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Arts & Culture

One to Watch: Rabiah Kabir’s Jazz Flute Odyssey at the Black Cat

In a club date, the young instrumentalist and composer proved that jazz’s evolution is eternal.
Gabe Meline
Rabiah Kabir and her sextet perform at the Black Cat jazz club in San Francisco on Jan. 21, 2026. (Gabe Meline)

Jazz is dead, or so the perennial phrase goes, spoken by the jaded olds. And year after year, young artists prove them wrong.

Case in point: Rabiah Kabir brought her sextet to the Black Cat Wednesday night for a 90-minute set that was equal parts fresh, inventive and fun. Performing songs from her recent album Jezebel: Rewritten, the flutist and composer showed that so long as jazz is infused with new ideas and inspirations, it will be infinitely reborn.

That much was evident from the first song, “Flute / Overture,” with electronic samples of birdsong and hopscotch-like sound effects. On the album, the song is dotted with samples of interviews Kabir undertook for her Stanford thesis The Jezebel Flute: Female Flute Players, Black Feminism and “The Masculine Jazz Spectrum”; onstage Wednesday, she referred to her celebration of “the power of femininity in music.”

Odd time signatures undergird Kabir’s music, on Wednesday propelled by drummer Jaycie Grady along with the driving bassist Leela Paymai, whose compositions from a Persian-jazz project, ZHENIIA, were also featured onstage to great effect.

At one point, Aymai spoke of the historic protests in Iran, and Kabir introduced “The ReZident,” a song inspired by her time studying in Cape Town, by noting that jazz has always been protest music. During an arrangement of Tears for Fears’ “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” pianist Julian Lopez picked up the mic to rap about media manipulation, U.S. imperialism and the bombardment of Gaza.

Kabir, who sat at the piano herself for an improvised solo number, shouted out her parents, educators, and collaborators, which included Nathan Sariowan on violin and Wesley Larlarb on guest piano. Ethan Buck, on alto saxophone, shined while doubling Kabir’s solos with his own simultaneous soaring lines, bringing the set to repeated climaxes.

But it was Kabir’s night, and rightly so. Neither a soul flutist in the vein of Bobbi Humphrey, an avant-gardist like Eric Dolphy nor a showman like Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Kabir is reaching for something deeper, and she frequently finds it. On “Red Shapes and Green Shapes,” a song inspired by a loved one of Kabir’s who’s currently in London and missed the show, her solo started low and introspective, the sound of loneliness, then gradually built to high wails, as if calling across the sea.

The set ended with “I Crashed My Car” — a song I liked very much last year — but the trajectory of Rabiah Kabir is far from over. Keep an eye on this one, folks.

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