Yazz Ahmed
La Saboteuse
(Naim)

YAZZ AHMED'S new album La Saboteuse is astonishing in the scope of its collaborative unity and the power and beauty of the sounds it expresses.

They were brought together from 10 different locations over a decade and mixed by the brilliant sound engineer Tom Jenkins, audio supervisor for the London Olympics' opening and closing ceremonies.

Recorded in sections and fragments in several studios from London to Copenhagen, in the homes and bedrooms of the musicians and a small room Birmingham's Symphony Hall, it is an amalgam of parts exquisitely fused — a sonic vision of music's future in the present.

DH Lawrence wrote that as an artist he was driven by contradictory impulses: “Love and produce! Love and produce! Destroy! Destroy! Destroy!” For Ahmed, it's “the relationship between the optimism of my conscious self and the seductive voice of my self-destructive inclinations, my inner saboteuse,” thus the album's title.

It's a coalescence of the music of her own Bahraini/English roots, Arabic and European scales, the Caribbean soul of Shabaka Hutchings's bass clarinet and British-based virtuosi including keyboardist Naadia Sheriff, vibraphonist Lewis Wright, drummer Martin France, percussionist Corrina Silvester, bass guitarists Dave Manington and Dudley Phillips and trumpeter Noel Langley.

In a journey that constantly develops and mutates, Ahmed's soft-toned, bending and beautiful notes begin the opener Inhale before Silvester's pounding percussion enters. Jamil Jamal' is a tale told by Sheriff's keys and Hutching's delving and dancing bass clarinet before Ahmed's swerving chorus.

Wright's chimes preface Misophonia, with Ahmed's bluesy horn leading to the electronics of The Space Between the Fish and the Moon and its floating trumpet sound and Wright's trickling phrases.

Hutchings opens the title tune, with lucid riposte from Ahmed and, as in the more joyous Bloom and Organ Eternal, it is as if they are the children of freedom, from two erstwhile colonised and militarised islands, Barbados and Bahrain, now palavering with the horns of unity.

On Al Amadi, Ahmed climbs a staircase of notes alongside Langley and The Lost Pearl is a hustling sonic narrative with Manington's emphatic bass diving through the fathoms and Wright's vibes ever near the surface. On Beleille, Hutchings's descent and Ahmed's sonic ascent, along with France's scuttling drums and Sheriff's sprinkling keys, all create a unique and compelling harmony.

La Saboteuse is a pathfinder. Complex and universal, it rings with what Keats called “the holiness of the heart's affections and the truth of the imagination” and, in defying genre and complete with milestones of notes, it points music forward.