Yazz Ahmed - Finding My Way Home (2024 Night Time Stories Light Blue Vinyl LP, Numbered)

Yazz Ahmed - Finding My Way Home | Vinyl LP - Night Time Stories (ALNLP74W, limited numbered light-blue reissue)

Yazz Ahmed has become one of the most singular voices in British jazz, a trumpeter and composer who weaves the maqam scales and rhythms of her Bahraini heritage into the music to create what she calls psychedelic Arabic jazz. Finding My Way Home, first released in 2011 and reissued here on vinyl for the first time, is where that journey begins. It is an early, exploratory record, quieter and more intimate than the lush albums that made her name, and much of it consists of spontaneous duo improvisations between her trumpet and Janek Gwizdala's bass, pieces conjured in the moment and named afterward. Around those miniatures sit fuller compositions that already hint at where she was heading: "Wah-Wah Sowahwah" and the ten-minute title track bring in Arabic percussion, cello and the bass clarinet of Shabaka Hutchings, blending jazz harmony with the colours and inflections of the Gulf. It is the sound of a musician finding her voice, tentative in places but unmistakably her own, and it rewards anyone who has followed where she went next.

Ahmed would go on to make La Saboteuse and Polyhymnia, the albums that established her internationally, but this debut has been hard to find for years, available only on a long-out-of-print CD, so this reissue is a genuine event for anyone building a collection of the current British scene. Night Time Stories have given it a proper vinyl issue, and this is the numbered limited pressing on light-blue vinyl, one of only a thousand copies.