Hugely excited to welcome back أحمد [Ahmed] - the quartet of Pat Thomas (piano), Antonin Gerbal (drums), Joel Grip (double bass) and Seymour Wright (alto saxophone) - for another extended four-day residency. They make music of heavy rhythm, repetition and syncopation, set deep into an understanding of jazz and the obscure depths of its history.

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)

Each night of the residency will see a special guest set from Billy Steiger. Billy and [Ahmed] have a special connection - he was present, listening and recording the first time they played, in 2014 in private (at a nightclub in the daytime).

Over the four nights, Billy Steiger will play
Four monochords on a single body
Monochord one: CBS10996, ≈700BC
Monochord two: CVR, 1920
Monochord three: M Tsingou, 1955
Monochord four: --------, 20??

[Ahmed] will play one long set each night, performing songs from the new record, Sama'a, in order, one a night.

Pat Thomas / piano
Antonin Gerbal / drums
Joel Grip / double bass
Seymour Wright / saxophone