AHMED - Sama’a (Audition)

The Ahmed project was born out of a desire to bring back into the light the work of Ahmed Abdul-Malik, an African-American jazz musician from Brooklyn. Born Jonathan Tim Jr. to Caribbean immigrant parents, Abdul-Malik was a double bassist and oud player who managed to fuse the language of jazz with the traditions of North Africa and the Middle East. After studying violin, piano, cello and bass from a young age, he immersed himself in Arabic, Syrian and West African sounds.

Having converted to Islam and taken the name Ahmed Abdul-Malik, he sought to redefine his Black identity through a sonic expression that had always explored the grafting of jazz onto Arabic timbres, pushing the African-American musical language toward new sonic geographies. Over the course of his career he played alongside giants like Art Blakey, John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk, and was among the first to lead sessions incorporating oud and non-Western rhythms, especially on his 1958 album "Jazz Sahara".

The group Ahmed draws directly on this material, taking it as the starting point for a reinterpretation that reworks those classics through contemporary improvisational idioms. Joel Grip turns the double bass into both shield and launchpad; Pat Thomas grafts in a piano that wasn't part of the original, shifting the centre of gravity of the whole operation. What emerges is an avant-garde jazz weave, a free-form momentum that nods more to Cecil Taylor and Peter Brotzmann than to any notion of world music — a notion that, with the instruments replaced, is effectively absent: a choice that manages to sidestep any accusation of cultural appropriation.

Scathing and convulsive, the album's four reinterpretations wrap around and overlap one another in a trance of obsessive lines, with the performers — armed too with a ferocious Antonin Gerbal on drums and a shrill sax played by Seymour Wright — triggering genuine timbral detonations. It's an unbridled catharsis, with architectures that are at times disorienting, at others cyclical with an almost maniacal persistence. As unpredictable as Pollock-like entropy, what emerges is an euphoric work of pure hypnotic delirium and one of the most astonishing releases in contemporary jazz.

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16/12/2025