PIANIST Zoe Rahman’s Hull Suite Live has profound autobiographical conceptions, provoked by a moving parental narrative. 

“When I was writing the music,” she writes in her sleeve notes, “the themes reminded me of my parents’ story of migration.

“My mother emigrated from England to New Zealand when she was 10, travelling six weeks by ship. She later met my father when they were both at Sydney University — he had travelled by ship from Bengal. After going back to visit his family in Dhaka, he 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.

“While composing, I was thinking about how my own existence is strongly linked to sea travel and the story of a piano!”

So when she was commissioned by Hull Jazz Festival for World Piano Day in 2024 to write a suite based around voyage and migration, Rahman grasped her parents’ story, during a now-times era when the realities of migration and family are so dear and essential to millions of us, and are considered threatening by a crass, racist and backward political culture that is pervasive and increasingly powerful.

I ask Rahman how the artistry of the Migrants Statue in Hull affected her composing of the suite.

“It’s a beautifully crafted sculpture depicting a family with two young children (the boy playing with a crab!) on a journey, their possessions in a suitcase. The image of this family, their connection to each other and to the sea, made me think about my mum’s journey all the way to New Zealand to start a new life. I had the image of my mum on the shoreline looking out to sea and wondered how she felt. The opening piece, Across the Humber, was written with this image in mind.”

“The desire to travel and migrate is inherent to human nature, and the album celebrates the cultural melting pot that can come out of it. However, my parents left Australia in part due to the White Australia Policy, then found it hard in the UK to find accommodation due to the ‘No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs’ notices of racism that were always a part of the story.

“Jazz itself came out of the forced migration of people through chattel slavery. Specifically to the themes of the album, the 2.2 million people who travelled from Europe through Hull and on to America migrated sometimes to escape poverty, others fleeing religious persecution. They were immigrants… fast forward to Ice.”

I ask her whether the synergy, unity and lyricism of her trio — with bassist Alec Dankworth (son of the great inter-racial kinship of Johnny Dankworth and Cleo Laine) and New York drummer Gene Calderazzo — is expressive of the theme of the suite.

“As a trio,” she declares, “we listen deeply, support and musically converse with each other to create a world where all of us have an individual voice while trying to create something musically that’s greater than ourselves. It links with Hull’s Voyage sculpture, commemorating fishermen and trade between Britain and Iceland. Uniting for a common musical goal mirrors the unity of purpose between different seafaring communities.

“Alec and Gene both have a cheeky sense of humour, which makes playing with them really joyful. Gene’s very direct, no treading carefully around subjects, which is fantastic as a musician to work with and, despite the external bravado, he has a lot of compassion and empathy, so his musicianship is very well-rounded and perfect for my music. Alec is a gentleman of the bass: thoughtful, kind, solid. The way I write is often very bass-heavy, but he’s very gracious about it and it never seems to bother him.”

I ask her whether the constant sound in the suite of the rolling and powerful sea reflects the cosmopolitan movement of peoples all over the world.

“Yes, I was definitely trying to create in music the sound and feeling of the sea’s movement, the upheaval, and how the emotional ups and downs of migrant travel could be reflected. My father is from Bengal, where water is very much part of the landscape, be it rivers, sea or rain. In Piano Story and Waves (the title has the double meaning of waving goodbye as well as waves of the sea), I had in mind the lift/swell of the sea but also the melodic intricacy of a Bengali song.”

Hull Suite is a beautiful, surging journey in sound, part notated, part spontaneous. As Rahman sums it up: “I wrote down the main part of each of the six sections, but within that there is room for improvisation, which is the heart of the music for me as a jazz musician.”

Hull Suite Live is released by Manushi Records.