Well, for some while jazz has been in a state of 'Waiting for Godot' – like Vladimir and Estragon in Samual Beckett's famous play, American jazz is waiting for Godot to arrive in the form of the latest major development. As saxophone virtuoso Branford Marsalis explained: “Who knows where jazz is heading? Some guy nobody’s ever heard of could arrive at any moment and blow us all away!” The implication that change will come from America, the land of its birth, is a given.

But things are never as cut and dried as they seem. You only have to listen to trumpeter and composer Yazz Ahmed’s two critically acclaimed albums La Saboteuse (2017) and Polyhymnia (2019) to understand why. While they are part of the universal language of jazz, they are also an expression of Yazz’s unique cultural identity. Of British-Bahraini descent, her early years were spent in Bahrain, her formative years in England where she pursued a music education, first at Kingston University, then the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, where she graduated with a Masters degree.

“When I left the Guildhall I formed my own band, I did little gigs with my band to an audience of one! I started small, I paid my dues, did all sorts of strange gigs and lots of function gigs and DJ gigs, and did a lot of teaching”

“I like to reflect and embrace my mixed heritage which is something I'm very proud of,” she says. “I do this through musical styles – the characteristics of Arabic music, so the scales and the rhythms, but also the essence of jazz, so that's the improvisation, and some of the jazz harmonies.

"It's been a long journey finding my own true voice. For many years I was very influenced by American jazz, and it took me a while to realise that, how would I put this, it didn’t feel genuine to me because, yeah, I'm not American”.

Ahmed is the UK’s most stylish, sophisticated and prominent example of a major global trend that dear old Vladimir and Estragon are still waiting to glimpse in America. She’s a musician whose ideas and style are drawn from the life experiences of the ‘inner woman’, whose spirit, sparkle and spontaneity strives to express her identity. In the crowded marketplace of jazz, she has created a space for her music to be heard, music that is rich in meaning and communicates across musical genres with mature and well-constructed compositions, and with improvisations that possess consistency and continuity unusual in a young player.

To understand what’s going on here, a little contextual detail is necessary. Jazz became a global phenomenon in the 1920s, the first great musical trend to be communicated by recordings that crossed international borders unhindered and were studied, assimilated and emulated. Inevitably over time world class jazz musicians began to emerge from beyond American shores, the first significant example was Django Reinhardt from Belgium, and by the 1960s Britain’s John McLaughlin and Tubby Hayes, Denmark’s Nils-Henning Ørsted-Pederson, Austria’s Joe Zawinul, and Poland’s Michal Urbaniak were among musicians from the global jazz community who were, at the very least, the equal of the American stars.

And while many musicians around the globe were quite happy to play in the adopted voices of the great American master musicians, some, like Ahmed, began to feel the need to reflect their own individual musical and cultural identity and outlook in jazz. This is called ‘glocalisation’, where local musicians adapt the music to reflect their own social and cultural concerns by introducing local elements into jazz, such as folkloric, classical or even local pop music influences to produce new meanings in local contexts. For glocalisation to take place, a musician needs to be fluent in playing American jazz – in other words, have a thorough understanding of the rules of the game.

As Yazz puts it: “When I left the Guildhall I formed my own band, very bebop inspired, I would write music for that group, inspired by the certain chord progressions or sort of types of melodies, but with my own twist, so they weren’t sort of obvious copies! I did little gigs with my band to an audience of one! You know, started small, I paid my dues, I did all sorts of strange gigs and lots of function gigs and DJ gigs, and did a lot of teaching.”

Yazz Ahmed (photo: Seb Peters)

Yazz’s maternal grandfather played trumpet with Tubby Hayes and with the Johnny Dankworth Seven, and went on to become a record producer who worked with Hayes and Graham Collier. He proved to be an ideal mentor to introduce her to British jazz.

“I did get a nice British jazz education when I was growing up,” says Yazz, with Kenny Wheeler emerging as a particular favourite. “My interest in the music of Kenny Wheeler brought me, just by accident, really, to [the album] Blue Camel.” This album, by Lebanese oud player Rabih Abou-Khalil from 1992, is itself a good example of glocalisation, with Khalil successfully bringing his native Lebanese folkloric music into the forum of jazz alongside Wheeler, Charlie Mariano, Steve Swallow and percussion.

“That was a moment where I suddenly realised, ‘Oh I can, I can bring these two flavours together, that, you know, really embrace my mixed heritage', and I was really intrigued by this. This combination encouraged me to start my own experiments and that's all developed and as I've grown I've learned new things”.

This was more than the proverbial penny dropping – it was an epiphany and a response to the deep need to express individual identity in jazz, as many musicians around the globe have done, and are doing. As Italian jazz legend and ECM artist Giuanluigi Trovesi put it: “I think it is important to say there are two ways to play jazz, people who play straight jazz and people who try and import something of their own culture.” Similarly, the German pianist Julia Hülsmann, also an ECM artist says, “I am a European person and it is important to me, you can’t escape the culture you were brought up in and I wouldn’t want to”.

It’s a view echoed by the Japanese pianist Hiromi: “In music the culture is there, although I never try and put in artificially, but it’s there. I grew up in Japan and I was born in Japan so…” Norwegian saxophonist Jan Garbarek also observes, “What I see as a major force in this music are players from any part of the world…now finding their own direction, influenced by their own culture, but still using strong basic elements of jazz”.

Intrigued by these possibilities, Yazz immersed herself in a period of intensive study: “I had some lessons, actual Arabic music lessons, with a wonderful violinist called Sunny Shah, who plays with Natacha Atlas. I was gathering all this information – I went to the library, got a load of books about Arabic music and really studied and listened to the music that I took for granted when I was living in Bahrain – the music of the pearl divers, the old folk music I was surrounded by in Bahrain, but didn't really think much of it at the time, it was just there. And as I started to become aware of my identity that's when I really realised that this music was very important to me”.

Standing back for a moment, we see that glocalisation breaks down into a series of unique musical encounters, each culturally specific as the glocal went global. But for Yazz, having a concept and putting it into practice are two quite different things. Her first steps in taking her new musical path came in 2011 with her debut album, appropriately titled Finding My Way Back Home.

Probing deeper into her new quest, she collaborated with the musicians of Transglobal Underground at the London Cultural Olympiad in 2012 on In Transit. Other commissions followed, including one for Birmingham Jazzlines where she was able to incorporate the folk music of the Bahraini pearl divers and traditional Bahraini wedding songs into a suite called 'Alhaan Al Siduri', which was premiered in October 2015 at the CBSO Centre in Birmingham and subsequently performed at the Bahrain International Music Festival in 2016, which marked her musical debut in the land of her father.

Her growing profile led to perhaps her most significant commission yet – from Gary Crosby and Janine Irons’ Tomorrow’s Warriors – to write a suite about powerful and inspirational women, from which emerged Polyhymnia in 2015, performed at the WOW! festival in London by the Nu-Civilisation Orchestra on International Women's Day. In 2017, she recorded and released her second album La Saboteuse which was Wire magazine’s Album of the Year and featured her quarter-tone flugelhorn – specially made to more authentically reproduce the 'in-between' tones of Arabic music not found in the ‘well tempered scale’ of Western music.

Following important commissions from the likes of the Ligeti Quartet and Open University, her third album Polyhymnia was released in 2019. Recorded with an expanded ensemble, Yazz explains, “During the recording process I began incorporating new elements and drawing on a wider pool of artists, including members of my own Hafla band, alongside some of my favourite musicians working on the London scene.”

A six-movement suite devoted to six women of exceptional qualities with whom she felt “a strong bond”, it became Jazz FM’s Album of the Year. By now she could look back on a string of recordings and performances with the likes of Radiohead, Lee Perry, ABC, Swing Out Sister, Joan as Police Woman, Tarek Yamani and Amel Zen, and These New Puritans.

Then Covid struck. When the first lockdown was announced in March 2020, Yazz says, “It really knocked me sideways. I became very anxious, and I found it very hard to sleep – all my gigs had disappeared in a matter of, you know, two days, and I panicked. I thought, ‘How on earth am I going to survive?’ But I was very fortunate to receive a few commissions – I got a commission from Jazzlines, from [online channel] Adult Swim, to write a piece of music for the New Jazz Century playlist, from the Festival of New Trumpet music in New York, and a commissioned performance for Boiler Room TV. So I did a lot at home, including home recordings, I had to learn a bit more about technology, music technology and how to create backing tracks for me to play along with. I learned a bit more about programming and recording techniques and how to film a performance – a new concept for me, thinking about stage design and stuff like that, so it turned out to be very productive. I've learned a lot in terms of music production and composing techniques. The main thing is, I’ve kept busy, getting through it all”.

Next up is Yazz’s biggest performance to date. On 21 November she will appear with her quintet and the BBC Concert Orchestra in a concert called Fusing Forces as part of the EFG London Jazz Festival.

“It's a collaboration between my quintet and the BBC Concert Orchestra [BBCCO], who will be playing my compositions specially arranged for the event. I've never written for orchestra, so I have some lovely people orchestrating my pieces with me, such as Tim Garland and Guy Barker, in all nine pieces of mine. The director of the BBCCO came up with a theme about the sea – diving, swimming, all kinds of marine culture… So some of the pieces are from suites that I wrote and I think there will be two pieces that the BBCCO is going to play that also reflect the marine theme. It's going to be amazing. Hearing a full orchestra fattening
up my tunes!”

Fusing Forces presents glocalisation writ large, yet culturally specific to Yazz’s own cultural heritage and part of a greater whole, be it South African Township jazz, Nigerian Hi-Life, Nordic jazz, Afro-Cuban jazz, Portuguese jazz and Fado, Hungarian jazz's gypsy influences, Azeri mugham (local folkloric) influences and so on; which, taken together represent a major evolutionary shift in jazz. Containing properties not present in American jazz, these differences are attracting attention in a music that has arguably shown no significant evolutionary development since the 1970s. For many jazz musicians, the music is no longer conceptualised in terms of American styles but in terms of its extension into the local; a particularly fruitful area for growth, something that has not emerged in isolation from US jazz, but rather from the interface between the global – American styles that have gone around the world via recordings, gigs and jazz education – and the local, with the notion of 'authenticity' now being expressed in terms of local significance.

Yazz’s music, now being celebrated by the BBCCO, places her at the forefront of this major shift whose significance is not lost on guitarist Pat Metheny: “I think the globalisation of jazz is a real interesting break; it’s harder to support the myth of jazz as ‘American Classical Music’. Jazz is now a vehicle for people everywhere to find themselves.”

Indeed, as Yazz herself says: “As I started to become aware of my identity, that's when I really realised that this music, this direction I am following, is very important to me – this music has helped me identify who I am.”

Yazz Ahmed and the BBC Concert Orchestra play the Queen Elizabeth Hall on 21 Nov as part of the EFG London Jazz Festival: efglondonjazzfestival.org.uk

This article originally appeared in the November 2021 issue of Jazzwise. Never miss an issue – subscribe today