Collection: Yazz Ahmed

Yazz Ahmed arrived at the trumpet by accident and by inheritance simultaneously. When she returned to London from Bahrain at nine years old and started at a new school, she was asked which instrument she wanted to play. Her maternal grandfather, Terry Brown, had been a jazz trumpeter in the 1950s, and that fact determined the choice. The music that followed from it has spent fifteen years refusing to stay in one place: jazz, Arabic folk music, electronics, Kaoss Pad manipulation, quarter-tone flugelhorn, and a compositional ambition that keeps producing works too large for a small ensemble and too personal to feel like academic world music fusion. She graduated from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, worked alongside Radiohead and These New Puritans, and released her debut "Finding My Way Home" (Suntara, 2011) before the wider world caught up. "La Saboteuse" (Naim, 2017), named for the inner voice of self-sabotage she decided to give a character and confront directly, reached number 18 on Bandcamp's top 100 albums across all genres and won The Wire's Jazz Album of the Year. "Polyhymnia" (Ropeadope, 2019), a suite dedicated to courageous women across history including Rosa Parks, Malala Yousafzai and the first female Saudi film director Haifaa al-Mansour, won the Jazz FM Album of the Year and an Ivor Novello Award for Innovation. "A Paradise in the Hold" (2025), a decade-in-the-making project that introduced voice for the first time, drew on traditional Bahraini wedding poems and the songs of the pearl divers. She has been commissioned by Blue Note Records and the BBC. Ahmed has described her own music as "psychedelic Arabic jazz."