Ishta by Ahmed Warshanna

“Three years went by, and I became more and more unhappy. I got really depressed. I didn't realize it at the time, but I really didn't want to become a doctor. It wasn't my passion. It wasn't what I wanted to do. Being an Arab, there's a lot of pressure from the family. It's like, what's the word, grooming, as a child. Everyone, when they see you, they're like, ‘Oh, it's our little doctor, little doctor Ahmed.’ And they would pinch your cheek and like, you're just playing with Legos. But that indoctrination led me to believe throughout my entire life, that I was supposed to become a doctor, that it was my destiny. There's nothing else for me. I just got so unhappy by my third year. It was at that time my mom got cancer.”

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Some records come to the world at their appointed moment. The heat of the contextual social atmosphere is particular enough to make us call that music “urgent” or “essential.” Those records attain musical truth via their time and place, relying on external factors to deepen their beauty. There is no shame in this, but pride and joy at crystallizing history beyond the boundaries of language.

Ishta, this debut EP from guitarist Ahmed Warshanna, is not that. Rather, this EP comes of its own accord. It is a breath of fresh air.

The five tracks on Ishta are a musical journey that could have been released at any point in the last half century and would still contain the same multitude of musical truths that they do today. By shrugging off temporal burdens, Ishta demands relevancy across historical contexts. This music necessitates itself.

Though this music is steeped in timelessness, it is not at all unmoored. Ahmed’s music is, rather, centrally grounded by its physical occupation in the world as a dual citizen of both Egyptian and American musical tradition. Place is an exploration of self. This music proves that.

Here is a call to search for meaning in the diasporic, to center ourselves at the intersections of inner-identities that can be disparate and otherwise opposed. With this music, the chains of heritage do not bind and arrest, but are jewelry, and liberate the spirit through a celebration of its weighted beauty.

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“At the beginning of my junior year, she was fine. And then, halfway through, late in January, she had stage three cancer. It was very aggressive. We were told that there's a chance it would go on to stage four, and maybe become terminal, that it may metastasize and become more aggressive. There may not be a lot of options. So I really thought that my mom was gonna die. I truly believed that she was going to die.

 

And then, when I realized that she was going to die-

when I realized that-

When I believed that she's going to die, I had, like-

 

The whole meaning to my life came into question. The only reason I wanted to become a doctor was because I wanted to please her. I wanted to make her happy and show her that she can be proud of me. When she was going to die, 10 years before I'd ever get to the point where I felt like I was going to please her, I was like, 'If I make it in 10 years, who is this for? This isn't for me, and I don't really care about a lot of other people's opinions.’ When that happened, the whole reason for my existence crumbled.”

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Upon my first listen, the main point of this record is the power of Ahmed’s writing. Of particular interest is how Ahmed treats arranging for his septet. The makeup of the group deviates from the ‘standard’ build of a medium-format jazz ensemble (drums, bass, chords, trumpet, saxophone, and trombone) only in the inclusion of two chordal instruments, with Ahmed on guitar and his longtime bandmate Josh Miller on piano (an inclusion that seems immediately vital).

It is rare that a record, particularly one so steeped in the jazz idiom, places the dynamic art of the ensemble above technical mastery of the soloist, yet here Ahmed does just that. The arranging on Inty Omry, for example, allows the timbres of the septet to weave within one another so that, even with dedicated focus, it is difficult to piece apart the playing of the individuals. This flavor of cohesion bleeds into the solos, where it is difficult (and, I might add, unimportant) to tell who is leading the band into energetic heights. The rhythm section, rather than serve as a static backdrop to virtuosity, paints a dynamic and full picture of Ahmed’s music with a many-handled brush. The soloist, at times, accompanies them. This is important.

Deeper experience with this record belies just how committed Ahmed is to present always his music with the many sonic languages he speaks. The tunes on this EP are not a disjointed collection of moments from one culture or another but are each a cohesive union of Egyptian Arabic music and American Jazz.

This record tips from one setting to the other, as opposed to a straightforward blend of two styles into a new one all its own, It wanders, walking no straight lines. Alf Leila, the second track on this record, develops this idea with wonder. With a swing just faint enough to shuttle the listener into the theme, the composition remains a swirl of consciously Egyptian harmony, while Hart Gounjian-Pettit’s muted trumpet continually cuts in to assert a post-bop flavor.

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“I began to listen to eclectic, intense and emotional music. John Coltrane with Elvin Jones and McCoy Tyner. The drums and the saxophone and the piano, all of that chaos and cacophony really felt like what was going on emotionally inside of me. I was also listening to a lot of Umm Kulthum because as I was taking my mom to chemotherapy, well, she loves that music, and just putting it on for her would make her so happy. And we'd listen to the kids’ music that we used to play on cassette when we went to Egypt. And so I had the idea of -

I want her to be proud of me. And I also want to be able to do what I love.

And then I started rolling with the idea of, 'what if I make a jazz album that has a lot of roots in Egyptian music or Egyptian harmonies, you know, the music that my mom loves, but can bridge the gap between that and the American music I love.’"

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Ishta’s track list illuminates the concept of duality, playing into deep-rooted traditions of distinct musical forms to emerge with a cohesive, bold statement of nowness. The first two songs, Inty Omry and Alf Leila, are dark, stormy arrangements of works by Umm Kulthum, the groundbreaking and eternally influential Egyptian composer and contralto. The third song on the record, Samaka, is a brushy rework of an Egyptian children’s song that Ahmed recalls singing with his mother as “one of my favorite memories from my childhood.” These first three tracks are the ‘standards’ of the record, taking up space where others might place pieces from the Great American Songbook.

The final two songs on the EP are original compositions and necessary inclusions that help assert this record’s place in the jazz tradition. Azra’, a blues with adjustments from Arabic harmonic theory, exposes Ahmed at his most musically vulnerable, being performed here only by the quartet, no horns. Intisar closes as somewhat of an ode to jazz’s poet-laureate, the saxophonist Wayne Shorter, whom Ahmed told me “is my compositional hero.” The allusion to Shorter is not at all hindered, of course, by saxophonist Dominic Ellis’s pointedly breathy tone and inquisitive lines, which sit atop the ensemble’s sumptuous backing.

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“There were two instances during her chemotherapy where she got extremely ill, to the point of near death. Those were the moments when I realized that I wanted to really write an album for her. I wanted to play the music at her funeral.

That was the real reason I wrote the album. Even though it was going to be a funeral, I could still honor her. She's the one that put me in music lessons when I was a kid. She was the one that introduced me to Frank Sinatra. She was the one that introduced me to Egyptian music and it was my way letting her live on, through me and what she gave me.

Writing the music for the funeral was my main purpose.”

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Beyond Josh Miller on piano, Ishta also features Thomas Owens on bass and Charlie Seda on drums to round out Ahmed’s rhythm section, while Daniel Sperlein joins Hart Gounjian-Pettit on trumpet, and Dom Ellis on Tenor to complete the septet’s horn section. “These were my friends and people I had already developed a rapport with. I knew the chemistry would be there.”

Ahmed tells me that, generally, he modeled the instrumentation, and his arranging for the group, after Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, particularly the sextet featured on the live masterpiece Ugetsu, and the arranging of both Wayne Shorter and Cedar Walton on that particular record.

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“She's in remission now. It's still a celebration of what she gave me; the moral of it is the same. It's just I don't have to play it at a funeral now.”

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-Abram Wolfe Mamet

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After this was written, my mother passed away in 2021 from a rare form of leukemia, which resulted from the chemotherapy she received during her breast cancer treatment. My mother brought music into my life; this album would not have been created without her. She will live on through my music. I love you, Mama.  

-Ahmed Warshanna

Based out of Baltimore, Ahmed Warshanna produces hard bop that is boundary pushing and a hark to the past. Ahmed has a unique compositional voice fueled by his passion for combining the East and West in his music. This delicate alchemy is a result of the musical environment he was raised in, an Egyptian-American household, where he was exposed to artists ranging from Frank Sinatra to Umm Kulthum

ahmedwarshanna.com