After six albums dedicated to refracting the music of Ahmed Abdul‑Malik, أحمد [Ahmed] – the quartet of Pat Thomas, Seymour Wright, Joel Grip and Antonin Gerbal – turn their attention to Abdul‑Malik’s one‑time bandleader, Thelonious Monk, in their ongoing search for “future music.” Monk and Abdul‑Malik are more than historical neighbors. In the late 1950s, Abdul‑Malik worked in Monk’s quartets, appearing on Thelonious in Action and Misterioso (both 1958) and on the long‑buried Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall. Beneath the surface of those recordings lies a shared project: a radical engagement with time that refuses a simple linear trajectory, offering instead sites of synthesis and rupture where fragments…
Tag Archive: [Ahmed]
In April 2022, the wild and inquisitively wilful British free-jazz keyboardist Pat Thomas was improvising with his eyes shut in the company of his quartet [Ahmed] at Glasgow’s Glue Factory. The music was dedicated to the 1950s-70s legacy of the late Art Blakey and Thelonious Monk bassist, oud player and early global-music pioneer Ahmed Abdul-Malik, the inspiration for the group’s work. When Thomas emerged from his trance, he was astonished to hear that an ecstatic crowd had been dancing the night away around him.
He shouldn’t have been surprised. Since [Ahmed]’s inception, their collective heat has fused abstract improv and groove music from all over the world: Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, dub, jungle, electronics, and the 1990s…