Tone Glow 141: [Ahmed]
The last in a series of five interviews with jazz quartet [Ahmed]. All four members of the group talk about Ahmed Abdul-Malik's brilliance and how performing in this group pushes them as artists.
All week, Tone Glow is hosting five different interviews in celebration of [Ahmed]’s two new albums, Giant Beauty and Wood Blues. The series will feature individual interviews with all four members and conclude with a group interview. The other interviews can be found here: Joel Grip, Pat Thomas, Seymour Wright, Antonin Gerbal.
[Ahmed]
[Ahmed] is a jazz quartet featuring Antonin Gerbal (drums), Joel Grip (double bass), Pat Thomas (piano), and Seymour Wright (saxophone). Their group is named after the legendary jazz bassist and oud player Ahmed Abdul-Malik, who performed with musicians like Art Blakey, Thelonious Monk, and John Coltrane. Abdul-Malik played on numerous recordings throughout the 1950s and 1960s, and released albums as a bandleader, including Jazz Sahara (1959) and East Meets West (1960). He was deeply concerned with finding ways to bridge different musical traditions, and was invested in learning about different cultures and people to ensure his music reflected that.
[Ahmed] has released multiple albums, including New Jazz Imagination (2017), Super Majnoon (2019), and Nights on Saturn (2021). Recently, they have released two new albums: Wood Blues and Giant Beauty. The former features a performance the quartet had at the Counterflows festival in Glasgow, while the latter is a five-disc box set featuring performances they had at the Edition Festival For Other Music in Sweden. Both releases were recorded in 2022. Joshua Minsoo Kim talked with [Ahmed] on March 8th, 2024 via Zoom to discuss their initial encounters with Abdul-Malik, the way that different venues shaped their performances, and how performing in this group pushes them as artists.
Joshua Minsoo Kim: Do you all remember, individually, when you first heard Ahmed Abdul-Malik’s music? What sort of things come to mind about your first encounter with his work?
Pat Thomas: I was 22, I think, when I first heard him. Matt Lewis, a drummer and a good friend of mine, brought this record that had “Nights on Saturn” and it just blew us away. I’ll never forget that experience to be honest.
Seymour Wright: For me it would have been on the two Monk records that were live at the Five Spot, Misterioso (1958) and Thelonious in Action (1958). And Coltrane’s Live at the Village Vanguard from ’61. I knew those because my parents had them when I was 12 or 13. I knew he played the oud as well because he played that with Coltrane. [Editor’s Note: Abdul-Malik is credited as playing the oud on Live at the Village Vanguard but plays the tambura]. Later, I heard Jazz Sahara (1959) or East Meets West (1960) when I was in my early 20s. My friend was writing a book about Lee Morgan and he got East Meets West and we listened to that together.
Joel Grip: My father had a lot of records and it was Misterioso at the Five Spot as well. I remember the tune really well—we would listen to it on the stereo at home. I was probably around 15. I didn’t really think of the bass player at the time, but what impressed me most was that it was really punchy and percussive. Later, I discovered where it was coming from, that it was from playing the oud and from this North African approach of playing the bass, and he incorporated that into the modern sound of Monk. I listened to that without researching, but later on, when we started playing in [Ahmed], I was looking through my father’s CDs and put on Misterioso again and was like, oh yeah, I remember this. And that’s when the threads started coming together. I got to know him, unconsciously, when I was in my teenage years and started playing the bass, but it was when I started playing in [Ahmed] that I started recognizing all this.
Antonin Gerbal: I discovered Ahmed Abdul-Malik when I was a teenager and it was through Misterioso too. I think it’s one of the most shocking albums I’ve heard, actually. The rhythm section of Ahmed Abdul-Malik and Roy Haynes is fantastic. So that’s how I heard about him the first time—it was through Monk’s world. And then later, around 20 years old, I discovered Jazz Sahara and East Meets West and it was very unusual compared to mainstream jazz that people talked about at music school. I associated Ahmed Abdul-Malik with Johnny Griffin, Ahmad Jamal, and Yusef Lateef—people in this era— but I only deeply explored Ahmed Abdul-Malik’s tunes through our band. Before that, it was less precise in my mind what he developed and discovered.
How do you feel like being in [Ahmed], then, has changed your understanding of Ahmed Abdul-Malik? You can speak to something specific, how you’re interfacing with your instrument, or to something more broadly.
Joel Grip: The first thing that comes to mind is the way it must have been on that slippery ice of inviting non-Western music and musicians and instruments into the bebop sound. To accept that mystery… he must have had a lot of energy. I have tried to understand who he was as a person, and I have maybe had experiences that are similar to him. I was in Senegal the last few months, going back and forth, and finding myself in a situation where I didn’t know how things were going to work. In this village where I was, there had never been a double bass before, so how was this music going to work? How were we going to mix these things? You enter a feeling of complete confusion but also of “yes, we have to go down this path of not knowing.”
He believed in these things. He and the other musicians involved may have gone through moments of uncertainty, but he believed in the notion of bringing unknown ideas together. That’s extremely valuable as an improviser, this idea of opening up doors. In doing these things, I think it has taken me closer to him. I may have gotten a small grasp on what he was doing in the ’50s of mixing these things and knowing it would work. Obviously my situation is completely different, but it is this idea of accepting the unknown and accepting that there is something new that can be found, that there is something more.
Seymour Wright: What Joel said resonates very strongly with me. What Ahmed Abdul-Malik was up to was a complex, synthetic experiment. What we’ve been doing is to approach that and think about it by doing our own version of a synthetic experiment. It’s been very humbling and illuminating and rewarding, and continues to be. I’ve really enjoyed trying to discover more through the interviews he did. It’s just another strand to things, but they’re not easy to find. They’re on sleeve notes and there are recordings and some DownBeat things. I remember [James] Spady, when we asked him to write the notes for Super Majnoon (2019), the first thing he did was email me and say, “Please send me all the interviews that Ahmed Abdul-Malik ever did.” And I was like, “Okay, here’s all the things I know about.”
It made me think that I should read all of them. I wanted to know everything that he had to say. People took the time to ask him and explore, and we should be familiar and read that. There’s an article about him playing with Cecil [Taylor] in 1959, and there are these things that emerge that make me think, “Wow, I hadn’t thought of that.” That aspect of things is also really fascinating. It’s like asking questions about what we understand to be the reception of jazz history, about how things happened in the past. Between us, what we’re doing is digging and asking questions. That’s something personally that I have found very compelling about what we’re up to—it is an investigation.
Antonin Gerbal: I think it’s great that we all have different experiences with this synthetic experiment. There are many aspects that pushed me into the unknown in terms of practical research, both musically and spiritually. With Ahmed Abdul-Malik, it is the way he conceptualizes repetition and rhythm and fragments. This encounter between Afro-American jazz and Middle Eastern music with different musicians—who come from different backgrounds—was very shocking for me as a drummer. One of the first impressions that I had was using the percussion in a traditional way and then the drum kit, which is a more recent instrument with its own tradition that’s maybe only a century old. I was thinking about how the cymbal was used, you know? I was thinking about the shape of swing and how it was infused in traditional rhythms. This encounter of traditions and modernities was very inspiring, and it’s very open, actually.
Pat Thomas: For me it’s just this concept of sound, and it’s influenced us in creating our own sound. He obviously had a vision and must have thought that this would work, sound-wise. With playing the piano, I would listen to these records and think about this concept of sound, that there was this idea that it would sound okay. We have created our own sound in forcing ourselves to figure out how to deal with this music. I don’t think any other band sounds like this, and maybe they don’t want to (laughter). But that sound really inspired us to look for our own, so I’m grateful to him for making that possible.
I want to mention a couple things I read in liner notes. In the liner notes for The Eastern Moods Of Ahmed Abdul-Malik (1963), he says, “The musician must be something of a scientist—one who investigates and tries to find the facts about basic things and about the unknown. It's up to the musician to elevate himself.” And then in the liner notes for The Music Of Ahmed Abdul-Malik (1962), he says, “Most of the things the musicians are searching for are old.” He then goes on to find a connection between the music of specific people and the rhythm of their language. I know that you had an early performance together as [Ahmed] in Hong Kong. Do you mind talking to me about that concert?
Pat Thomas: I personally think that Hong Kong was where we created our sound. It was quite a bizarre one in the sense that people were expecting a sort of dance group. They got us, and we were looking at each other like, best of luck dancing to us! But we did tighten up and we became a rhythm section by the end. When you have people in front of you trying to dance, you feel obliged to help them (laughter). The next day or the day after, we went into the studio and we wanted to develop those ideas. I think we were lucky that we didn’t just play a gig. The fact that we were in a studio afterwards was helpful, and that’s where we explored and recorded Super Majnoon. I really think that’s when we really started to work as a rhythm section. The gig was great, and what was really nice was that David Grubbs and Taku Unami were there. They were absolutely raving about it, which was really nice. David Grubbs was hitting me up like, “How did you come up with this concept?” And I was like, “We just came up with it now.” (laughter). We struck on something there. As a rhythm section, in terms of [Ahmed], we really started to tighten up after that gig.
Antonin Gerbal: For me, it’s very strange because I think the first time we played together was at Vortex. Pat and Seymour organized that when me and Joel were in London. All the elements were already there and what Pat said about “the sound” is super important. We go deeper and deeper into the sound, both Ahmed Abdul-Malik’s sound and ours as a band, both individually and collectively. It’s dynamic for sure. And then in Hong Kong, we had our foundation and explored it. A lot of people I talked with after a few gigs were like, “Where does this concept come from?” And we just play as improvisers in this tradition. More and more, it became affirmative, and it’s not like we only went back to the 1960s, we continued this affirmative movement.
Joel Grip: Exactly. It’s the affirmative movement of sound. The Vortex show, the first time we played together, it was more of a “body feeling.” People ask about the concept but I never had to have a concept, it was just very evident in the sound that we found each other on the stage at the Vortex playing for no audience—it was daytime. We never said a word before about how to do it, and the sound led us and made it possible. The concept was the sound itself. As you say, Antonin, it’s always continuing. The research always goes deeper. And it’s always exciting to know where we’ll end up. And maybe we won’t end up anywhere, but it’s exciting to be part of this process of transformation. Having these dates at Cafe OTO really helps.
Seymour Wright: There was one in between Hong Kong and the Vortex which was at a barn in Dala-Floda, Sweden. We think about Ahmed Abdul-Malik’s vision of sound, but the contexts we find ourselves in are very strange (laughter). And that’s really important. The idea of being on the 18th floor in Tin Wan, Hong Kong and playing for a party—it was an unlikely proposition. And we had Taku sitting cross-legged in the front row. It was like, “Here we are. What are we gonna do?” And it changed us. And then the next time in Stockholm it was like, “Okay, what are we gonna do?”
It’s important that we are in these contexts that ask questions of us, much like Abdul-Malik’s music asks questions of us. How we play together is in asking questions. We’re working on something that is not fixed. The work has to do with a kind of collective interrogation of what can be done and why we do it. It’s challenging but in a very rewarding and enriching way. As Pat said, we were very fortunate to have done this concert and to go back into the same space, and it was an empty Empty Gallery that was fashioned into a studio. I can’t remember if it was a day or two days. The engineer was David Sum, who has recorded Cantopop and film soundtracks in Hong Kong. It was really great to have this strange context to explore. And then with OTO, it’s another different context where we have different questions to work through.
This talk of the location is interesting. With Wood Blues (2024), you were in Glasgow at a venue that was a glue factory during the 1890s. Can you talk to me about performing there in 2022? How do you feel like that location shaped the way you approached performing?
Joel Grip: It’s always an encounter with the room. As improvisers, we have to acknowledge the space. That glue factory was very particular. Sometimes it’s not just about the acoustics. It was really cold there and that really shaped things (laughter). We were sitting in the backroom and had this tiny fan to heat us up. We had to jump around, and it pushed me to play in order to be warm. And everybody needed that—the audience was standing and we needed to move. It would help us make a sort of dance music, though we were already down that path. It was obvious that we needed this movement, not only to stay warm, but to get this “body feeling.” And this room, this old industrial building, is good for that.
Antonin Gerbal: For me, it’s about this relationship to the space, to the room, to the people. Each time, it’s as singular as the music you play. One of the great aspects of the band is that we have different resources with our different backgrounds and experiences. A very strange concert for me is when we were in Lisbon. We played outdoors. Outdoor gigs are never so easy to manage in terms of energy and feeling the audience. We were in the middle of a huge stage and people were very far from us—it was almost the opposite of the Glasgow concert. In Lisbon, it was like we had a sort of monster energy coming from us. There was no direct feedback from the audience. We were playing very powerfully but I didn’t know what would happen, and then it was great to talk with people after the gig because some of them were totally excited. It gave a shape to the music. It’s not by accident, for me, that we played new tunes in Lisbon and also in Glasgow. Improvisation can open these unknown spaces where finally, in the end, you just have to play and do your best.
Seymour Wright: In Lisbon we played “African Bossa Nova” and that felt like a really appropriate thing to do. It was a richly intertextual invitation for reflection. It felt really correct in that space, and that was the first time we did that piece. We’ve done it a number of times since and Glasgow was the first time we did “Wood Blues.” So there’s a physical space, but there are also these musical spaces and sometimes they’re things we visit, but there also may be multiple points of departure. When we were in Novara, Italy we played Monk’s “Evidence.” After the soundcheck we were like, okay, let’s play “Evidence.” And that was another novel space—barracks I think—and we didn’t meet anybody, we just had a nice time for a few days. We’re stacking these different types of spaces—real, conceptual, sonic. And it’s a very powerful thing to do and think about.
Pat Thomas: I have a relationship with Glasgow—I’ve played there a few times at the festival and the audience is very respectful. During the soundcheck, the room was incredibly cold and we were like, “How are we going to do this?” The audience really warmed up the place. When we came back to perform, the heater came back, which helped. And this cold slab transformed. It was just after lockdown and people were really wanting to hear music, and so the audience was so ready. Some people told me afterwards that they were shocked because it sounded like something from the ’50s, which then morphed. We don’t talk about anything, we just collectively respond to what we pick up from the audience. When someone slams a door or comes in and talks, it affects how we play. Everything has an effect.
There’s something interesting about improvisation where, in the moment, you’re finding ways to articulate things that you didn’t realize you were necessarily capable of doing. These things just come out. We’re talking about different places and I want to think about each of you as your own individual “space.” When playing together, what do you feel you are not able to do or bring that someone else can?
Joel Grip: Playing with Antonin, and knowing him for a long time now, what I don’t bring is exactly what he gives me. He pushes me a lot. He reduces my mobility, and I say that in the most loving way. This is very particular, and I don’t want to get too clinical about it, but he pushes me to find unknown ways to play the bass. For me, it’s not that I play something and realize that I knew how to play it—it’s more that I actually didn’t know it, and that this is me learning. I could not have possibly known how to do this before without Antonin. He creates a certain space for me and I put all my energy there and it becomes super interesting; I would never have been able to do it or think about it without him. And this is the same with Pat and Seymour as well.
We’ve played so tightly together for such a long time, and it’s so clear how things crystallize and how our “opposites” help each other. They help us dance, to embrace each other. They make the music happen. And out of necessity, I have to find a new piece of my thumb to push the string. It may just be a millimeter difference—it can really get this clinical. I might move to my third finger, and I’ve never met anyone who has played the bass like that. Doing that in the moment feels like being on a spaceship and not knowing where it’s going.
Pat Thomas: I like that I might not know where something is going, but that I can trust that someone else will do something when I’m doing something else. It’s this trust that we can try something and that somebody will take it up. That’s quite special when you can get that in a group. We’ve been around for like 10 years now. When we first started, I always felt like there was this trust where I didn’t know where we were going but that it felt okay. Improvised music is always based on trust, and I think we got that concept of trust very quickly. Joel and Antonin as a rhythm section, they obviously trust each other. It’s funny that you say that you have this millimeter space that you can work on. It all happens very quickly, too. We’ve never spoken about this, but we do this thing where we work with these blocks of sound. People think we have these arrangements but they’re completely spontaneous. We trust that everybody is going to come up with something, and that’s the beauty of trust.
Seymour Wright: And part of that too is that there is this balance. Between us, we seem to know how to balance where we are gonna go. We also trust each other, the four of us, that we will have this shared equilibrium. It may mean that somebody has to go over there to balance the person who’s over here. That’s very important.
Antonin Gerbal: I remember that from the first time we played together, it was a very different experience. Pat has this very special thing where he’s like, “Don’t worry, just play.” The idea of joy is also important. With Joel, I remember in Hong Kong that I played the toms and he said, “I don’t hear myself. You took all my range!” (laughter). And I didn’t do that because I’m a bad guy. At times it can be very funny. I know Joel so well and we’ve played with so many different musicians and in weird places where the bass is not supposed to be. To me, it’s mysterious how Joel can always produce these things with just his hands and his body and some strings. We push each other and it’s a joyful process. I also think “imagination” is a big idea. Pat wrote something about the praxis of our band and it’s this idea of the imagination in praxis and the praxis of imagination. It’s super exciting when you experience this imaginative process with people and on stage. It becomes a real party.
Let’s talk about Giant Beauty (2024). Can you all speak about the Edition Festival For Other Music and the performances you had there and how this process of imagination took place there? Are there any days that especially stood out in terms of learning or growth or anything like that?
Pat Thomas: “Rooh (The Soul)” was particularly special for me. I think we had just heard that Abdul Wadud passed away, and Joel did this really beautiful bass solo. It was a real challenge to everyone else, like what are we gonna do after that? (laughter). We touched on something that went really modal and jazzy, which was great. It really showed that we have this variety of approaches. His solo set the bar and it really showed his appreciation of Ahmed Abdul-Malik. It really pushed us a bit further to think about the material and to still be [Ahmed]. It’s easy to just sound like everybody else when in a modal context. “Rooh” was particularly special because by then we had settled down and knew the room pretty well.
Joel Grip: The place was an old brewery situated at the foot of the mountains in Stockholm. It was where I grew up, and so I knew all the little pieces of rock on that mountain from running around there and playing as a child. My family were there in the audience at the time, and revisiting that place was a little bit like revisiting my childhood. And that was there in the solo as well, this contact I was having with the sound and the smell and everything that was surrounding us. I was also thinking about what changed in Stockholm. It was a very poor part of Sweden forty years ago and now it’s the richest. This change has been so fast that it is now no longer a place that I can come back to—like, I don’t know if I want to come back. This is where I’m from but I feel so far away from it; I had this sadness. So there was this connection I had to Ahmed Abdul-Malik, but also this connection to this place where I was from. It felt like a dead place—it didn’t feel like home.
Being in Stockholm, it was extremely warm. It only happens one week per year and this was the week it happened. We had to rest the whole day! It felt like a marathon, I felt like I was a professional athlete. I had to rest for 12 hours before I could do it again. We found this place where we would eat called Falafel King and that’s where we filled up on energy (laughter). At Cafe OTO we’re playing two sets for four nights and in Stockholm we only played one set. I’m scared! (laughter).
Pat Thomas: If it were as hot as it is in Sweden, there would be no way. We would be finished. I remember one time you said that we were all drenched. If the air conditioner doesn’t end up working, it could end up being one set a night (laughter). I remember when Cafe OTO used to not have an air conditioner. When it was a packed night… just forget it (laughter).
Antonin Gerbal: Sometimes you hear music and you just think about technical or theoretical aspects. I think that Ahmed Abdul-Malik and all the main guys—Monk and Coltrane, these kinds of people—were incredible technicians of their own practice but also went much further than that. We are much more, through the band, than we are individually. That’s why I’m so surprised all the time with what comes out. It’s also related to our cultural backgrounds. As we’ve said in this interview, we use different tools but I also feel a unity in our energy and desire. There’s a utopian dream. It’s a kind of magical feeling. In life, something will happen and it’s normal—a new child is coming, for example—but nobody can explain that feeling. When we play music together, it is at this same degree of intensity. That’s why, maybe, we don’t plan anything musically until we actually play. This music is life.
Seymour Wright: I think that was the first time we had done “Rooh,” to touch on something we mentioned earlier. I think you can hear, while we’re playing, that we are thinking about what’s going to happen—and this is not in an unsettled way. After the solo, there is a long, solo, patient, reflective drone. There is a patient suspense in the way the form unfolds. We work out what to do, and what Pat mentioned about the trust and what Joel said about the location and what Antonin said about this being an almost magical investigation—you can feel all those things being worked out in the piece. Maybe that’s too grand a thing to say, but it does feel like a salient rendering of that stuff.
Are there specific things that you all feel you have learned about yourself from playing with each other? Are there things that you’re still hoping to learn? It’d be easy for someone to hear “El Haris (Anxious),” for example, and to feel like you’ve expanded upon what you were initially doing. I ask this because I’m interested in what keeps you going with [Ahmed].
Pat Thomas: We all have a belief that we can push it every time. Something that is an advantage is that we’re not playing all the time, so every time we come together, it’s like starting fresh. If you’re a band who is playing three months a year, all the time, no matter who you are it can become a bit predictable. I think we play enough that it’s always like, “Oh, what are we gonna do today?” We always think about pushing something a bit further. And that’s a positive thing.
With “African Bossa Nova,” we found a way to play it and have found a way to make it sound ominous. It’s an achievement to do something like a bossa nova and that it doesn’t have any of the trappings. That’s one of the strengths of the band. We can do the blues but it’ll sound like [Ahmed] doing the blues and not just the traditional blues. It’s always a challenge. I think Coltrane’s groups are a great example of this. We haven’t got a formula yet—maybe we have? And maybe in five years’ time we’ll call it and say that we couldn’t do anything else with it. If that happened we would probably stop doing it. I say that now, but if someone offered us £10000 then I might change my mind (laughter).
Antonin Gerbal: It’s really strange because we are playing in the present time, but at the same time, we are also in the past and are also opening futures. To be in different places and times is interesting. I cannot say what will happen next beyond what is evident to us now. For example, we’ll play a Monk tune at the OTO residency. A great aspect of being a collective is that we wait for the right time to make decisions, so that when we make them, it feels natural and comes from our passion. We wouldn’t have played “Wood Blues” ten years ago, I would say. There’s a logical process but we can’t control it, we just accept what is next. And this is so related to improvisation. In French we have this expression that translates to, “Not going faster than the music itself.”
Joel Grip: It is impossible to prepare, physically, for playing with [Ahmed]. It doesn’t matter how much I prepare because I will have a bleeding hand by the end of the concert. That’s been a tradition. And I can live with the pain, and the music is wonderful, but I would love to experience a moment when it is not painful to play. The only time I do experience that is when we play multiple nights in a row. This concerns all my groups but with [Ahmed] it’s more extreme. When I have pain I’ll take the bow, but in [Ahmed] I cannot. On a practical level, I would love to play more nights in a row, though I do agree with Pat that playing too much would be bad. But playing two sets each night—eight gigs in four days—this is exactly what I want. And that’s not just for the music, but because I think this is what Ahmed Abdul-Malik and other bass players at the time experienced. They’d play three sets per night, 300 nights per year. Of course your hand would be different from how my hand is today. I would love to experience a little bit of that and see what happens to the music.
Seymour Wright: As for me, I love doing this because it pushes me to learn how to play. As we learn that, and as we move together into the future, we also learn about the past and how things might’ve been, and that there are things that we can’t straightforwardly access. These are beautiful and rewarding things to learn as we move forward.
[Ahmed]’s new albums, Giant Beauty and Wood Blues, can be found at Bandcamp. The other interviews in the [Ahmed] series can be found here: Joel Grip, Pat Thomas, Seymour Wright, Antonin Gerbal.
Thank you for reading the 141st issue of Tone Glow. Let’s access the future and the past.
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Great set of interviews (and a great interviewer), thank you!