Yazz Ahmed - Polyhymnia (2024 UK Night Time Stories Numbered Orange 2LP)

Yazz Ahmed - Polyhymnia | 2LP - 2024 UK Night Time Stories, Limited Numbered Orange Vinyl (ALNLP76W, one of 1000)

Yazz Ahmed is a British-Bahraini trumpeter and flugelhornist who folds the Arabic music of her heritage into contemporary jazz, quarter-tones and maqam and all. Polyhymnia grew out of a 2015 Tomorrow's Warriors commission for a piece to mark International Women's Day at the Southbank Centre. She named it after the Greek muse and built a suite of six long pieces, each honouring a woman or group who pushed for change. "Lahan al-Mansour" is for Haifaa al-Mansour, Saudi Arabia's first female film director. "Ruby Bridges" takes the six-year-old who desegregated a New Orleans school. "One Girl Among Many" folds in Malala Yousafzai's 2013 United Nations speech. "2857" is the number of the Montgomery bus Rosa Parks was arrested on, "Deeds Not Words" the motto of the Suffragettes, and "Barbara" a tribute to the saxophonist Barbara Thompson. Ahmed plays it with a large London-scene ensemble, her trumpet curling through eastern-tinged horn writing and washes of electronics.

One of the most ambitious records to come out of the London jazz scene, praised widely and named among Jazzwise's best jazz albums of 2019. The band reads like a roll-call of that scene, with Nubya Garcia and Camilla George on saxophones, Shirley Tetteh on guitar and Sarah Tandy on keys among some twenty-five other players. Reviewers kept reaching for Miles Davis and Gil Evans's Sketches of Spain to describe the way Ahmed's trumpet floats over the ensemble, though the Bahraini colours are hers alone.

This is the 2024 reissue on Night Time Stories, a double LP pressed on orange vinyl and individually numbered, limited to one thousand copies.