أحمد [Ahmed]

Giant Beauty

Genre: JAZZ / FUSION

5CD BOX

Boomkat Product Review:

Clocking in at over four hours (!), 'Giant Beauty' documents a five night performance from pianist Pat Thomas, bassist Joel Grip, drummer Antonin Gerbal and saxophonist Seymour Wright, who barrel through the canon of under-appreciated US jazz innovator Ahmed Abdul-Malik. Seriously physical, transcendent material, it's crucial listening for anyone intrigued by the fertile space between hard bop, free jazz, Arabic music and West African modes.

Abdul-Malik was a complex, quietly inspiring figure who impressed his interest in West Asian Islamic cultures and Afican musics onto the mutable framework of hard bop. A prodigious multi-instrumentalist who could play violin, tuba, bass, piano and cello, he'd come up in Brooklyn, playing bass with various ensembles while he was barely out of high school. And when he converted to Islam, he dedicated himself to understanding the culture on a deeper level, learning Arabic fluently and experimenting with instruments such as the oud and the qanun. During the 1950s Abdul-Malik's notoriety grew significantly thanks to his tenure playing with hard bop legend Art Blakey, but he was creatively undernourished, desperate to find a way to integrate the sounds he was hearing from New York's Arab community into jazz. So after working with Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane (he played on one of the iconic 'Live at the Village Vanguard' sessions), he was encouraged to start his own ensemble and champion a fusion that's still out on its own, best absorbed on sets like 1958's 'Jazz Sahara' and 'Sounds of Africa' from 1962.

Thomas, Grip, Gerbal and Wright formed [Ahmed] to celebrate Abdul-Malik's outsized but under-sung contribution to jazz, playing a raft of shows and releasing the ecstatic 'Super Majnoon' last year. But 'Giant Beauty' is an even more boundless exploration of the canon, recorded at long-running Stockholm art hot-spot Fylkingen's Festival of Other Music in 2022. On each of the event's five nights, [Ahmed] performed a different composition, stretching comparatively brief tracks like the six-minute 'African Bossa Nova' into sprawling album-length interrogations that adhere to three core rules: No discussion, no plan and no solos. [Ahmed] slim down the sonic palette on their almost 50-minute version of 'Nights on Saturn', losing Bilal Abdurrahman's haunting Korean reeds and Abdul-Malik's dextrous oud flutters and filling the gaps with fluidly evolving, energetic phrasing. Not a cover, exactly, it's described by the band as a process of "versioning", deconstructing the component elements and working out how to capture the essence without following the set path. Thomas uses his piano almost percussively, hitting the keys as if he's in communion with drummer Gerbal, who winds dizzy rolls around the dissonant crashes. And Wright wrings his alto horn into an overblown wail, mirroring the original track's non-Western arsenal without mimicking it completely.

Abdul-Malik's recording of 'Oud Blues' is a restrained slow-burner, with its walking double-bass met on the fringe with twanging, plectrum-hit oud vamps. In the hands of [Ahmed] it dissolves into a different universe; the bassline's still there to draw us in, but the quartet use this simply as a jumping-off point, lavishing it with ASMR alto smacks and frenetic hard bop piano phrases that evolve into crashing waves of militaristic drumming and swirling, dissonant horns. And there's little of the characteristic, levitational swing of the original left on [Ahmed]'s version of 'African Bossa Nova', that the band tease into an extended riot of shifting rhythms and freeform skronk that periodically turns on itself, sponging up some of Abdul-Malik's recognizable themes before wringing them out onto the ground. Recorded by John Chantler and bundled with a book featuring texts from Silvia Tarozzi, Magnus Granberg, Nate Wooley, Valerie Mol, Pär Thörn and Lars Grip and drawings from Guillaume and Aliocha Delcourt, it's a monumental package that helps affirm Abdul-Malik's rightful place in history - jazz heads, you won't wanna miss this one.

5CD BOX (5)

Back in stock - Die-cut rigid slipcase, 5 CDs in double card sleeves plus 96 page book including an interview between Seymour Wright and John Chantler. Limited Edition of 500 copies.

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