Pianist Pat Thomas, alto saxophonist Seymour Wright, double bassist Joel Grip and drummer Antonin Gerbal are أحمد [Ahmed]. Together, they’ve been practicing the fusion of historic scrutiny and ecstatic shared experience for more than a decade. For most of that time, they’ve confined themselves to transformations of the music of just one composer: late American double bassist Ahmed Abdul-Malik. In addition to working as a sideman in jazz bands playing around New York City, Abdul-Malik made a series of records in the 1950s and 1960s that combined hard bop with Arabic musical forms.
أحمد [Ahmed]’s usual practice has been to play one of Abdul-Malik’s compositions per set or LP side, treating the performance as ceremony of collective reimagining. The band would break his tunes apart, lingering over some fragments, repeating others with unwavering insistence and compacting nuggets of musical knowledge to neutron-star density. You could take أحمد [Ahmed]’s work as an assertion of jazz’s underacknowledged Moorish roots, study the use of intense scrutiny as a model for making historically aware jazz feel new or just get lost in the non-stop intensity of each performance.
Then, in 2023, أحمد [Ahmed] opened a crack in its methodological mold by playing a tune by one of Abdul-Malik’s highest-profile employers, Thelonious Monk. The band hasn’t stopped since, and its seventh album, Play Monk, contains nothing but. The program includes “Bye-Ya,” “Epistrophy,” “Friday The 13th,” (titled “Friday Thirteenth” here), “Evidence,” “Oska T” and “Round Midnight.” In other words, some of Monk’s best-known compositions. This is a canny lateral move, since it opens the door to a new book of songs that has an incontrovertible connection to أحمد [Ahmed]’s first one, but is more widely known. This makes it easier for an analytically minded listener to hear what the quartet is doing.
أحمد [Ahmed] starts “Round Midnight” with a straightforward articulation of its instantly recognizable opening phrase, but within seconds, the band disrupts its linear progression. Wright’s tone goes from solemn to coarse and sour, and Grip’s bowing swings the music around like a whirlpool, dragging everything sideways and down. Wright worries at his chosen fragment, twisting it inside out with his considerable technique while Thomas stays quiet for a couple minutes. Then, the pianist finally enters, playing the same vamp over and over while Gerbal picks up the pace with a crisp cadence. As Thomas advances with apparent reluctance from one chunk of the beat to the next, the rhythm section swings the groove and Wright lays abraded tones against it. The combination of torque, forward motion and fractional inspection accumulates tension, which threatens to dissipate only to renew and intensify. The quartet rides the tune into unknown territory, which is pretty remarkable given how familiar “Round Midnight” is.
أحمد [Ahmed] is as mind-blowing as ever, but on Play Monk, the band is easier to access than ever. [Otoroku]
—Bill Meyer
