أحمد [Ahmed] – Pat Thomas / Antonin Gerbal / Joel Grip / Seymour Wright – Day Four (Residency)

The group work and rework the music of the late musician Ahmed Abdul-Malik, producing a stamping, swinging, relentlessly propulsive music where profundity and physicality root back to ecstatic feeling. It excavates, reinhabits and uses anew the now overlooked documents and fragmentary plans of his mid-20th-century synthetic vision, producing a new jazz imagination for the 21st century. "What emerges from the breadth of Giant Beauty isn’t evolution, but a recurring, infinitely complex synthesis of shared history that concentrates into an explosive now. Thomas’s alternately gleeful and maniacal clusters, Wright’s ruthlessly reductive abstractions, and the way Gerbal and Grip’s hurtling velocity connects the rhythmic concepts of Count Basie and The John Coltrane Quartet to the energies of punk rock and techno carry each performance to places where development atomises into a ceaselessly slamming present. Of course, that’s not all that happens; one could expend thousands of words considering how each of these tracks embodies ecstatic abandon and rigorous analysis. It’ll do you no harm to start now." – Bill Meyer, WIRE magazine (WIRE album of the year, 2024)