BLACK MUSIC MONTH TRIBUTE Remembering the understated genius of Ahmad Jamal

BY ERIC GRODE

Ahmad Jamal, whose measured, spare piano style was an inspiration to generations of jazz musicians, died on Sunday, April 16, at his home in Ashley Falls, Mass. He was 92.

In a career that would bring him a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master award, a lifetime achievement Grammy and induction into France’s Order of Arts and Letters, Mr. Jamal made a lasting mark on jazz with a stately approach that honored what he called the spaces in the music.

That approach stood in marked contrast to the challengingly complex music known as bebop, which was sweeping the jazz world when Mr. Jamal began his career as a teenager in the mid-1940s. Bebop pianists, following the lead of Bud Powell, became known for their virtuosic flurries of notes. Mr. Jamal chose a different path, which proved equally influential.

The critic Stanley Crouch wrote that bebop’s founding father, Charlie Parker, was the only musician “more important to the development of fresh form in jazz than Ahmad Jamal.”

In his early years, Mr. Jamal listened not just to jazz, which he preferred to call “American classical music,” but also to classical music of the non-American variety.

“We didn’t separate the two schools,” he told The New York Times in 2001. “We studied Bach and Ellington, Mozart and Art Tatum. When you start at 3, what you hear you play. I heard all these things.”

Mr. Jamal’s laid-back, accessible style, with its dense chords, its wide dynamic range and above all its judicious use of silence, led to more than his share of dismissive reviews in the jazz press early in his career; Martin Williams’s canonical history “The Jazz Tradition” described his music as “chic and shallow.”

But it soon became an integral part of the jazz landscape. Herbie Hancock and Keith Jarrett are among the prominent jazz pianists who looked to Mr. Jamal as an exemplar.

Probably the best-known musician to cite Mr. Jamal as an influence was not a pianist but a trumpeter and bandleader: Miles Davis, who became close friends with Mr. Jamal, recorded his compositions and arrangements and would bring his sidemen to see Mr. Jamal perform. He once said, “All my inspiration comes from Ahmad Jamal.”

Jamal was born Frederick Russell Jones in Pittsburgh on July 2, 1930. Fritz, as he was called, began playing piano at age 3 and a few years later became a student of Mary Cardwell Dawson, the founder of the National Negro Opera Company. By the time

Fritz joined the musicians’ union at age 14, the celebrated jazz piano virtuoso Art Tatum had hailed him as “a coming great,” and after graduating from high school he began touring with George Hudson’s big band.

In 1950 he moved to Chicago, where he converted to Islam, changed his name to Ahmad Jamal and assembled a piano-guitar-bass trio known as the Three Strings. During an extended stay at the Manhattan nightclub the Embers in 1951, the trio came to the attention of the noted record producer and talent scout John Hammond, who signed them to the Okeh label.

In 1955 Mr. Jamal recorded his first full-length album, “Ahmad Jamal Plays,” with the guitarist Ray Crawford and the bassist Israel Crosby, for the small Parrot label. Tellingly, when the album was acquired and rereleased the next year by Argo, a subsidiary of the seminal blues label Chess, it was retitled “Chamber Music of the New Jazz.”

Mr. Jamal received his first major national exposure with the Argo album “At the Pershing: But Not for Me,” recorded at a Chicago nightclub in 1958 with Mr. Crosby and the drummer Vernel Fournier.

The success of “At the Pershing” stemmed in part from Mr. Jamal’s ambling yet propulsive interpretation of the standard “Poinciana,” still his best-known recording.

Mr. Jamal’s output was as prodigious as his light-fingered style was economical: He released as many as three albums a year in the late 1960s and early ’70s, and more than 60 in his career.

He also founded a handful of record labels, a management company and a Chicago nightclub and restaurant called the Alhambra.

Live recordings often captured Mr. Jamal at his nimblest, and many jazz connoisseurs rank such albums as “Freeflight” (1971), recorded at the Montreux Jazz Festival, and “Chicago Revisited: Live at Joe Segal’s Jazz Showcase” (1993) among his best.

In 2011, Mosaic Records released a nine-CD boxed set consisting of the 12 albums he recorded for Argo between 1956 and 1962. His album “Blue Moon,” a well-received collection of originals and standards, was released in 2012 and nominated for a Grammy Award. His last two albums were recorded in 2016 and released as “Marseille” in 2017 and “Ballades” in 2019.

Last year, Mr. Jamal released two separate double-disc collections: “Emerald City Nights: Live at the Penthouse (1963-64)” and “(1965-66),” consisting of previously unreleased live recordings made in Seattle. A third set, “(1966-68),” is planned.

The reverence with which Mr. Jamal was held stretched well beyond the jazz world. Clint Eastwood used two tracks from “But Not for Me” on the soundtrack of his film “The Bridges of Madison County.”

But the more extensive tributes have come from the world of hiphop. Tracks like De La Soul’s “Stakes Is High” and Nas’s “The World Is Yours,” along with dozens of other rap songs, have sampled Mr. Jamal’s piano riffs.

All told, for a pianist who started playing at 3, music was truly his lifelong pursuit, spanning almost 90 years. And he was always looking ahead.

“I’m still evolving,” Mr. Jamal told The Times in a phone interview last year, not long after turning 92. “Whenever I sit down at the piano, I still come up with some fresh ideas.”

The recording that turned millions on to jazz

phenomenon. Its fame and popularity spread like wildfire. It topped America’s jazz charts for months and established a 107-week residence in Billboard’s album charts. It sold over one million copies and is still selling.

The record certainly changed Jamal’s life, transforming the then 28-year-old into a household name. “I could write volumes about that,” laughs Jamal. “Life changed and it’s constantly changing as a result. It’s been the thing that has paid the bills for the last 61 years,” Jamal told an interviewer in 2020.

At The Pershing: But Not For Me, was recorded for Chess’ jazz imprint, Argo. It captured Jamal’s then trio (with Israel Crosby on bass and Vernell Fournier on drums) during their residence at The Pershing Hotel in Chicago during January 1958.

At The Pershing: But Not For Me was much more than a record: it was a

Central to At The Pershing’s appeal was the song “Poinciana,” an exotic and haunting slow ballad written by Nat Simon and Buddy Bernier in 1936.

“Not often do we have instrumental hits, but ‘Poinciana’ is still being emulated,” says Jamal. “That particular record has been plagiarised and copied by many. It transcended all categories.”