Ahmed

An excerpt from Edward George's 10,000+word liner-note 8 page booklet that comes with the أحمد [Ahmed]'s double LP:  They are, Seymour said, in movement, and in keeping with their claim, their music is, like a Brownian bridge, an A&J Tranean train, a Byrdian plane, or a Blountian space-time myth-machine, a way of playing themselves into the historio-graphical hands, or better yet, the loving arms, or perhaps, to be precise, the metaphysical embrace, of ‘a new creative space’, and playing is a way, the only way, when you think about it, of getting and staying in movement, the only way of staying ahead of themselves. Staying ahead of themselves was always important, and tricky too: they were on the (musical) trail of someone who preceded them, was ahead of himself, or at least ahead of his own epoch, the late 1950s, and theirs, the late 20th and early 21st century, in which he was, before they found him (or he found them, the way music finds you — and finds you out) present as no more than a discographical evanescence. 

And to complicate things further, the way they talked about what they were doing as they proceeded along that trail, you’d think they were archaeologists (and not anthropologists), or geologists (and not ethnographers), as well as exemplars of whatever discipline it is through which the capacity for inhabiting and transforming the body, the corpus, of another takes place: ‘We excavate and reinhabit documents and fragments of plans and compositions that he left behind to make music that though it originated in the 20th century will speak to the 21st’. They said that, on the back, or the strength, of their first album, and it was enough to make you wonder where in the world it was that they started from, what their point(s) of departure might have been.

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PARENTHETICAL ENTRY 23

(Ahmed), in whose name is praise and desire, are: Antonin Gerbal = (drums), Joel Grip = (bass),
Seymour Wright = (saxophone), Pat Thomas = (piano).

This album: It swings, hard. As a guaranteed reference I got myself a copy of Count Basie’s Atomic, and after careful consideration, I think Would / Wood / Oud Blues can be said to rate as highly as Atomic on the Bassie Swing Metric, whose precision is comparable to the Official NLH Shaka Sirens Metric, on which one B Matic tells us, Jah Shaka’s use of sirens on the dub plate of Michael Prophet’s ‘Gates of Zion’, ‘weighs in at a hefty 9.2 on the Official Shaka Siren Metric, the highest score ever recorded on YouTube[1] — almost breaking our measuring equipment’.

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Edward George, London 2023