Zoe Rahman plays The Verdict with a suite about her parents' sea crossings

Zoe Rahman, the pianist who was nominated for the Mercury Prize 20 years ago, is playing The Verdict in Brighton on Friday 9 October with music from her new live album, Hull Suite Live.

The suite started as a commission from Hull Jazz Festival for World Piano Day 2024. It was meant to be a 20-minute solo piano piece, and the festival asked her only a couple of weeks before she had to play it. “Nobody ever calls me up and commissions me!” she told UK Jazz News^2,3.

Her brief was two statues in Hull, one of them a memorial to the migrants who passed through the port on their way to America. That set her thinking about her own family. Her mother emigrated to New Zealand as a 10-year-old, a six-week voyage by ship. Her father, from Bengal, went by ship to Sydney for university, and the two met there.

One piece, Piano Story, comes from a family detail she learned only recently. “After going back to visit his family in Dhaka, my father needed proof that he had the financial means to support his return to Sydney, so my mother sold her piano so that they could be together,” she told the Argus¹.

The album was recorded at the Vortex Jazz Club in London with her long-standing trio: Gene Calderazzo on drums, who has played with her for more than 20 years, and Alec Dankworth on bass. She released it on her own label, Manushi.

Rahman was born in Chichester. Her Mercury nomination, for the album Melting Pot, was in 2006. She has since won a MOBO award and an Ivor Novello award.

First reported by the Argus.