Zoe Rahman
The Hull Suite
by Howard Lawes
World Piano Day was celebrated in Hull for the first time on the 88th day of 2024 at Humber Street Piano Sessions, 88 being the number of keys on a piano. Local pianists were invited to come along and play a tune during the day which culminated in the world premiere of the Hull Suite composed and performed by pianist Zoe Rahman. Talking over Zoom, Zoe described receiving a call from Hull Jazz Festival founder David Porter asking her to compose a twenty-minute suite but leaving her only two weeks in which to compose it. The work was to be based on the themes of voyage, migration and family, taking inspiration from two statues in Hull. The first, called The Migrants statue, commemorates the 2.2 million people who passed through Hull as a port between 1836 and 1914, travelling from northern Europe to America. The second statue, called Voyage, looks out across the Humber towards the sea and commemorates the fishermen, seafarers and trade shared between Hull and Iceland, where there is a twin sculpture.
The Voyage statue
Zoe’s links with Hull go back a long way. Zoe had played a spellbinding gig with Courtney Pine at the 2021 Hull Jazz Festival, but her first visit to Hull was much earlier, playing with Hull’s own Roland Gift, former frontman of the Fine Young Cannibals, at the grand opening of the Hull City Stadium in December, 2002. It was a freezing cold day, and Hull City beat Sunderland 1-0.
When considering the family theme, Zoe’s thoughts turned to memories of her parents who as young people met at the University of Sydney in Australia. Zoe’s mother emigrated to New Zealand as a 10-year old girl, travelling by ship. The journey took 6 weeks. As a young woman, Zoe’s mother studied at the University of Sydney where she met Zoe’s father who had travelled from Bengal. Her father had to go back to Bengal for a family matter but before returning to Australia had to show that he had sufficient funds to support himself. Zoe’s mother sold her new piano to raise the money.
The Voyage statue and her parent's story inspired the Voyage composition from Zoe's suite. The statue, Voyage, looks paradoxically serene given the dangers faced by Hull’s fishing trawlers over the years but the music takes its inspiration from the statue and includes a lovely double bass solo.
Zoe told this story at the premiere of the Hull Suite and until recently had been unaware that her mother may have had ambitions to be a musician. As it turned out the couple settled in England, her mother becoming a GP and her father a teacher of English Literature and they bought another, second-hand piano, and the rest as the say, is history.
he Rahman family were keen on the arts and Zoe and her siblings started to play the piano, more out of curiosity than parental pressure. Zoe’s talent for music rapidly became apparent, encouraged, Zoe remembers by a wonderful teacher at primary school called Mrs Hawkins. Zoe went on to become a Junior Exhibitioner at the Royal Academy of Music, took a music degree at Oxford University and then won a scholarship to study jazz performance at Berklee College of Music, Boston, where she studied with the inspirational pianist JoAnne Brackeen.
Zoe’s own children also enjoy making music and perhaps with some inspiration from their mother’s memory of Mrs Hawkins they composed a song that won a competition for their school in which the prize was Jamie Cullum’s piano. It goes without saying that Zoe believes music is important for children in many ways. Studies have shown that not only does music bring joy, but it has a wealth of personal and social advantages. Zoe is dismayed at how music education in schools has declined over the years and both she, through the National Youth Jazz Collective, and her brother Idris, through Youthsayers, involve themselves in music education. While an education in music brings many benefits, a career in music can be problematic, particularly for young women. Zoe’s ability has been widely recognised, being the first female jazz instrumentalist to be nominated for the Mercury Prize in 2006 and winning a Parliamentary Jazz Award (2006), a MOBO award (2012) and the Ivor Novello Impact Award at the Ivors Composer Awards (2021). A female jazz instrumentalist is perhaps less 'marketable' than a female jazz singer and Zoe decided very early in her career to self release her albums starting with The Cynic (2001). She named her record label 'Manushi', the name derived from the Bengali word 'manush' which means 'human'.
Although the premiere performance of the Hull Suite in 2024 was on solo piano, her new recording features her longstanding trio. Zoe has been performing with her current trio of Alec Dankworth on double bass and Gene Calderazzo on drums since 2003, and this recording is her first since 2001 to feature just the trio. Zoe speaks very warmly of Alec and Gene, highlighting their professionalism and innovation and the wonderful social and musical dynamic that exists between them. The recording, at The Vortex in London, was live with an audience and that gives the music a freshness and spontaneity that is impossible to achieve in a studio.
The Migrants statue
Although the themes of voyage, migration and family inspire the music and spark memories in the composer’s mind, Zoe agrees that labelling a specific part of the suite with a title is difficult. Music is after all inherently abstract, relying on human senses to experience it and the brain to convert it into an emotional experience. She believes that jazz, and the freedom it gives to musicians, is very effective in this regard, particularly at a live performance with an audience. The Hull Suite has six sections, but it is played as a continuous piece. The section titles are Across the Humber, Out to Sea, Piano Story, Voyage, Waves and East Coast.
Both of the statues that inspired the music stand on the banks of the River Humber and Across The Humber begins with some undulating motifs suggesting the motion of water and the rocking of boats. The migrants who arrived in Hull before travelling onwards to America were no doubt full of expectation about their future but sad to be leaving their homelands. The next part of the suite, Out To Sea, has a lovely, evocative melody portraying these emotions.
The section called Piano Story refers to Zoe’s parents' exploits on the other side of the world, the music is quite dramatic and fraught before a happy resolution is achieved. Waves again reminds us of the sea and its never-ending motion, and perhaps the goodbyes, while the swinging rhythm of East Coast suggests the jazz music of New York that the migrants may well have heard in their new country. Gene Calderazzo provides a stunning drum solo. The album has three other tracks, Synergy, surely a tribute to the other musicians in her trio, Fresh Start and Red Squirrel, the latter piece first written in 2011 but never recorded.
Those of us who have been a fan of Zoe Rahman’s music for many years will enjoy Hull Suite just as much as all the other wonderful music she has composed and performed during her career. The whooping of the audience at the end of the live recording at The Vortex bears testament to the quality of her performance and that of her excellent trio.
Zoe Rahman's Hull Suite is available here and her website is here.
The “Hull Suite Live” Tour 2026 has dates and venues as follows:
12th September Nottingham Peggy’s Skylight
19th September Luton The Bear Club
24th September Wolverhampton Arts Centre
2nd Oct Newcastle The Lit & Phil
9th Oct Brighton The Verdict
12th Nov Leeds Seven Arts
13th Nov Hull Truck Theatre
14th Nov Lincoln Blue Room
18th Nov EFG London Jazz Festival PizzaExpress Live, Soho*
19th Nov Sheffield Firth Hall
27th January (?) Chichester Minerva Theatre*
(* on sale in September)
© Sandy Brown Jazz 2026.9