I’ve known Mustafa the Poet, now known simply as Mustafa, for a long time. A lot of people do. If you’re from Toronto – the chronically misunderstood city we’re both from – it’s hard not to know each other, or at least of each other. It would be especially strange, as Torontonians, to not know (or notice) someone on the brink of something great, maybe even bigger than them.
Like others from our city, Mustafa is on that list. But unlike others from our city, Mustafa’s been on that brink (or precipice) for a long, long time. Now, we’re finally watching him bloom.
On When Smoke Rises – his eight-track, 24-minute-long debut album – he sings about his foundation: his people, his ends and, most notably, his friends. Working within folk musical traditions, but with genre-fluid producers like Frank Dukes and Jamie xx, the record sounds both new and old, familiar and sonically experimental. (Production on the project also includes samples of Mustafa’s friends speaking to him over voice notes, checking in one another, screaming “AHWOOLAY!” and repping home.) It’s a measured and thoughtful account of what it means to see and love the people of Mustafa’s world – to quote writer Momtaza Mehri, who opened Mustafa’s London concert, glory be to the gang, gang, gang.
Before achieving his current success as a recording artist, Mustafa had experimented with different forms of writing, testing the limits and temperaments of each world and its corresponding scenes. The short version of the story goes like this: as a kid (as young as seven or eight years old), Mustafa’s older sister, Namarig Ahmed, decided to teach her little brother about the healing effects of poetry. Together, they talked, Namarig planting seeds of curiosity in a child trying to
