presents what Ahmed refers to as the most “purely Bahraini piece” on the whole album, hand claps and percussion and ecstatic ululations from Ahmed’s own father providing a celebratory backdrop for what’s otherwise a more stark performance from Ahmed herself.
With the penultimate track “To the Lonely Sea,” Ahmed and company recapture a hazy, nocturnal mystique, a meditative quiet that reveals a graceful beauty within her compositions even as the hypnotic vocal performances and frantic rhythms fall away. Yet it’s not hard to find that elegance even in the animated encore of closer “Waiting for Dawn,” in which the energy and effects escalate but the groove remains exquisitely human. It’s an important reminder—even though the nature of these pieces is highly conceptual, and the strength of her compositions is undeniable—that Ahmed is a jazz artist. It’s in the chemistry of the ensemble, each instrument playing off of each other in a riveting musical dialogue, that these compositions fully bloom.
Label: Night Time Stories
Year: 2025
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Yazz Ahmed : A Paradise in the Hold
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