Surveying the history of Arabic jazz, it becomes clear that it has been born out of emigration, cultural exchange and openness to new influences. It has also been a vehicle to showcase the beauty of Arabic civilization, not only the music but also the Islamic spirituality and Sufi philosophy that often underpin it.
Gabriel Polley
Yazz Ahmed’s new album A Paradise in the Hold is a love letter to one of her two homelands, Bahrain. It is undoubtedly her most ambitious work yet, a decade in the making since she traveled to the Arab Gulf state to compose a suite themed around Siduri, an ancient Mesopotamian demi-goddess who inhabits a paradisical island some scholars identify with Bahrain. The time and care spent is evident in the album’s complexity, 70 minutes in which Ahmed’s jazz trumpet lines pierce wavelike basslines, dreamlike vocals in Arabic and English, and electronic soundscapes.
At the start of our conversation, Ahmed apologizes for being a little tired — the previous night, she performed at London’s legendary jazz club Ronnie Scott’s, arriving home at one in the morning. But my mention of the new album’s reception quickly dispels any lingering bleariness. “I didn’t expect the music to be so loved,” she admits. “I mainly write music that I’m interested in. The response has been astonishing — it’s given me the confidence to share my stories.”
Stories are at the heart of A Paradise in the Hold. There are myths of Siduri, and Al Naddaha, an Egyptian siren who leads men to a watery grave in the Nile. There are folktales of Bahrain’s sailors who, for centuries, dived to the seabed for pearls, and embarked on epic trading voyages across the Arabian Sea and Persian Gulf. But there is also a more personal story, Ahmed’s own, of a childhood between two homelands.
“As someone of mixed heritage, home feels like two places, but also like I don’t really have a home,” Ahmed explains. “When I moved to the UK from Bahrain aged nine in the early 1990s, I had to adapt to British society. A lot of people were, and still are, not so tolerant of people from the Middle East. When I watched films, the bad guys always looked like my Dad. I really downplayed where I was from, and lost my connection with my Bahraini side.”
That, thankfully, has long since changed. Now, Ahmed is frequently described as a British-Bahraini musician, a dual identity which makes her stand out on London’s jazz scene. When asked if she’d ever rather swap this label for being known as “just” a jazz artist, Ahmed gives an answer correlating with the feminist themes in her music. “I embrace it, and I’m very proud of mixing my two cultures together in my music. But also, it helps me avoid a quiet sexism in jazz. There’s a lot of musicians who are labeled ‘female trumpet player,’ ‘female saxophone player.’ It’s diminishing of the person. You never hear ‘male trumpet player.’”
Ahmed’s sound is unmistakably Arabic jazz, but it is distinct from much of the genre as will be explored below. While many Arabic jazz artists have taken inspiration from the music of Egypt and the Eastern Mediterranean, Ahmed instead draws on Bahraini music. “It’s a real mixture of different cultures, mainly because of where Bahrain is located,” she says. “There are influences from South Asia, Iran, East Africa and the rest of the Middle East. There’s a lot of chanting, which makes it quite spiritual, though not necessarily in a religious way. Lyrically, there are songs about seeing the demons of the sea, missing your loved ones.” When asked for recommendations of other Bahraini artists, Ahmed suggests “a band called Majaz. They mix jazz, North African music, but the overall sound is very Bahraini — it’s got the lilting grooves that are very typical in the region, and the particular instruments used in traditional songs.”
From the softly clicking trumpet keys at the opening of A Paradise in the Hold, the listener is keenly aware not only of the notes Ahmed plays, but also the instrument she plays them on. The trumpet is both Ahmed’s vehicle to explore the intersections of jazz and Arabic music, and something that presents a technical challenge. “The trickiest thing is to get the quartertones, the ‘blue notes’ in Arabic music,” Ahmed explains. “I’ve been trained in western harmony, so even though I grew up listening to Arabic music, quartertones are very difficult to play, especially on my trumpet. But I try to bring in scales that you hear in western music, which you also get a lot in Arabic music.
“Because the trumpet is close to the technique of singing — we create notes with throat and tongue positions — I do my best to think like a singer as well. I use vibrato to add character to long notes, to try to think like Fairuz.” Ahmed laughs at mentioning the legendary Lebanese singer, modestly adding “Obviously not as skilled! But I try to emulate that, which helps with the sound.” Considering the influence of jazz composition on Fairuz’s chief songwriters the Rahbani brothers, Ahmed drawing on Fairuz for her trumpet technique demonstrates how Arabic jazz has traveled full circle.
From جَسَّ, or jassa to jazz
The mingling of jazz with Arabic music is nothing new. It has been claimed that the term “jazz” itself — its mysterious linguistic origins much debated — could derive from Arabic. Writing in 1939, the British musicologist Henry George Farmer pondered whether
One might hazard a suggestion that the modern musical term jazz may be of African origin, being derived from the Arabic jaz‘, and that it passed through the Western Sudan into the […] lands from whence the supply of slaves for America came.
The British free experimentation pianist and electronics composer Pat Thomas, who combines avant garde jazz with Arab and Sufi traditions, has endorsed this theory, noting that the Arabic verb جَسَّ, jassa, means to discover through touch — a fitting metaphor for jazz’s approach of musically probing at its subject in a way often more tactile than intellectual.
The transatlantic slave trade formed the bridge from part of the Islamic world to the land where jazz would be born. Many West African Muslims were enslaved and transported to America; some, like Fula Islamic scholar Omar ibn Said (born c. 1770 in modern Senegal, died 1864 in North Carolina), were highly literate in Arabic. While it’s easy to overstate the direct influence of African culture on early jazz, Arabic language and Islamic culture, as important influences on West African music, are indisputably part of the DNA of the music of the African diaspora in America, including jazz.
For decades, the Arab world was sometimes referenced in jazz compositions to evoke a mysterious, faraway land. Hence, one of the earliest jazz standards was the 1921 song “The Sheik of Araby,” its chorus replicating clichés of a primitive and eroticized “Orient”:
I’m the Sheik of Araby,
Your love belongs to me.
At night when you’re asleep,
Into your tent I’ll creep.
Nevertheless, when African-American jazz artists like Louis Armstrong or Duke Ellington stepped into the role of the titular Sheik, there was a knowing reference to their own ancestral land, geographically closer to the Arab world than the society to which history had carried them.
It would take until the late 1950s for a real crossover of jazz and Arabic music. African-American musicians became increasingly drawn to “Eastern” music and spirituality, both to enrich their musical vocabulary and as an antidote to the racial inequality, soulless consumerism and moral bankruptcy of the Jim Crow-era United States. Numerous jazz musicians converted to Islam, from the militant Black nationalism of the Nation of Islam to more inward-looking Sufi and Ahmadiyya sects, and some adopted Arabic names. Historian Robin Kelley writes
For most of these artists, conversion was primarily about worship, self-discipline, and about changing one’s identity, escaping the degradation of being “Negro” in order to become human and, for better or worse, exotic. However, the attraction towards Islam did not always lead these jazz artists to a particular interest in Arab and Islamic musical traditions.
It was double bassist and oud player Ahmed Abdul-Malik (1927–1993) who really pioneered Arabic jazz. While Abdul-Malik claimed that his father was Sudanese, Kelley asserts that Abdul-Malik’s parents emigrated from the Caribbean island Saint Vincent to New York. As a child, Abdul-Malik was exposed to the music of New York’s Arab diaspora. His adoption of an Arabic name accompanied his conversion to Ahmadiyya Islam in the late 1940s. In the 1950s, while playing bass alongside jazz luminaries, Abdul-Malik began studying the oud under Egyptian teachers at the urging of his friend, saxophonist and spiritual jazz progenitor John Coltrane.
Abdul-Malik’s first two records, Jazz Sahara (1958) and East Meets West (1960), represent the earliest examples of Arabic jazz. Abdul-Malik was helped by Arab musicians far from their homelands, who were part of the wave of Arab migration to the US in the early twentieth century. Alongside jazz instrumentation, Abdul-Malik introduces Arabic percussion, qanun (zither) played by Palestinian-American Jack Ghanaim, violin by Lebanese-American Naim Karacand, and of course his own oud. Abdul-Malik’s subsequent recordings feature less Arab influence, though on tracks such as the playful “Oud Blues” he continued to mix musical worlds. Despite declining health, Abdul-Malik continued to take oud lessons with the Palestinian maestro Simon Shaheen until days before his death.
Arabic jazz was further explored by a New York bandleader with whom Abdul-Malik toured Latin America in the early 1960s. Unlike jazz musicians who had previously flirted with Arabic music or Islamic spirituality, Herbie Mann was not African-American, but of Eastern European Jewish origin. On his 1967 album Impressions of the Middle East, his band placed jazz musicians including the late legendary jazz-funk vibraphonist Roy Ayers, alongside Egyptian qanun player Mohammad Elakkad (husband of the Jewish Egyptian actor and singer Souad Zaki), and Armenian-American clarinetist Hachig Kazarian and oud player Chick Ganimian. While the record’s first side features Mann’s trademark accessible jazz sound adorned with some Orientalist flourishes, its second side showcases a much richer excursion into the music of the immigrant artists’ homelands.
Until the late 1960s, Arabic jazz had been largely an American phenomenon, with non-Arab musicians enlisting Arab immigrants’ help. Instrumental in creating a jazz sound indigenous to the Arab world was a brigadier general in the Egyptian army. The cosmic jazz supremo Sun Ra and his band the Arkestra made an impromptu stop in Egypt in 1971, after a European tour. When their instruments failed to clear customs before their concert dates, Salah Ragab — the musical director of the Egyptian military, and a jazz drummer himself — loaned the visiting band replacements. This was the start of an enduring friendship, with strong inspiration from Ra on Ragab’s own recordings, big band jazz-meets-interplanetary psychedelia-meets-Arabic orchestration. During the 1970s, jazz-influenced sounds, from Lebanese disco to Sudanese funk, became popular across the Arab world.
By the 1990s, musicians from the Middle East and North Africa were frequently collaborating with western jazz artists. A particular inspiration to Yazz Ahmed is Lebanese oud player Rabih Abou-Khalil’s 1992 album Blue Camel. “That was the first time I heard jazz and Arabic music mixed together,” she reveals. “It featured my favorite trumpet player and composer, Kenny Wheeler. That’s how I discovered it, from my love of jazz. Discovering this record, I was like ‘Wow!’ It blew my mind. I didn’t think I could mix these two types of music together — it was incredible. That album really started my journey.”
Growing canon of Arabic jazz
Today, Arabic jazz is well established, with its own stars and subgenres. Iraqi-American trumpet player and vocalist Amir ElSaffar has won critical acclaim for blending Arabic maqamat musical scales since his 2007 debut Two Rivers. Also cited by Ahmed as a contemporary influence is French-Lebanese trumpet player Ibrahim Maalouf, whose reworking of Egyptian diva Umm Kulthoum’s classic “Alf Laila wa Laila,” the 2015 album Kalthoum, is a masterpiece. Bringing a very different sound is Naïssam Jalal, a French-Syrian flautist whose album Healing Rituals, released in 2023, is an aptly titled spiritual journey through a more pensive side of jazz. Lebanese band SANAM display the influence of avant garde free jazz on 2023’s Aykathani Malakon. The output of Palestinian musician and sound artist Dirar Kalash moves further toward free experimentation, sometimes shocking in its visceral sonic representation of the racial oppression afflicting Palestinians and African-Americans.
A Paradise in the Hold is a worthy addition to this growing canon of Arabic jazz. On the title track, the flowing horn improvization and electric piano are reminiscent of Bitches Brew-era Miles Davis. “Dancing Barefoot” shifts between time signatures, with much of the instrumentation falling away to leave a hauntingly beautiful interplay of vocal and trumpet. The standout “Though My Eyes Go to Sleep, My Heart Does Not Forget You,” which features handclaps in complex polyrhythms over grooving bass and brass, sounds like a jazz band jamming at a women’s celebration during an Arab wedding. Samples of Bahraini folk singing are to the fore in “Into the Night” and parts of “To the Lonely Sea,” blended seamlessly with electronica and dreamlike melodies.
Surveying the history of Arabic jazz, it becomes clear that it has been born out of emigration, cultural exchange and openness to new influences. It has also been a vehicle to showcase the beauty of Arabic civilization, not only the music but also the Islamic spirituality and Sufi philosophy that often underpin it. The musical, spiritual and political dimensions of Arabic jazz, as the genre has developed over almost seven decades, are clearly appreciated by Yazz Ahmed.
“I’m trying to do my part, as a musician who has a voice,” Ahmed says at the end of our interview. “I try to champion Bahraini women in particular, and show that Arab women don’t just do the diva thing — they play and create music that’s hard-hitting, not just stereotypically beautiful. It’s an ongoing journey, and I hope I’m opening people’s minds. Jazz music comes from struggle and freedom of expression, and that’s always something I always try to remember. I do my best to keep that going, and to tell my story.”
Anyone who listens to A Paradise in the Hold knows that she has succeeded. In this era of rising xenophobia in the west and colonial violence in the Arab world, Arabic jazz should also be seen as a valuable cultural form for challenging prejudice and overcoming misconceptions. It is truly music for the times in which we live.
