For those who heard it, Qur’an Shaheed’s 2020 soul jazz EP Process provided some succour in that bleakest of bleak years. With Pulse, her first album proper, the Pasadena-based pianist and singer has deconstructed what she does with the help of producer Spencer Hartling, who took her demos, brought in some tape loops and applied FX dubbing to help present something far more multi-textured and, ultimately, zeitgeist-y. Pulse is discombobulating at times – but so, too, is the world in which it is being released.
On Shaheed’s Bandcamp, she describes herself as a “woman and her piano on a journey to embrace femininity and love in this lifetime,” adding that that’s in contravention of the “times of mental and spiritual strain that the world is presenting.” As well as struggling against prevailing head winds, she grew up the daughter of Nolan Shaheed, an acclaimed trumpeter, former musical director for Marvin Gaye and touring musician with Stevie Wonder. If that brings with it its own expectations, then Shaheed’s need to reinvent the wheel is both understandable and, on Pulse, highly successful.
Opener ‘Dreams’ bubbles away on a soundbed of elasticated notes that loop repetitively as she spreads her luxuriant alto across its spiky frame. It could be the work of Gershon Kingsley or Delia Derbyshire if it wasn’t for the telltale modern sound design veering into the picture with resounding slabs of sub-bass, or indeed for Shaheed’s extraordinary voice. On ‘Dreams’ she expresses a deep affinity with dreaming like dreams themselves are going out of fashion: “Do you still dream?” she sings, almost with a hint of desperation: “I still dream. You can’t take away the things that I know. In my mind I know, I know.”
Meditative mantra-making continues throughout. On the tactile, quasi-psychedelic ‘Fix It Part 1’, she repeats the line “you can’t take away my intuition” over and over as if she’s trying not to forget it or have it stolen from her. The second part then melts into a strange celestial soup of noise and whispers that echo back on themselves. Those fans of Process from five years ago may feel like we’ve wandered off into unchartered territory here, though Pulse – capricious though it is – is never short of riveting.
Only ‘Doo Doo Doo’ comes closest to resembling a conventional r’n’b song, though with its glitchiness and its rhythm section elegantly falling over itself, it’s fair to say that this is creative indulgence that somehow hits the bullseye for both the listener and its creator. “I’m not here to help you up,” admits Shaheed on the said song, “I’m here for me”. Thankfully, this is an album that strikes a chord as much for its emotional honesty as for its musical adventurousness.
