Aziza: Aziza

This worldly modern-jazz supergroup — a collective made up of the bassist Dave Holland, the saxophonist Chris Potter, the guitarist Lionel Loueke and the drummer Eric Harland — toured widely before recording its self-titled debut. As one might expect, it’s an album on which every granite-carved rhythmic vamp accrues many subtleties of texture and inflection, and any solo heroics (of which there’s no shortage) are absorbed into a larger flow.

On the front cover of Aziza Brahim’s new album, Sahari, a young girl poses in ballet shoes and a glistening white tutu. It’s a common childhood scene, but it’s tipped upside down. She’s not privileged and the backdrop isn’t a comfortable suburban home. She’s an exile, living nowhere near her homeland, and behind her stand the tents and buildings of a refugee camp. There’s a desert on the ground and a burning sky above. Yet even in this bleakness, she has optimism. She believes in a better future.

Sahrawi singer-songwriter activist Aziza Brahim’s fifth album Mawja (Wave in Hassaniya Arabic) is fashioned from a simple but powerful foundational palette: Saharan and Iberian percussion entwining with stately guitars and warm, enveloping bass.

Pianist Aziz Mustafa Zadeh, a native of Baku in the former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan, is quite impressive on her American debut. This solo set finds her influenced by Chick Corea and Keith Jarrett to a certain extent but also infusing the music with her heritage. The scales she often utilizes are clearly from the Near East yet her improvisational skills show that the 23-year old has long loved jazz. She takes three vocals (two of which feature rapid and exotic scatting) that display a wide range and an appealing voice. Zadeh performs fifteen diverse originals and the virtuosic pianist clearly has the potential to be a major force in jazz.

Contrasts is the eighth release by Azeri jazz artist Aziza Mustafa Zadeh. Released in early 2006, it is her first completely solo album since her debut in 1991 with the sales of more than 1.000.000 copies worldwide.

There are many contrasts in Aziza Mustafa Zadeh's work, not least due to the conflict between hands and voice, which Aziza Mustafa Zadeh acts out to the joy of her listeners, and which has continuously been documented on CD since 1991. Aziza Mustafa Zadeh is a pianist. She is a pianist like her father, the acclaimed jazz-pianist and composer Vagif Mustafa Zadeh, who passed away much too early in 1979. Aziza Mustafa Zadeh is a singer. She is a singer like her mother Eliza Mustafa Zadeh, her mentor and constant companion.

Raised in a refugee camp in Algeria, Aziza Brahim embodies and mourns the displacement of North Africa’s Sahrawi people. Her ascent has been steady rather than spectacular, her breakthrough coming with 2014’s Soutak, an elegant acoustic set that drew from her adopted Barcelona home. Here, Brahim embraces the electric desert blues popularised by Tinariwen and Tamikrest (with whom she shares producer Chris Eckman). It’s a buoyant sound – Brahim’s voice is too airy for drones and chants – led by rolling pieces such as Calles de Dajla and followed by slow, contemplative blues. At its heart is a title track grieving for the exiled thousands stranded in an inhospitable tract of Western Sahara, whose only escape is “music and imagination”.

Shamans is the seventh album released by Azeri jazz artist Aziza Mustafa Zadeh. It was released in 2002. In the liner notes, Aziza left a comment about each song. The artwork also contains a number of paintings by Aziza. Around 2.000.000 copies of this album were sold worldwide.