Zoe Rahman occupies a distinctive position as a jazz pianist and composer having now completely assimilated prevailing influence Joanne Brackeen into her music as well as continuing to explore her Bengali cultural roots. A Mercury nominee five years ago for Melting Pot, Rahman is also the pianist in Courtney Pine’s high flying Europa band. Rahman’s latest album, as Stuart Nicholson discovers, explores in an erudite but accessible way the disparate elements of her music and family connections.

“I’m trying to find out who I am,” says pianist Zoe Rahman. “I call myself English, I live in Britain and music is a way of exploring who I am.” She’s talking about her latest album, Kindred Spirits, which just happens to be one of the finest jazz albums by a British artist of the last few years. “It’s all about my genetic make-up and my cultural make-up and everything about who I am and where I am at this point in my life” she continues. “And its about the discoveries I have made about myself in the last decade, it is just an extension of that really.”

Zoe Rahman has been threatening to come up with something special since her Mercury Prize nominated debut album The Cynic from 2001. With the benefit of hindsight, subsequent albums, Melting Pot (2006), Where Rivers Meet (2008) and Live with Special Guest Idris Rahman (2009) can be seen as progress reports on her growth as an artist, stages in her development without which Kindred Spirits would have been impossible. “My first two albums was all music I wrote myself,” she explains. “Where Rivers Meet is music by Bengali musicians, and then my Live album was mostly [compositions] by other people, whereas this album, my fifth album, ten years since my first album, sums up all those musical journeys up to this point.”

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