edition. - أحمد [Ahmed]

أحمد [Ahmed] — Oslo

notes

Footage shot during [Ahmed]'s soundcheck at Victoria Nasjonal Jazz Scene ahead of their performance for the Oslo Jazz Festival later the same evening.

Camera/Sound/Edit: John Chantler

Opening music is 'Lotus Blossom' by Billy Strayhorn performed by Antonin Gerbal (Piano) and Joel Grip (Double Bass). [Ahmed] play a spontaneous arrangement of 'Farah 'Alaiyna (Joy Upon Us)' by Ahmed Abdul Malik.

[Ahmed] – the quartet of Pat Thomas, Antonin Gerbal, Joel Grip and Seymour Wright – make music of heavy rhythm, repetition and syncopation set deep into an understanding of jazz and the obscure depths of its history. The group work and rework the music of the late musician Ahmed Abdul-Malik to create a stamping, swinging, relentlessly propulsive music where profundity and physicality root right back to ecstatic feeling.

Pat Thomas — Piano
Seymour Wright — Alto Saxophone
Joel Grip — Double Bass
Antonin Gerbal — Drums

“A very radical saxophonist” – Evan Parker

Seymour Wright of Derby, his first solo album is widely considered to be a defining document of 21st-century, ‘inter-textual’ saxophone and now with his saxophone (mostly) no longer in pieces he has played in several often surprising and increasingly peculiar settings – from the on-going extreme twistings of lll人 (joined on one occasion by Otomo Yoshihide) and lll人lll (with Yuki Yamamoto, Howard Slater and Ute Kanngiesser), the lava flow of xomlatesc tbobnhi’s four-day London Jazz Festival residency and the robop-debut of CYNTHIA, to duets with Ute Kanngiesser (a rare public, many-year hebdomadal), Daniel Blumberg (Hebronix) and saxophonist John Butcher.

Increasingly he has been performing and recording music in more jazz-like settings too, exploring aspects of the early NYAQ and a certain jazz tradition in Steve Noble’s current group and performing the music of Ahmed Abdul-Malik in أحمد‎ a newly convened quartet with Pat Thomas, Joel Grip and Antonin Gerbal. This on-going trajectory, through the weird, is making the range of his music making and collaborative creativity increasingly public.

Photo: John Chantler

Joel Grip

Improvising bassist, Joel Grip, makes music at the countenance of the other.

Anchored to a spontaneously fermented musical approach, his music reverberates and transforms within a collective body of timing and sound.

Joel Grip practice improvising, as a way to learn and develop a forthright sound, and embrace its reactiveness, rapidity, and startling character with the aim of pushing music to intense, ecstatic and transformative levels.

joelgrip.com

Photo: Fabio Lugaro

Pat Thomas

Pat Thomas is a composer and pianist, widely recognised as a leading figure in contemporary improvised music.

He is renowned for his distinctive, percussive style of playing, and for weaving a wide range of influences like reggae, jungle, and Sufi philosophy into compositions and performances.

Of the course of his career he has collaborated with a wide range of jazz and improv luminaries, from Mike Cooper, Derek Bailey, Tony Oxley, and Evan Parker, to more recent avant-figureheads like Moor Mother and Matana Roberts.

As well as an ongoing solo practice, current group projects include أحمد [ahmed] (with Seymour Wright, Antonin Gerbal, and Joel Grip), Black Top (with Orphy Robinson), and duos with Mariam Rezaei, Mark Fell, and Tyshawn Sorey.

Photo: John Chantler

Antonin Gerbal

Antonin Gerbal is a percussion player, improviser and composer, active in the field of contemporary musics – from jazz to non-idiomatic languages.

He has studied music at Paris Conservatory and philosophy at EHESS. In 2009 he co-founded Umlaut France, an organization which runs the eponymous label and organizes concerts and festivals in Paris and Berlin. Antonin Gerbal is mainly using percussion elements to develop multiple accesses to musical languages in jazz, improvised or written music. He has collaborated with many international artists and played in United States, Japan, Russia and Europe.