Dawn Patrol: A Limited Edition Tea Collaboration with Yazz Ahmed

Some of the best creative ideas start with the simplest of questions. “How does this work?” “What if I added this?” Or perhaps, in the case of this particular collaboration, something altogether more unusual: “what would this music taste like?”

That’s essentially where this extraordinary partnership between privehuislust and Yazz Ahmed began. British-Bahraini jazz trumpeter and composer Yazz Ahmed arrived with an idea that was at once beautifully simple and genuinely ambitious: to commission a tea that could capture the spirit, the atmosphere, and the emotional texture of her new album, Shinrin-Yoku, and specifically it’s luminous opening track, Dawn Patrol. What she and we have created together is something we believe to be truly special. A blend that doesn’t just accompany the music, but converses with it.

About Yazz Ahmed

Yazz Ahmed is one of the most distinctive and emotionally compelling voices working in contemporary jazz today. Born in the UK to a Bahraini father and a British mother, she grew up between two cultures, and that duality has always been woven deeply into the fabric of her music – expressed through the seamless interweaving of Western jazz traditions with the microtonal scales, quarter-tone harmonics, and intricate rhythmic textures of Arabic and Bahraini musical heritage. She plays the flugelhorn and trumpet with a voice that is entirely her own, and her compositions have earned her recognition and admiration across the world, from prestigious BBC Radio 3 commissions to headline performances at major international festivals on multiple continents.

What makes Yazz’s work so enduringly compelling is its remarkable emotional depth and its profound rootedness in the physical world; in landscape, in the body, in the most elemental act of breathing. Her music doesn’t simply ask you to listen. It asks you to feel where you are, to notice the air around you, and to be, for a moment, completely present.

About the album

Shinriny-Yoku takes its name from the Japanese practice of forest bathing. Forest bathing is the deeply restorative art of immersing yourself in nature slowly, without agenda or destination, and allowing the sights, sounds, and scents of the natural world to do their quiet, unhurried work on the nervous system. It is a practice that became profoundly personal for Yazz during the lockdown years, when she spent long, contemplative hours walking in the landscapes close to her home, listening to the birdsong drifting into her garden, and finding her way steadily back to herself through a sustained, loving attention to the rhythms of the natural world.

The album reflects that gradual, healing journey in its entirety. Across its four pieces – Dawn Patrol, Forest Bathing, A Moment to Be Free, and Questions No Answers – Yazz moves through vivid interior landscapes of water and ancient woodland, wide open sky and winding, earthy mountain paths. Her composition style is spontaneous and deeply meditative in equal measure: she riffs and explores freely, following instinct wherever it leads, before drawing the threads together into something cohesive and whole. 

About Dawn Patrol

The album’s opening track, Dawn Patrol, was originally commissioned by Adult Swim, and Yazz composed it by meditating deeply and at length on a mood board they sent her. The images on that board brought water irresistibly to mind in the particular way it moves and breathes, the way it pulls you gently under and then releases you back into the light. She began to imagine setting off at sunrise and riding giant, rolling waves in the spirit of Hokusai’s iconic and endlessly reproduced Great Wave off Kanagawa, before diving beneath the surface into the cool, suspended quiet below, floating weightlessly, and then rising slowly back up to find the sun already climbing the sky and the board patiently waiting.

Surfers use the phrase “dawn patrol” to describe an early morning session on the waves. Heading out at first light, when the sea is often glassy and the conditions at their most rewarding. There is a very particular mood to it: the sharp cold air against your face, the emptiness of the water stretching out ahead of you, the intoxicating sense that the day belongs entirely and completely to you alone. Yazz captures all of that exquisite feeling in a piece that moves fluidly between surging, rhythmic energy and the deepest, most expansive stillness between the sheer exhilaration of the wave and the profound, enveloping silence of the water below. As she put it herself, with characteristic warmth and humour, she has never actually been surfing but perhaps, after all of this, it is finally her calling.

The tea

When Yazz first brought the idea of a collaboration to us, we were immediately and completely drawn in. Tea, like music, is fundamentally a ritual. It’s one of those quietly powerful daily practices that asks you to stop what you are doing, to prepare something with care, and to be genuinely, unhurriedly present for the experience. The two things belong together in a way that felt, from the very first conversation, entirely natural.

We worked closely and thoughtfully with Yazz and her label, Night Time Stories, over the course of the development process, to arrive at a blend that felt authentically true to both the emotional landscape of the music and the specifics of her personal heritage. At the heart of the blend is a loving tribute to Bahraini Karak Chai. A rich, deeply aromatic, stovetop-simmered spiced tea that is a cornerstone of Bahraini culture and daily life, and, for Yazz herself, a deeply personal and cherished ritual that she carries with her wherever she goes. It felt essential that the tea carry that connection honestly: not merely as a flavour reference or a gesture, but as a genuine act of creative autobiography, a cup with a story inside it.

Our version is entirely caffeine free, built on a warm, earthy base of rooibos and honeybush and layered generously with ginger, cardamom, cinnamon, cloves, and black peppercorns. It is warm and grounding with an uplifting natural sweetness, mellow and rounded enough to truly settle into, yet spiced with enough depth and vitality to keep you present and alive to the moment. Like the music that inspired it, it holds both stillness and momentum simultaneously, and it moves in a way that feels quietly inevitable.

The blend is designed to work beautifully with dairy or plant-based milk, and it is best prepared in the traditional stovetop style: three tablespoons of tea simmered gently in a litre of water until the kitchen fills with fragrance, around five to ten minutes, before being brought to the boil with 50g of sugar and 500ml of your milk of choice, stirring consistently and attentively before straining into your cup. It is the kind of blend that asks something of you in return. That you slow down, that you settle, that you be somewhere, fully and without distraction.

Drink it in the early morning as an awakening ritual, before the rest of the house begins to stir and the day makes its demands. Or brew it in the evening as the light fades, put the record on, and simply allow the two to work on you together.

The artwork

The packaging features a bespoke original illustration by the talented Sophie Bass, whose work brings the rich sensory world of the album to luminous, immersive life. The dappled woodland light filtering through leaves, the deep, saturated greens of a living forest, and an overriding feeling of being held tenderly within something vast and gentle and ancient. It is a piece that stands entirely on its own as a work of art, and we think it makes for a genuinely beautiful object in its own right, as much as it makes for a beautiful tea.

How to get it

Dawn Patrol is available from 28th May as a 100g loose leaf tea, as a standalone copy of the Shinrin Yoku vinyl LP, or as a bundle pairing both together. It is a strictly limited edition run, and once it is gone, it will not be coming back.

And if you happen to be in London on the evening of Tuesday 27th May, Yazz is hosting a listening party at Shai Space from 8pm to 10:30pm, where we will be serving the tea for the very first time. It promises to be a genuinely special and memorable evening, and we would love to see you there.

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