She’s played with everyone from Radiohead to Lee “Scratch” Perry, but the 2012 debut by this Bahrain-raised, London-based trumpeter was a spartan collection which tried, tentatively, to fuse the maqam melodic modes used in Arabic music with Miles Davis’s modal jazz. This time, however, Ahmed improvises more fluently in these Arabic scales. It adds a futuristic, Fourth World dimension to the textures created by an unorthodox, Bitches Brew-style line-up that features Shabaka Hutchings on bass clarinet and Naadia Sheriff on Fender Rhodes piano. Riff-based tracks such as Organ Eternal and a cover of Radiohead’s Bloom resemble the slightly clinical post-rock of Jaga Jazzist or Tortoise, but Ahmed works better when she’s being less strident. On the space age jazz waltz The Space Between the Fish and the Moon, her haunting solo is elegantly mutilated by FX pedals until it sounds as though her flugelhorn is melting before our very ears.
