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The Scotsman, 4-star review, Mon 30 Oct 2006
RAMSHORN THEATRE, GLASGOW ...She more than justified the hype, leading an excellent trio with Oli Hayhurst on his streamlined stand-up bass and London-based American drummer Gene Calderazzo. Rahman, like many of her peers, can't be pinned down to a single jazz style or idiom. Her music reflects a wide-ranging musical sensibility that took in various shades of jazz (influences that flashed past included Monk, Abdullah Ibrahim, Bill Evans and Keith Jarrett), classical and world music, and re-emerged in her own voice. From the lovely, lucid intro to Scott LaFaro's Gloria's Step through to the rolling South African feel of her own J'Berg and the evocative Bengali tune Muchhe Jaoa Dinguli, the pianist revealed a lovely touch, acute harmonic imagination and powerful rhythmic feel. By her own admission, she revelled in playing the Ramshorn's fine Bosendorfer piano. Most of the set featured her own tunes, including Camel, with its Monkish touches, Shiraz and Last Note. A highly mobile, energised reading of Joanne Brackeen's Egyptian Tune Dance provided another highlight, and underlined the fact that we were not simply hearing a very talented pianist at work, but a genuine feast of intricate and communicative trio playing.

Julian Maynard-Smith
...'Melting Pot' suggests heat and variety, two qualities that appear in abundance on this piano trio recording: from Monkish fractured rhythms on the opener Camel, to crashing waves of chords suggestive of Alice Coltrane on Shiraz, to the muscular and almost funky rhythms of The Calling and Last Note. But there is also great delicacy: Red Flower , the only solo track on the album, is an introspective tone poem, and No One glides from free jazz to aching tenderness.... From a melting pot of influences has emerged an original voice, a unique alloy of high tensile strength...This is a name to watch out for.

Dave Gelly, The Observer, 4th June 2006
"A remarkable pianist by any standards, Zoe Rahman is quickly becoming an unignorable presence on the British Jazz scene. Here, she clears the second album hurdle with ease...this best captures the boldness and breadth of her approach. She can slip from Monkish percussiveness to extreme fragility with assurance, and sustain a mood with the simplest of devices. There are influences of both Middle Eastern and South African music, but her style is distinctively her own."

PREVIEW: Kerstan Mackness, TIME OUT London March 8th - 15th 2006

Rahman is the brilliant young Asian pianist who is finally beginning to receive the acclaim she deserves. A former Perrier jazz musician of the year, she studied at the prestigious Berklee music school in Massachusetts and has since built up an interesting CV, playing punky worldbeat with Terry Hall and Mushtaq, trancey Arabic folk with singer Reem Kelani, and superior hard bop with drummer Clark Tracey, as well as writing for the theatre.

Unlike many of her contemporaries she eschews jazz's current obsession with the three Bs - Bach, Brad Mehldau and Bill Evans - in favour of a highly individualistic, vibrant style (she plays as if in love with the very sound of the piano), occasionally hinting at Monk or Alice Coltrane but remaining determinedly original. She plays with a compelling drive and shifts effortlessly between meditative and hypnotic pieces, pulsating and tricksy modern bebop, rumbling South African themes and off-beat improvisational lines as heard on her superb recent album 'Melting Pot'.

Tonight's concert, part of the Southbank's 'Banglabeat' mini-fest, finds her exploring the music of her Bengali father's favourite singer Hemant Mukherjee. Rahman cheerfully admits to knowing little about Bengali music, but included one of Mukherjee's songs on 'Melting Pot' after hearing his music when her father asked her to transfer an old cassette to CD. She sees this evening's free concert as an opportunity to approach her Bengali heritage through music. This trio features her brother Idris on clarinet and Brazilian percussionist Anselmo Neto. Expect Rahman's arrangements to reference all her influences, from Arabic tone poems to luminous jazz, but to ultimately sound like no one except Zoe Rahman herself.

Kevin Le Gendre, Echoes Magazine (March 2006)
"..more than filling the potential mooted by her 2002 debut, 'The Cynic' her swing is a tad more muscular, her movement between registers more assured. She has brought anything from yearning South African to Arabic melodies to flighty touches of drum & bass influences to her sturdy, bluesy post-bop template without sounding at all contrived..it is Rahman the leader, whose poise and economy has more than a hint of Ahmad Jamal, who really puts her stamp on the session. A very timely reminder of a musician whose burgeoning virtuosity is impressively matched by her communicative power.

Tom Barlow, Jazzwise Magazine (4-Star review, Feb 2006)
"this artist has truly arrived. Melting Pot brims with top-notch composition, interaction and soloing. As a player, Rahman weaves dense, darkly rich melodicisms..to make player comparisons detracts from Rahman's individuality. A raw, percussive musician, she wrenches emotion from every track from the brooding 'Last Note' to the middle-Eastern twists of 'Muchhe Jaoa Dinguli'. One of the most distinctive British piano trio albums in a while, let's not take Rahman for granted."

City Life magazine review by Mike Butler (Nov 2005)
"..the new CD, Melting Pot, shares common ground with any pianist with luminous touch, bubbling spirit and a penchant for offbeat time signatures. Rahman's sound is instantly engaging, and positively transcendent. The incantatory quality of her playing acknowledges life's mystery, while the freshness and dynamism confirm life's energy. Melting Pot is an absolute gem. It cuts deep."

Chis Parker, Vortex Website Review (Jan 2006)
"Zoe Rahman has established herself as one of the brightest young stars in the UK jazz-piano firmament. This album showcases all her considerable gifts: highly individual compositional skill; dense, powerfully emotive pieces; satisfyingly complex and hospitable to exhilarating improvisation; an almost dreamy lyricism and a tightly controlled robustness; a keen awareness of the importance of group interplay that enables her to lead a wonderfully sprightly band through the most absorbing of her pieces, which are small marvels of textural and dynamic variation, packed with subtle mood changes and rhythmic felicities. A confident and eloquent album that reveals new delights on each listening."

John Fordham, Jazz UK (Jan/Feb 2006)
"With her album 'The Cynic' four years ago, British pianist Zoe Rahman announced that she was a sophisticated listener to the usual suspects on the contemporary acoustic piano-trio scene, but had no inclination to be anybody's clone...her own music ranges through postbop, ambient reveries, funk, free-jazz and world-music, all seamlessly integrated. The themes are strong, and the only non-original is a hypnotic world-music meditation also involving Rahman's clarinetist brother Idris and udu-player Adriano Itauna."

Brian Morton, Jazz Review (Feb 2006)
"This is, in every way, an impressive sequel [to her debut album]. Rahman has tremendous control at the keyboard, from the Monk/stride shapes that bring in "Camel", to the much more lyrical approach of "J'Berg", which at different angles reminded me of every one from Paul Bley to Abdullah Ibrahim..the looser and more expansive sound Zoe gets from Gene Calderazzo and Oli Hayhurst lifts this album a notch above its predecessor."

Sholto Byrnes, The Independent on Sunday (4th Dec 2005)
"Rahman's second album confirms the pianist as a distinctive voice on the British jazz scene. She manages to avoid the cliches of bop while still indicating a familiarity with its language. Even when hitting a riff hard, her trio has a woody texture to it which allows air into the rhythmic motifs that Rahman often favours. The result is attractively difficult to place and timeless. Rahman has a quietly concentrated manner at the keyboard that is winning her a wider audience. She deserves it."

Susannah Tarbush, Saudi Gazette (20th Dec 2005)
"With the release of her second album, 'Melting Pot', the jazz pianist and composer Zoe Rahman has further confirmed her place as one of the most talented and inspiring young musicians on the contemporary British jazz scene. It is a real pleasure to listen to Rahman's assured musicianship with its freshness of spirit creating intriguing rhythms and haunting melodies. Rahman's performance has a driving sense of energy, yet also a reflective and transcendent quality. Rahman is a graceful presence on stage, with her slender form, fine features and wide smile."

John Fordham, Guardian (18th Nov 2005)
"..Rahman's wayward and mobile left-hand patterns swerving under crisp post-bop swingers like Camel, soft meditations with repeating low themes emerging under treble trills (Shiraz), dense, hypnotic, multi-linear entanglements like the funky The Calling or free-jazz tussles preceding soft rumination like No One.

Dave Gelly, The Observer (12th Feb 2006): review of Clark Tracey's "The Mighty Sas"
"..a brighter, more inventive group would be hard to find, almost absurdly poised and mature for their years. Zoe Rahman, a Perrier Young Jazz award winner, must be one of the finest young pianists in Europe."

Susannah Tarbush, Saudi Gazette (31 January 2006): review of Reem Kelani's "Sprinting Gazelle"
"Kelani is supported by a terrific lineup of musicians. Her core band, with which she often appears in performance, includes jazz pianist Zoe Rahman, whose piano improvisations (taqasim) add a magical dimension to tracks such as the evocative 'Yafa!'"

Tariq Shadid, Musical Intifada (Feb 2006): website review of Reem Kelani's "Sprinting Gazelle"
"The piano, enchantingly played by Zoe Rahman, sometimes is reminiscent of the work of Aziza Mustafa Zadeh, at other times touching upon the style of Ziad el Rahbani...."

Barry Boyce, CJC website review:
"'Zoe' is the Greek word for 'life'; the vivacious and exuberant Zoe Rahman was certainly aptly named. For me [she] ranks highly among living UK jazz pianists because of her distinctive style and approach: Zoe Rahman plays like Zoe Rahman, and her music is, thankfully, never easy listening." March 2005

John Brand, live review, Sheffield Jazz Club:
"This was superior contemporary jazz from the outset. Truly this was an evening of jazz as the sound of surprise. Throughout, Zoe had been able to take flight while relying on the crisp and incisive support of [Gene Calderazzo], one of the best drummers around, combined with the always eloquent bass work of Oli Hayhurst." March 2005

Jack Massarik, London Evening Standard:
"She is an exceptional pianist with a warm sound and a firm and confident touch". Jazz FM CD review 2000

Ian Carr, BBC Music Magazine
"The Cynic, young British pianist Zoe Rahman's debut trio album, is a remarkable achievement, because it seems that she already has her own sound and style. [Her] compositions are excellent, developing in highly original ways. It's a great debut." The Cynic CD review 2001

John Fordham, Guardian/Jazz UK
"Zoe Rahman, a young, animated British pianist, is a musician of powerful technique, group sympathy and compositional skill...Her group's collective expressiveness was consistently absorbing" Live review, Dec 2000
"Rahman's composing is as striking as her improvising. Exhilarating as she can be, Zoe Rahman is also a subtle and hypnotically absorbing interpreter of ballads". Jazz UK