About

Music is a way into God. The absolute open expression of everything.
Amiri Baraka

It is through the wings of God’s silent memory that daughter of the Moroccan diaspora, Ami Taf Ra, uses music to explore layers of history, spirit and heart. Ami transcends the abyss of the present through leaning into fragments of the past, creating new futures archived in memory and translated in, with and through realms of sound. Music is the golden thread of call and response between those who mother us and those whom we mother. From a lineage of visionary women who dreamt otherwise (im)possibilities, Ami riffs off of this dream book of matrilineal liberation. Her music transcends the binds of geography, temporality and materiality. In the Black and blur of Gnawa, spiritual jazz, Arabic music(s), soul and Black popular music, Ami creates an intimate space for her music to breathe, within and between different sonic worlds.

Wrapping her sounds in the dialects of different lands, her music carries sediments of melody and verse from her myriad homes: Cairo, Istanbul, Amsterdam and LA, transmuting the voice of her wayfaring soul into song. Worlds of possibility unfold through the notes her spirit speaks. In her work, Ami takes us there, to those terrains of otherwise possibilities, to places that words yearn for; it is the space between the notes that deliver us to worlds of beauty beyond our wildest dreams. Hawa. A return to source. A homecoming. Melody unfurls a vernacular of its own to Ami. In the whisper of an epiphany, with graceful prowess she glides through traditional Arabic modulation and ornamentation as if she has always already been singing ghazals. Playing in the spaces between Arabic and Western modalities, she uses sound to explore and experiment with the hybridity of her identity.

As Fred Moten proposes, ‘you are always already in the thing that you call for and that calls you’. The spirit speaks in tongues that Ami weaves in her work as an artist. Moved by the life force of music, she has orbited around worlds of music-making as world building, communing in spaces where the creative spirit of sound build architectures of their own making. Working with refugee communities in Jordan, Ami delved into the political and pedagogical registers of her artistry. The work of an artist is not merely expressive but it resides within wells of meaning and purpose music is an instrument through which horizons of justice may emerge. This political reawakening aligns with the long history of African diasporic musical traditions, as a site of refusal, radical imagination and revolution.

Ami’s music prises open a kaleidoscope of pathways that surrender to the ever yielding (im)pulse of the divine. Her work is marked by a metaphysical and musical errantry; as with her predecessors, there is a sonic creolisation that weaves Arabic scales with popular melodies and lyrical ecstasy. The fertilisation of jazz with Arabic traditional music is an ode to the Black radical tradition, of music being (re)imagined, sampled, and repurposed, speaking to the unique pulse of the present. Through a flight of memory, Ami draws on the rich and varied sonic traditions of jazz to braid the sounds of her motherland with the different places and people moving with and through her. Singing an Arabic (re)imagining of the Bossa Nova classic ‘Manha De Carnaval/Black Orpheus’, Ami collapses boundaries of genre and geography to pave way for resonances that have always already existed, rendering the potent saudade of Brazilian music palpable through the poetics of Arabic. Music creates the space for her to exist in her complexity and multitude; for all the different facets of her being to collide in beautiful symphony.

2025 sees the release of Ami’s The Prophet and Madman on Brainfeeder. A majestic record, whose transcendental spirit is rendered with depth, fortitude and grace. The record is a metaphysical conversation with the Lebanese writer, philosopher and mystic, Khalil Gibran’s classic and ceaselessly yielding texts, including The Madman (1918) and The Prophet (1923). Like Ami, Gibran resided in liminal spaces as a writer of the Lebanese diaspora, thus his texts were an instrument of carving home and belonging, through memories of an elsewhere. There is an ineffable beauty in Ami cradling the sacred heart of Gibran’s philosophical wanderings. The first single shared with us, Speak to us Outro, captures the choreography of epiphanies Gibran gifts us with through the voice of Al Mustafa in The Prophet, gentle opening our hearts and minds to his wisdom. Through her stunning (re)imagining of Gibran’s body of work, like the astronomer in The Madman, Ami guides us to gaze at the cosmos within, to retreat inwards towards the expansiveness of the black holes of our interior universe; to study the constellations within, so that we can move to a cosmology anchored in the wisdom of Orion’s belt and the dawn of Aquarius. This is magnificently rendered in the timeless ode to divine surrender in the rapturous Love, where the revelation of love as Rasool gives our winged breath flight. Gibran speaks in dreams, with Ami transmuting these dreams through sound, turning us away from the logic of man and towards the boundless essence of the Creator.

Crafted during the pandemic with producer and beloved musical collaborator and savant artist Kamasi Washington, they deeply sat with Gibran’s deeply beautiful body of work together. Tending to its spiritual registers, they immersed themselves in the variegated hues of Gibran’s texts, responding to his spirit of word with their braided spirit of sound. Her celestial vocal arrangements in Love and Speak to Us, see her bending notes to the will of spirit, echoing the work of iconic Lebanese artist Fairuz. The gorgeous dance between North African cosmologies and Black American sonic traditions can be heard in the funky pulsating terrain of Gnawa, where Washington and Ami tenderly sculpt a portal to the transcendent noor of pan-African wisdom.

The record dances with histories of the LA-based Black Jazz label, echoing Doug and Jean Carn, spiritual jazz partners, who created melodies wielding a generous mountain for our levitation. We hear cosmic tones of a generation of Black American musicians who used jazz as a site of improvisation, to weave registers of elsewhere cosmologies. Ami’s commitment to these beautiful textures of liberation are felt. Ephemeral and ecstatic, the music is both a celebration and lamentation, a site of refuge and yearning, sage and seeker.

Time is the mere distance between intention and its manifestation; five years in the fold of a deep, generative and unerring love, Ami has nurtured fertile soil for her music’s flourishing, whilst also becoming a mother and giving life to her daughter, Asha. The record is a dedication of love to the emergent freedom dreams of Asha. It is a mediation on the worlds of liberation that reside within us all. In this way, moving in the spirit of the chorus, Ami has gathered musicians to do the work of breathing life to the music in stunning ensemble. Communing in the sonic sublime of trombonist Ryan Porter, bassist Miles Mosley, guitarist Brandon Coleman, drummers Tony Austin and Ronald Bruner Jr, vocalist Taylor Graves, pianist Cameron Graves and percussionists Allakoi Peete and Kahil Cummings, the record is held in the energy of these powerful sonic conversations. Gathering together as they orbit around the sagacious prophecies of Gibran, we are compelled to deeply listen to the heavenly registers they weave.

Ami’s journey with and through the capacious (over)tones of music symbolises its power as an instrument of love, freedom and hope. Her music is a reminder that the phoenix rises amidst the chaos of man. In the afterlives of political, economic and social crises, love remains; the ontology of humanity is woven into the variegated grooves of The Prophet and Madman. In an epoch of despair and disillusion, Ami Taf Ra crafts polyrhythms of ascension, sculpting cartographies of collective freedom to (re)imagine the beauty and power of love as a force of hope. This musical offering compels us to move to the highest vibration of our collective conscious, rising in marvellous communion together.

Speak to us
in the womb of creation
Mother and child
Circle unbroken
Daughters of infinite dance
In the groove of sound
Space(s) between
ebb and flow
whispering rituals of home
Dancing
In the air of sound
making light together
the faint trace of history
Echoes of freedom
Prophetic listening
Sounds and signs
the curves of ancient dialect
held by the tongue of the sacred in others
‘Prophetic listening’ rendering
Prophetic hope
A way into God
From God to Gibran
From Ami
To Us