{"title":"Ahmed","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"samaa-audition","title":"Sama'a (Audition)","description":"\u003cp\u003eKnown for their exhilarating live-to-record albums such as last year's critically acclaimed Wood Blues and Giant Beauty, سماع] Sama'a] (Audition) is the first of two releases that will surface after [Ahmed]’s first studio recording sessions at North London’s The Fish Factory in early 2025.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSince 2014, [Ahmed] أحمد have excavated and re-imagined the music of Ahmed Abdul-Malik, in an ever ongoing search for future music. Over a decade on, the group were given the opportunity to set up in the studio for the first time and, with the aid of meticulous engineer Benedic Lamdin, سماع] Sama'a] (Audition) is Ahmed’s most detailed work to date. The Fish Factory is renowned for its high-ceilinged live room and superb piano - giving the quartet the ability to hone in on recording techniques and equipment choices, without having to split into booths or don headphones and lose any group dynamic. Moreover, the studio afforded very different listening proximities and sight-lines than their live band-stand positions, and for the first time [Ahmed] were able to make choices for playback and record listeners rather than for a live performance and audience - a very different emotional and aesthetic dialogue. Astonishingly, this was the first time the group have been able to sit and listen back to their music together between takes. What emerged is an iterative, developmental, explorative suite of music.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFastidious fans may recognise the album's tracklisting as that of Ahmed Abdul-Malik’s Jazz Sahara. After his success collaborating with the pianists Thelonious Monk and Randy Weston, Jazz Sahara was the first record Abdul-Malik made as a leader and was released in 1958. It used the flame of late Fifties jazz to light the wick of North African folk music and acted as a reminder of the Arabic origins of jazz, creating a distinct, unique sound that was far beyond its time. In Malik’s Jazz Sahara, there is no piano. The ongoing work of each member of [Ahmed] then is to think differently, to wonder how the music will work and to take a risk on trying it out - an extraordinarily compelling feat of imagination. Using group improvisation strategies and recording in single takes, سماع [Sama'a] (Audition) tackled the full suite of Jazz Sahara in just one session, with ‘Ya Annas [Oh, People’] and ‘Isma'a [Listen’] being previously unrecorded. 'Farah 'Alaiyna’, also released on 2019’s Super Majnoon, sounds unrecognisable - the slow, heady stomp and repeated phrasing of 2019’s embryonic [Ahmed] having been blast furnaced and sped up four-fold. The result is four kaleidoscopic, relative miniatures that move, unfold and re-imagine at a very different scale and proportion than [Ahmed]’s previous records. It’s a dizzying, euphoric music and an extraordinary record of a group moving through space-time like no other.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Otoroku","offers":[{"title":"2LP - Black","offer_id":53687917609291,"sku":"R4277-1016","price":32.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"CD","offer_id":53687917642059,"sku":"R4277-2327","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/ROKU046-cover-web.jpg?v=1761042661"},{"product_id":"play-monk","title":"Play Monk","description":"\u003cp\u003eAfter 6 albums re-imagining the work of Ahmed Abdul-Malik, أحمد] Ahmed] turn to the material of Malik’s bandmate Thelonious Monk in the group's ongoing search for future music. Before going on to develop his own groundbreaking approach to jazz, Ahmed Abdul-Malik worked in Thelonious Monk’s late 1950’s quartets - appearing on seminal Monk recordings: Thelonious In Action (1958) and Misterioso (1958), and the more recently unearthed Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall (2005). Abdul-Malik and Monk share a critical engagement with time - specifically in challenging its linear trajectory and offering sites and modes of synthesis and rupture instead. In their music, fragments of time are scattered and re-arranged in the present, an idea central too to the project of أحمد [Ahmed]. Over several decades, all four members of أحمد] Ahmed] have engaged with Monk’s standards in various individual and collective ways, but Play Monk, recorded in the same three-day London studio sessions as Sama’a (Audition), is the first released documentation of the group's versions of Monk’s music which began with a spontaneous interpretation of ‘Evidence’ in Novara, Italy, 2023. Across 2CDs, أحمد] Ahmed] atomize Monk’s ‘standards’ - transforming each composition into a shifting quantum time artifact. The melodic, harmonic, rhythmic and spatial gestures of each piece become complex vernacular forms, creating a dialogue in time and a (red)shifting lens through which to view our material present. Into the fissures of Monk’s form, أحمد] Ahmed] pour their own play - colliding and dancing with Duke Ellington, Cecil Taylor, Caribbean diasporic music, European improvisation and Jah Shaka in their pursuit of future music. “Monk’s music is not played so much as grasped, condensed and catapulted through the vagaries of time,” writes Fielding Hope. “Monk famously used to dance in circles. In flight from the numerical bind, أحمد] Ahmed] make music that sounds like it could float on forever.”\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Otoroku","offers":[{"title":"2CD","offer_id":56975164375371,"sku":"R4360-0545","price":22.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/ROKU047_2CD_Sleeve_web.jpg?v=1775586584"}],"url":"https:\/\/shop.roughtrade.com\/fr\/collections\/ahmed.oembed","provider":"Rough Trade","version":"1.0","type":"link"}