Yazz Ahmed — Shinrin-Yoku
Saturday, August 15, 2026
Afternoon Session: Doors 4:30pm, session begins 5:00pm.
Evening Session: Doors 7:30pm, session begins 8:00pm.
Omelas Listening Room
San Juan
In partnership with Night Time Stories
Yazz Ahmed grew up between Bahrain and Britain, and plays trumpet and flugelhorn. Her music—which has earned her an Ivor Novello and by wide agreement a role as one of the defining voices of her instrument in this generation—moves through jazz and electronics, shaped by both sides of her heritage.
She recorded Shinrin-Yoku remotely in 2020, drawing on the Japanese practice of "forest bathing": slow, attentive immersion in nature as a form of convalescence and restoration. Released on Night Time Stories (who we are proud to collaborate with) into a troubled world, this record gently revisits the notion that returning to the world isn’t an event but an ongoing practice.
We'll play the EP in full, uninterrupted, after a brief spoken introduction. Come, settle in, and listen.
This session also features a special video message Yazz recorded specifically for Omelas.
Tickets are sold in advance only — there will be no door sales.
100% of ticket proceeds go directly to the featured artist — or to the artist or curator leading the session.
La sesión terminó — la música sigue.
The session ended — the music continues.
Sobre la artista · About the artist
Lee más sobre la artista · Read more about the artist
The person
Yazz Ahmed (b. 1983) is a British-Bahraini trumpeter, flugelhornist, and composer. She grew up in Bahrain and moved to Britain at nine; her grandfather, the jazz trumpeter Terry Brown, is the one who put the instrument in her hands. She went on to a master’s in jazz at London’s Guildhall School.
Her dual heritage runs through her music like two premises in a proof—British jazz and the music of the Gulf she grew up in—and it’s this sound that has earned her titles like “the high priestess of psychedelic Arabic jazz.” Widely held as one of the most influential trumpet players of her generation, she won Jazz FM’s UK Jazz Act of the Year and the Ivor Novello Award for Innovation in 2020.
The instrument
Yazz plays a custom quarter-tone flugelhorn. An ordinary (read: Western) trumpet or flugelhorn can only reach the notes on a piano: the white and black keys. Arabic music lives between those keys, in the “in-between” notes a piano can’t find: the “microtones.” So she had an instrument built with an extra valve that bends any note a quarter tone up or down: into the cracks where even bebop dared not go—and found the further color there.
You’ve heard her without knowing it
She played flugelhorn on Radiohead’s The King of Limbs (2011), and has recorded or performed with Lee “Scratch” Perry, Natacha Atlas, Transglobal Underground, Arturo O’Farrill, and These New Puritans.
Her records, if tonight sent you looking
Finding My Way Home (2011) · La Saboteuse (2017: The Wire’s Jazz Album of the Year) · Polyhymnia (2019: Album of the Year at the 2020 Jazz FM Awards) · A Paradise in the Hold (2025, her fourth).