The jazz bassist and composer Ahmed Abdul-Malik was born Jonathan Tim Jr. in Brownsville, Brooklyn, in 1927. All through his life Tim claimed Sudanese descent, however in line with the historian Robin D. G. Kelley, his roots have been really Caribbean. Within the Fifties it was common for black musicians to seek for new connections with their diasporic heritage. As immigrants arrived in American cities in better numbers, there have been extra alternatives to find the religions, languages, and music of Africa and the Center East. In his guide Africa Speaks, America Solutions, Kelly describes “a Bedford Stuyvesant renaissance where a transplanted African culture thrived, Islam took root, and the international movement for Afro-Arab solidarity found its American champions.”1
Malik took religious inspiration from these environment, changing to Islam in his teenagers and studying Arabic. In highschool he joined the Muslim Brotherhood, an offshoot of the Ahmadiyya motion that Hazrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad based within the Indian subcontinent in 1889. Ahmidayya discovered American footing within the Nineteen Twenties, in Detroit, Chicago, and Harlem. It had many adherents amongst jazz musicians within the late Nineteen Fifties, together with the saxophonist Yusef Lateef, the drummer Artwork Blakey, and the pianist Ahmad Jamal. (When he transformed, Blakey briefly adopted the identify Abdullah Ibn Buhaina, and the nickname “Bu” caught.)
Malik’s examine of Center Jap tradition immediately fed his aesthetic concepts. He realized to play the oud—finding out on and off with visiting masters from the Arab Music Institute in Cairo—and used Center Jap and North African scales and modes in his compositions. Most significantly, as he famous in a 1963 interview, he hoped to create a religious music, an artwork kind in search of the “ultimate truth.”
After early success collaborating with the pianists Thelonious Monk and Randy Weston—the latter a childhood buddy from Brooklyn who additionally immersed himself in African music—Malik made his first report as a pacesetter. Jazz Sahara, launched in 1958, used the flame of late Fifties arduous bop to mild the wick of North African people music. The primary monitor, “Ya Annas (Oh, People),” begins with a solo by the Syrian violinist Naim Karacand, who performs non-Western scales over a easy dance rhythm, earlier than the saxophonist Johnny Griffin swings over a squared two-bar vamp, catapulted ahead by Al Harewood’s drumming. Karacand returns with an ecstatic melody, accompanied by Bilal Abdurahman—one other Brooklyn neighbor and member of the Brotherhood—on duf or tambourine, Jack Ghanaim on the zither-like qanun, Mike Hamway on a goblet-shaped drum known as a darabeka, and Malik himself doubling on the lute-like oud. The piece ends with the chief returning to bass, soloing over a groove that feels solely barely extra Khartoum than Brooklyn.
If Jazz Sahara juxtaposes two traditions in a reasonably standard approach, The Music of Ahmed Abdul-Malik (1961) takes a extra spontaneous method. As an alternative of rigorously arranging and structuring his tunes round soloists, Malik loosens his compositional authority, permitting the band to make use of the naked bones of melody, vamp, or rhythm as improvisational jumping-off factors. On each albums, nevertheless, Malik’s musicians appear refreshed by the restricted materials. Their enjoying—whether or not Harewood’s driving swing or Andrew Cyrille’s extra expressionist drumming—has a pleasure and danger that isn’t discovered of their different work of the interval.
Malik made 4 extra data amalgamating these musical languages. Their titles alone are suggestive: Sounds of Africa (1962), The Jap Moods of Ahmed Abdul-Malik (1963). Different artists of the time explored an identical fusion. Weston translated North African melodies into solo piano performances; Lateef realized to play reed and percussion devices from the Center East, Africa, and Asia. However solely Malik positioned artists from the Saharan custom immediately alongside New York jazz royalty.
Malik carried out as a sideman on commercially profitable data by Monk, John Coltrane, and the blues and people singer Odetta. Sadly his personal albums didn’t promote. He turned from recording to training, instructing jazz improvisation at NYU into the Eighties. Two strokes minimize his life quick in 1993, twenty years after his final studio look, a 1973 album with Weston.
For a very long time it appeared as if Malik was misplaced to jazz historical past. Within the final decade, nevertheless, a European quartet calling themselves حمد [Ahmed] has revived his legacy to create a brand new music of their very own. The group grew out of ISM, the British pianist Pat Thomas’s trio with the French drummer Antonin Gerbal and the Swedish bassist Joel Grip. In 2015 Thomas invited alongside a fellow Brit, the saxophonist Seymour Wright, who recommended they examine Malik’s oeuvre. The members of the burgeoning quartet all beloved his data. Thomas recalled his first encounter in a 2019 article:
Nights On Saturn was one of many recordings that modified my life.… I can actually say that it nonetheless shocks me. It may be in comparison with Magic Metropolis by Solar Ra in the way it creates an other-worldly sound: Rahman’s enjoying on the piri, the shifting, polymetric enjoying of Cyrille, the free-flowing ostinato bass determine by Malik, and the arco cello enjoying by Scott.
The opposite three possible felt equally. Gerbal, Grip, and Wright every have a historical past of partnering with freethinking artists: Wright has labored with the Chicago footwork DJ RP Boo, Grip performs with the poet-percussionist Sven Åke Johannson, and Gerbal is shut with the French electronics iconoclast Éliane Radigue. These collaborations have made them conversant in several features of minimalism: repetition, silence, and the gradual metamorphosis of a single concept. Malik’s late compositional aesthetic of “less is more” might have been as alluring to them because the sound of his earlier exotica.
Items like “Oud Blues” or “Nights on Saturn” supply little or no by the use of melody, concord, and rhythmic info, a characteristic that informs حمد [Ahmed]’s mission: “No discussion. No plan. No solos.” This can be a radical method to method historic music, which is usually both transcribed, organized, and offered as a museum piece or handled as a useful bookend for unrelated improvisation. As an alternative حمد [Ahmed] makes use of Malik’s compositions as constructing blocks for one thing wholly new. They deconstruct every work into melodic fragments, rhythmic impulses, and broad harmonic movement, twisting small bits of fabric into contemporary constructions. Their’s will not be a tribute to Malik’s data, however an extension of his experiments. The place he elicited new concepts from musicians of various traditions, حمد [Ahmed] distills his compositions by way of a collective training that features concepts gleaned from numerous sources: Boo, Johannson, Radigue, et al.
After irregularly acting at festivals and small live shows for a number of years, the group launched its first report, Ahmed New Jazz Creativeness, in 2017. They’ve since launched 4 extra albums to rising essential discover. The group hardly ever excursions however will make long-overdue stops within the US in 2025, in New York and on the Large Ears Competition in Knoxville.
Bradford Bailey
Pat Thomas performing with حمد [Ahmed] at Version Competition, Stockholm, Sweden, 2022
Bradford Bailey
Joel Grip performing with حمد [Ahmed] at Version Competition, Stockholm, Sweden, 2022
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Seymour Wright performing with حمد [Ahmed] at Version Competition, Stockholm, Sweden, 2022
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Antonin Gerbal performing with حمد [Ahmed] at Version Competition, Stockholm, Sweden, 2022
In 2022 حمد [Ahmed] carried out 5 live shows at Stockholm’s now defunct Version Competition, and this April the pageant’s founder, John Chantler, launched the fabric from their residency on his label Fönstret. (I additionally carried out on the pageant and contributed a brief essay to the discharge’s liner notes.) Large Magnificence is a strong field set of 5 discs—clocking in between forty-five and fifty minutes every—that doc the band pushing the recognizable parts of Malik’s music to their restrict. Thomas and Grip mushroom and shatter his compositions into uncooked blasts of noise and percussive harmonies, whereas the rhythm part swings ridiculously quick for a formidably very long time. Malik’s originals are, the critic Lee Rice Epstein writes, “luxuriated in, realized anew, and expanded upon like a wave receding from a shore and echoing back through countless incoming breakers.” However the actual achivement of Large Magnificence is that حمد [Ahmed] detonate Malik’s creations with out shedding the fragile thread of his imaginative and prescient.
“Oud Blues,” carried out on the third evening of the pageant, is a working example. On the 1961 recording, the cellist Calo Scott walks a medium-fast blues with Cyrille whereas Malik dances a joyful bebop traces on the oud for two-plus minutes. That’s it. Its simplicity virtually precludes its declare to being a composition. But حمد [Ahmed] makes a complete set-length efficiency out of it. Grip begins by referencing Scott’s strolling line at a barely sooner clip. Wright approximates Cyrille’s high-hat two-and-four with percussive tongue slaps on his saxophone reed. Gerbal softly merges with the groove whereas Thomas coats the music with thick, colourful harmonies in a dissonant model of the “locked-hand” approach: the best way jazz pianists of the Nineteen Thirties performed the melody with the pinky of their proper hand whereas harmonizing it with the opposite 9 fingers. Sometimes Wright leaves off his reed-popping to roar a impolite honk that will be comical if it didn’t swing so arduous.
On the set’s virtuosic peak, they play 4 variations of Malik’s blues in 4 completely different tempos. Thomas continues to be deep within the Thirties; Wright stubbornly locks into the shriek of late-Sixties “fire music”; Grip lays down a driving vamp that wouldn’t be misplaced in New York jazz golf equipment immediately; and Gerbal covers the band in a luminous mid-Fifties hard-bop sheen. This era-hopping is deliberate. In an essay for the Finnish journal WeJazz, Wright explains that the group undertakes a “deliberate stretching, a study, and a synthesis across several living traditions and communities of practice.”2
حمد [Ahmed] carried out a special Malik tune every evening in Stockholm. On the primary evening’s model of “El Haris (Anxious),” from Jazz Sahara, they use particles of melody to construct to an rapturous free jazz climax. On “Nights on Saturn,” from the second evening, Thomas and Wright consult with the unique melody from The Music of… in several tempos and keys. “African Bossa Nova,” veers from the snaking dance of the Sounds of Africa unique to a sequence of manic repetitions harking back to Julius Eastman. And the ultimate evening’s “Rooh (The Soul),” from East Meets West (1959), turns into an elegiac, droning tribute to the free-jazz cellist Abdul Wadud, who had handed that day.
The synthesis of concepts will not be uncommon in jazz; it could be one among its defining options. However Ahmed Abdul-Malik didn’t add Center Jap devices to his data merely to entry a novel sound. His music has a palpable sense of intent: it’s looking and unfinished, anxious and thrilling, life-affirming and maybe life-changing. حمد [Ahmed] honor him by bringing their broad data in and out of doors the jazz custom to bear on his compositions—discovering their very own “ultimate truth.”
