Mustafa - When Smoke Rises review: a sad, beautiful tribute to too many young lives lost

You can find a well-viewed clip of Mustafa Ahmed aged 12 on YouTube, reciting his poem A Single Rose. Now 24, the Toronto-raised son of Sudanese immigrants has been poet laureate at the 2015 Pan American Games and part of Justin Trudeau’s Youth Advisory Council, as well as earning pop songwriting credits for The Weeknd, Camila Cabello and Shawn Mendes.

All of that might suggest commercial ambitions for his debut as a solo musician, but When Smoke Rises is a painfully intimate snapshot of his life in Toronto’s Regent Park neighbourhood. He says he’s been listening to Sufjan Stevens’s Carrie & Lowell album – a quiet meditation on the death of Stevens’s mother, with whom Stevens had a difficult relationship – and wanting to do something similar to commemorate the shockingly large number of young friends he has lost to violence. In Ahmed’s songs, his pals are known by more than their mugshots. “Can I crystallise the memories of people whose descriptors have been their criminal records and nothing beyond that?” he has said.

He does a fine job of it on Ali, titled for Ali Rizeig, on which he expresses regret at failing to persuade his friend to leave the home in which he was shot dead in 2017. The music is mournful and withdrawn – heartbeat drums, plucked guitar, slow piano and samples of his friends speaking, as well as his mother singing a Sudanese folk song on Separate. It’s very sad, and very beautiful, a fitting tribute to the many departed.

(Regent Park Songs)

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