The EFG London Jazz Festival brings to Kings Place a reimagining of the work of legendary jazz artist Ahmed Abdul-Malik from visionary group, أحمد [Ahmed], along with a set by the remarkable contemporary/experimental vocalist, movement artist and composer Elaine Mitchener and bassist/producer Neil Charles.

Abdul-Malik was a NYC bassist, oudist, composer, educator and philosopher who fused aspects of American, Arabic and East African thought, ethics, meanings and beliefs in open and experimental ways to make vital, forward leaning jazz. [Ahmed] re-envision the notes of Malik as they push for new ground. Melodies respirate, swell, escalate and combust in a driving jazz which yes is technical, yes is accomplished, but ultimately just foot-to-the-floor swings.

Music of heavy rhythm, repetition and syncopation set deep into an understanding of jazz and the obscure depths of its history. It is music that excavates, re-inhabits and uses a-new the now overlooked documents, and fragmentary plans, of his mid-20th century synthetic vision to produce a new jazz imagination for the 21st century. 

Across their releases Wood Blues (Astral Spirits, 2024), Giant Beauty (Fönstret, 2024), Nights on Saturn (Communication) (Astral Spirits, 2022), Super Majnoon (East Meets West) (Otoroku, 2019), and New Jazz Imagination (Umlaut, 2017), the quartet of Pat Thomas, Antonin Gerbal, Joel Grip and Seymour Wright work and rework the music of the late Ahmed Abdul-Malik to create stamping, swinging, relentlessly propulsive music, where profundity and physicality root right back to ecstatic feeling.

[Ahmed] make music: to listen, dance and think to. 

أحمد [Ahmed] is:

Pat Thomas piano

Antonin Gerbal drums

Joel Grip bass

Seymour Wright alto saxophone

Elaine Mitchener & Neil Charles

Elaine Mitchener is a British Afro-Caribbean vocalist, movement artist and composer working between contemporary/experimental new music, free improvisation and visual art. She is currently a Wigmore Hall Associate Artist; was a DAAD Artist-in-Berlin Fellow (2022) and was an exhibiting artist in the British Art Show 9 (2021-22). In February 2022 Mitchener was awarded an MBE for Services to Music. Elaine is founder of the collective electroacoustic unit The Rolling Calf (with Jason Yarde and Neil Charles).

Neil Charles is one of the most in-demand musicians on the scene, with a huge array of credits to his name, including Jack DeJohnette, the Sun Ra Arkestra, Mingus Big Band, Jose James, Jerry Dammers, Courtney Pine, and Terence Blanchard. His own projects have included Zed U, with Shabaka Hutchings and Tom Skinner, and the more recent ensemble Dark Days, dealing with the work of James Baldwin. Most recently, he has been heard across the international scene with Gabriels. As well as being known as a bass player with a huge sound and immaculate sense of time, he is equally renowned as a producer, going by the alias Ben Marc.

Presented in association with Cafe Oto