Zoe Rahman
Tolbooth
Stirling
FOUR STARS
With two young children under three needing entertained at home, Zoe Rahman says she doesn’t get to play piano to an audience of adults very often these days. Let’s hope these youngsters come to appreciate how privileged they are to enjoy such intimate recitals because listening to the Chichester-born Rahman getting to know the Tolbooth’s Estonia grand, especially when she delicately explored her Bengali roots, was a treat indeed.
Rahman is more usually found leading her trio, a situation, she joked, that lets her take off her cardigan much earlier during bass or drum solos, but aside from that convenience, she doesn’t need other musicians’ company. Her forceful left hand provides strong rhythm patterns and big chords at times reminiscent of McCoy Tyner driving the classic John Coltrane Quartet and she seems able to inspire a flow of improvised ideas within herself, building her ‘solos’ with a conversational logic where she asks and answers questions melodically.
Her choice of material was both refreshingly diverse and easily familiar but still featuring her own take and pacing on standards including Duke Ellington’s The Single Petal of a Rose and Thelonious Monk’s Ruby My Dear, which was delivered as a brief but sincere parting shot.
There’s a lot of joyfulness and wit in her playing, the latter quality coming through notably as she dampened the strings on Jessica Williams’ soul-jazz flavoured The Sheikh and stretched the phrasing to her own will on These Foolish Things, and she balances stormy vigour, as on her own The Epicentre, with a marvellously poetic touch on pieces selected from Bengali polymath Rabindranath Tagore and her dad’s favourite music from his days in Dhaka.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article