Who is jazz musician Ramzi Hammad?

With his band, Ramzi Hammad Collective, he weaves Middle Eastern rhythms with contemporary jazz grooves to produce the sort of sound that Michael League once termed ‘music for your brain and your booty’.

Making waves isn’t easy in a landlocked nation, but Hammad and his Collective have been doing just that and then some, nominated for the Moods ZKB Jazz Prize and winning the m4music New Jazz Showcase, they’re becoming known and respected for their electric energy and tight sound. 

In March 2026 they made their London debut as they joined us at the Southbank Centre as part of our Montreux Jazz Festival Residency, so ahead of that performance and their continued rise, we put together this introduction to the man behind the Collective, Ramzi Hammad.

His musical interest began at home

Hammad was born and raised in Zurich, son of a Swiss mother and Palestinian father – each of which encouraged him into music. ‘My family, especially on my mother’s side, has always been very artistic, so it was kind of expected that I would learn an instrument at some point,’ he says, but it was his father who indirectly steered him towards the drums. ‘My father plays the darbuka and he showed me the basics when I was around six-years-old; ever since then I knew I wanted to learn the drums, which I started playing when I was 11.’ His first gig was also a family affair, playing the darbuka, along with his father and an oud player, at events for Basel’s Palestinian diaspora.

His first job was as a professional gamer

Though he had a love for music, it wasn’t something the young Hammad initially entertained as a career. ‘When I was a kid I wanted to be an architect,’ he says, a route influenced by his father who had wanted to be an interior designer, but a love of gaming took him in a different direction. ‘I became a professional minecraft builder when I was around 13 and I could kind of live out my architecture ambitions there. I made pretty good money for that age and really saw myself as a professional gamer until I properly discovered my love for music when I first started playing in a band at 16.’

He remains passionate about being part of a band

Since that musical revelation at the age of 16, Hammad has been part of a number of bands, playing as a sideman and drummer with several jazz combos and groups including Ayyuka, Palko Muski and Muralim before latterly forming his own Collective. ‘Playing with other people, especially on an instrument like drums that accompanies others, truly showed me the magic of music,’ Hammad explains. ‘The communal aspects, the technical parts, the food for your soul, working on your craft together and by yourself all really resonated deeply with me’.

He can turn his hand to more than just the drums

Although drumming is where it began for Hammad, and where it continues within his Collective, he’s expanded his musical arsenal over the years. ‘I always knew that if I was going to play a musical instrument it would be the drums, but I also knew that to understand music more broadly, I had to learn another instrument.’ As a teenager he taught himself the piano, before having more formal piano lessons at music school. ‘Now there are weeks where I don’t touch the drums and only play piano, which is why I’m a pretty competent pianist’.

His first musical influence was Benny Greb

The acclaimed German drummer was the young Hammad’s first musical hero and so he was especially ‘stoked to meet’ him at a drumcamp when he was 18. But in his teenage years he found new musical inspirations. ‘My first real musical loves have to be Yussef Dayes and Alfa Mist, who I discovered when I really got into music in my late teens. Their energy, vibe and melding of styles was something totally new to me and I knew I wanted to make this kind of music in the future’.

His musical inspirations are broad

‘My inspiration is hard to pin-point,’ explains Hammad of a pool of interest that spans Palestinian music, hip-hop, jazz, flamenco, afrobeat, electronic and Cuban music, with particular inspiration coming from those combining some of these styles, ‘artists such as Christian Scott, Tigran Hamasyan, Ibrahim Malouf, Snarky Puppy or Ezra Collective’. He continues, ‘I also like to look at folkloric styles to find the musical aspects that are shared between cultures; styles like flamenco or jazz are really interesting to me because they’re styles that emerged out of different people meeting (willingly or not) and reconciling their differences to express themselves together musically. They’re more than the sum of their parts.’

He sees composing and arranging as his ‘true calling’

‘I’m a very analytical but also a creative person and I feel like arranging is the best part of making music to combine these two aspects,’ says Hammad. ‘The reason my Collective is this big is because I can’t contain my musical ideas to a small formation and need all these voices to express my ideas’. 

But much as he sees arranging as suiting his skillset, it’s performing that gives him the biggest buzz. ‘I’m still all for the performance; I love jazz because of its spontaneity, which you can’t compose. Ultimately my music is dance music, and the vibe of a whole room moving together to one pulse and exchanging energy is something truly special which can only happen live’. And the experience of playing live continues to inform his music, as he says of their stand out performance at Zurich’s m4music festival; ‘realising people care less about you playing everything perfectly all the time and more about the energy you give them is a lesson you don’t learn in music school, which I direly needed’.

His Collective was formed at Zurich’s University of the Arts

Hammad and the other members of his band all met as students in Switzerland’s largest city. They travel to London as a sextet, with Hammad joined by South African guitarist Rich Harpur – ‘an indispensable part of our band as my music has some tricky guitar parts, and he’s definitely the guy for that’; Congolese bassist Benjamin Goncalves – ‘the bedrock of our band, musically and emotionally’; Swiss percussionist Jona Hunter – ‘I really vibe with him personally and musically, he’s always down for my weird rhythmic concepts’; French trumpet and flugelhorn Theophile Blanchon – ‘he’s great on the music and technical side and produced of our latest single ‘Fayruz’’; and Swiss-Japanese saz player Marina Iten – ‘a really great, versatile and organised player who also manages our band, which I’m very grateful for’.

Montreux has offered him a chance to kick on

Hammad’s Southbank Centre gig comes off the back of a rewarding residency with the Montreux Jazz Artists Foundation. ‘It was a really meaningful experience meeting all these great musicians and mentors and feeling like we’re all just people on the same wavelength,’ he explains. ‘The music, jams and experiences really nourished the soul – it gave me the confidence to believe I really have something to say on an international stage, not feeling stuck in Switzerland’. The journey beyond Swiss borders begins here at the Southbank Centre and continues with a new EP and European tour in the summer, and more international exploration beyond with Hammad especially keen ‘to collab with as many musicians as possible, especially people from diasporas that I’m influenced by’.