Remembering Ahmad Jamal (1930–2023)

I was saddened to hear of the passing of renowned music icon Ahmad Jamal. The 92-year-old Grammy Award-winning jazz pianist, band leader, composer, and educator died at his Massachusetts home last Sunday, April 16.

I’ve been collecting and listening to Jamal’s works for about a year now. I even ordered a CD through his website which he kindly signed for me. Ahmad Jamal was a true legend. May he rest in power and peace.

Perhaps Jamal’s most well-known work is his take on the song “Poinciana.” Following is his famous live recording of it at The Pershing Lounge in 1958.






Following are excerpts from various online tributes to Ahmad Jamal.

For most jazz performers, a song is part of a performance. For Ahmad Jamal, each song was a performance. Over the course of a remarkable eight-decade career, Jamal, who passed away Sunday at the age of 92, created stellar recordings both as an ambitious youth and a sagely veteran.

Jamal’s death was confirmed by his daughter, Sumayah Jamal [pictured at right with her father in 2022]. He died Sunday afternoon in Ashley Falls, Mass., after a battle with prostate cancer.

Jamal’s influence and admirers spread far and wide in jazz. For instance, Miles Davis found enormous inspiration in his work: In his 1989 autobiography, Miles, the legendary trumpeter said that Jamal “knocked me out with his concept of space, his lightness of touch, his understatement, and the way he phrases notes and chords and passages.” Miles went on to record Jamal’s “New Rhumba” on his classic 1957 recording Miles Ahead.

His contemporary admirers are just as fervent. Pianist Ethan Iverson, a founding member of the exceptionally popular trio The Bad Plus, said, “All of his pieces are theatrical and contained. In some ways the Bad Plus was an extension of his classic trio.”

Pianist Vijay Iyer was just as adamant. “His sense of time is that of a dancer, or a comedian. His left hand stays focused, and his right hand is always in motion, interacting with, leaning on, and shading the pulse. He bends any song to his will, always open to the moment and always pushing the boundaries, willing to override whatever old chestnut he’s playing in search of something profoundly alive.”

– Martin Johnson
Excerpted from “Ahmad Jamal, Measured Maestro
of the Jazz Piano, Dies at 92”
NPR News
April 16, 2023

At the start of his career, when jazz clubs were still in thrall to the fast-tempo style known as bebop, Ahmad Jamal was — along with Dave Brubeck — dismissed by some critics as a mere “cocktail pianist”. The fact that he achieved success in the pop charts towards the end of the 1950s probably did not help his cause with more high-minded scribes. “Jamal’s real instrument is not the piano at all, but his audience,” declared one leading sceptic, Martin Williams.

By the end of his career half a century later, however, Jamal was acknowledged as a master of modern jazz. Not only did a younger generation of jazz keyboardists, such as Herbie Hancock and Keith Jarrett, revere him but an older generation did too, most notably the trumpet great Miles Davis, who admitted to channelling Jamal’s minimalist style on his recordings. “All my inspiration comes from Ahmad Jamal,” he once declared.

Jamal’s technique was instantly recognisable. It absorbed elements of Nat “King” Cole, Erroll Garner, Count Basie and Art Tatum and wove light but propulsive rhythms embellished with unusually subtle dynamics and filigree phrasing. The effect could be bombastic or merely decorative, yet when all the elements came together the results were sublime.

In Jamal’s trios the bass and drums were no mere supporting players but spiralled and pirouetted together. “I don’t think in single lines,” Jamal once explained. “I think in big-band concepts.” Where other players galloped through chord sequences he explored vamps in which a dance pulse was often never far from the surface. Jazz had turned its back on the ballroom but even in the most formal concert hall Jamal’s groups created the illusion that they were playing for people who were dancing while sitting down.

A Muslim convert as a young man, Jamal was born Frederick Russell Jones in Pittsburgh in 1930 to Baptist parents. He started playing piano at the age of three when the fascinated child watched his uncle Lawrence at the keyboard and announced himself as an instant phenomenon. “My uncle said, ‘Can you do what I’m doing?’ And that’s it,” he recalled. “I played everything he played. And the rest is history.”

– Excerpted from “Ahmad Jamal Obituary”
The Times
April 17, 2023

Embarking on a professional music career from the age of 14, over seven decades Jamal forged a unique sound that leapt over genre boundaries. Minimalism, classical, modernism, pop: Ahmad was sometimes likened to Thelonious Monk in terms of his ability to innovate and influence other musicians: his piano would be sampled by the likes of De La Soul, Jay-Z, Common and Nas. The trumpeter Miles Davis once said: “All my inspiration comes from Ahmad Jamal,” writing in his memoir that his friend had “knocked me out with his concept of space, his lightness of touch, and the way he phrases notes and chords and passages.”

Born Frederick Russell Jones in Pittsburgh in 1930, Jamal began playing music at three when an uncle challenged him to copy him on the family piano. He devoured “reams of sheet music” in all genres donated by his aunt and began receiving formal training when he was seven, then was composing at the age of 10. He found himself drawn to works by the French classical composers Maurice Ravel and Claude Debussy. By his early teens he was performing in nightclubs. “I’d do algebra during intermission, between sets,” he once told DownBeat magazine.

After marrying, he settled in Chicago in 1950 and converted to Islam from the Baptist faith of his family, becoming one of the first African American performers to publicly speak of his Muslim faith. Talking to Time magazine about going by the name Ahmad Jamal, he said: “I haven’t adopted a name. It’s a part of my ancestral background and heritage. I have re-established my original name. I have gone back to my own vine and fig tree.”

. . . Jamal performed jazz, which he called “American classical music” all his life, in the house band for Chicago’s Pershing Hotel lounge – a Black-owned favourite of the likes of Sammy Davis Jr and Billie Holiday, and where he recorded his 1958 breakthrough album, At the Pershing: But Not For Me. The album sold one million copies and remained on the Billboard magazine charts for more than 100 weeks, making Jamal a household name when rock’n’roll was on the up and jazz was beginning to wane.

. . . Speaking about his ability to continue performing and touring in his 80s, he told the Guardian: “It’s a divine gift, that’s all I can tell you. We don’t create, we discover – and the process of discovery gives you energy. . . . Rhythm is very important in music, and your life has to have rhythms too.

“You can exercise properly, eat properly – but the most important thing of all is thinking properly. Things are in a mess, and that’s an understatement; so much is being lost because of greed.

“There are very few authentic, pure approaches to life now. But this music is one of them, and it continues to be.”

– Sian Cain
Excerpted from “Ahmad Jamal,
Influential Jazz Pianist, Dies Aged 92”
The Guardian
April 16, 2023

Dapper and sagacious, Ahmad Jamal may have looked more like a UN delegate than a jazz musician, but he was recognised as a truly great jazz artist by some of the music’s most notable pioneers. Jamal, who has died aged 92, was hailed in the 1940s and 50s by Art Tatum and Miles Davis, and more recently by McCoy Tyner and Keith Jarrett. In the 90s, when a jazz piano-trio renaissance was being led by gifted newcomers such as Brad Mehldau, Jason Moran, Geri Allen and Esbjörn Svensson, Jamal did not retire to the sidelines but played better than ever. The former Wynton Marsalis pianist and composer Eric Reed has said that Jamal is to the piano trio “what Thomas Edison was to electricity.”

He was a fascinating philosopher of contemporary music and a lifelong critic of the entertainment business, which he accused of fleecing African-American artists. Although he recognised the structural and technical distinctions of jazz and European classical music, he was adamant that there was no superiority of one over the other in what he called “the emotional dimensions”. “You have to know what the hell you’re doing,” he told me in 1996, “whether you’re playing the body of work from Europe or the body of work from Louis Armstrong.”

– John Fordham
Excerpted from “Ahmad Jamal Obituary”
The Guardian
April 17, 2023

Renowned for a light touch that favored lyricism over a barrage of notes – in contrast to the heady, sometimes hectic sound of bebop that ruled when he began playing as a teen in the 1940s – Ahmad Jamal sought to create more space with a style that has been credited as one of the most admired in jazz history.

After getting his start performing as Fritz Jones in the late 1940s, Jamal began to develop what the Times described as a “laid-back, accessible style, with its dense chords, its wide dynamic range and above all its judicious use of silence,” which led to some dismissive, negative reviews from the jazz press early on, including writer Martin Williams describing his sound as “chic and shallow.”

That criticism would not stick, however, as more and more jazz greats began to cite Jamal as an inspiration, including Herbie Hancock and Keith Jarrett. Legendary trumpeter Davis – who became a friend and who later recorded Jamal’s songs – once said “all my inspiration comes from Ahmad Jamal.”

Jamal first full-length album, Ahmad Jamal Plays, was released on the Parrot label in 1955 – and later re-released on Chess Records under a different name – and featured the original track “New Rhumba” and covers of such jazz standards as George and Ira Gershwin’s “A Foggy Day” and “It Ain’t Necessarily So” and Cole Porter’s “All of You.”

It was 1958’s live album, At the Pershing: But Not for Me, which was recorded at the famed Chicago nightclub, however, that introduced the world to Jamal’s sound. The record spent more than two years on the Billboard 200 album chart, a rare feat for a jazz album. The album collection featured the pianist’s best-known track, his energetic take on the standard “Poinciana.”

. . . Over the course of his career Jamal would release more than 80 albums and earn a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master award, as well as Lifetime Achievement Honor from the Recording Academy and a Living Jazz Legend designation from the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts.

Jamal continued to perform and record well into his 80s, releasing his final album, the mostly solo piano collection Ballades, in 2019, which included a solo version of [his first hit] “Poinciana” that served as a poignant bookend to a prodigious, acclaimed career.

– Gil Kaufman
Excerpted from “Ahmad Jamal,
Influential Jazz Pianist Dies at 92”
Billboard
April 17, 2023

For 70 years, Jamal developed and refineed a unique style marked by a judicious use of spaces, dramatic explosions of dynamics, but also a delicate touch. A critic for the Village Voice observed in 2010: “You never know what this guy’s going to do. Quips fly from his right hand; queries bubble up on the left . . . linked by a devastating sense of swing, an addiction to group interaction, and a deep trust in melody.”

. . . During his seven decades of performing, Jamal recorded well over 80 albums. . . . A quietly reserved man, Jamal was always polite to interviewers and admirers. Phil Elwood, jazz critic for the San Francisco Examiner wrote: “I sometimes get the feeling that Jamal would rather crawl into the piano at the conclusion of a performance, so deeply involved is he in his music.” Jamal’s riposte was: “I regret that I still don’t have enough time to spend with my instrument. I think I could become more at one with it if I did.”

Certainly the piano was his first and true love. He once said: “When I pass a piano anywhere, I have to touch it or play it. The reward of being a musician is not money. It’s the wonderful indescribable feeling of knowing you are performing at your highest level. It’s a spiritual feeling. You can always make money. But you can’t always latch on to your own spirit.” But more often than not, Ahmad Jamal did just that.

– John White
Excerpted from “Obituary: Ahmad Jamal”
Jazz Journal
April 23, 2023

Ahmad Jamal’s hard-swinging, orchestral conception of the piano trio – as documented on more than 70 recordings from between 1951 and 2018 – exerted enormous influence on the sound of jazz during the second half of the 20th century. He is a member of the DownBeat Hall of Fame and was an NEA Jazz Master, and he received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2017.

“Every time I hear Ahmad, I leave totally inspired,” Harold Mabern told DownBeat after hearing Jamal play a set in 2002, a half-century after Miles Davis’ early inspiration. “He plays a three-chord masterpiece before he even sits down on the stool, then he throws up his hands to give a signal, and from that point on it’s magic. It’s his sound, his knowledge of chords, the way he orchestrates from the bottom of the piano to the top. Or the way he’ll play a ballad, where he returns to the bridge in a totally different way each time. He will play a run and stop on a dime. And he’s a master at playing without cliché in time signatures like 5/4 and 7/4.”

In 1949, Jamal moved in Chicago, where he worked with tenor saxophonists Eddie Johnson, Claude McLin and Von Freeman, eventually finding a steady job with tenor saxophonist Johnny Thompson and Israel Crosby at a South Side boite. Meanwhile, Jamal recruited guitarist Ray Crawford and bassist Tommy Sewell, both Pittsburghers, to form the Three Strings. In late 1951, Jamal brought Crawford and bassist Eddie Calhoun to New York to play intermission at the Embers, a boisterous midtown supper club. John Hammond attended, was impressed, and signed Jamal for several recording dates on OKeh. On the strength of these well-received sessions, Jamal began to find regular work, using a small South Side lounge called the Kit-Kat Club as his Chicago base. In 1955, he entered the Pershing Lounge with a new trio featuring Crosby and New Orleans-born drummer Vernell Fournier.

At the Pershing: But Not For Me made Jamal an international star, commanding several thousand dollars a week. He invested in real estate, and opened a posh, alcohol-free supper club, the Alhambra, but the investments didn’t work out. In response, Jamal moved to New York in 1962, beginning his transition from elegant miniaturist to efflorescent improviser. On 1964–1971 albums like Naked City Theme, Extensions, The Awakening and Manhattan Reflections, he presented the discursive, kaleidoscopic performances that remained his trademark for the remainder of his career.

Most recently, Jamal released a pair of newly discovered vintage live albums under the banner Emerald City Nights: Live At The Penthouse (Jazz Detective). The recordings track live shows recorded between 1963 and 1966 at the famed Seattle jazz landmark, and a third volume is on the way. See Jamal’s last interview about these recordings here.

– Ted Panken
Excerpted from “In Memoriam: Ahmad Jamal”
DownBeat: Jazz, Blues & Beyond
April 18, 2023

The crisp, carefully tailored but deeply swinging arrangements Ahmad Jamal created for his trios of the 1950s and ‘60s had a long-term effect on the piano trio format as well as the individual work of other pianists, composers, arrangers and horn players.

“No single artist after the great alto saxophonist [Charlie Parker] has been more important to the development of fresh form in jazz than Ahmad Jamal,” wrote critic musician Stanley Crouch. Miles Davis, Keith Jarrett, John Coltrane and Randy Weston were among the numerous iconic jazz artists whose own music revealed, directly or indirectly, the influence of Jamal’s style.

. . . Jamal made his first recording, an original titled Ahmad’s Blues, in 1951 with his trio, the Three Strings – the title tracing to the instrumentation of piano, guitar and bass. But his success began to escalate in 1956, when the guitar was replaced by drums, creating the basic trio format that he continued to maintain for decades.

In the ‘70s, he occasionally added a percussionist to provide the proper coloration for his interest in Caribbean and Latin rhythms.

Starting in the ‘80s, however, his repertoire emphasis shifted from the imaginative interpretation of standard songs to the creation of his own works. Although the source material changed, the fundamental Jamal style remained the appealing sound it had always been, enhanced by growingly rhapsodic pianistic touches.

It is music, said a 1994 Los Angeles Times review characterizing the full range of the Jamal trio’s performances, “that can be simultaneously detailed and spontaneous, thoughtful and entertaining.”

Jamal continued to tour and record well into his 80s, including a 2018 stop at Segerstrom Center for the Performing Arts in Costa Mesa. On his longevity, the musician said, “There might be some sidemen still living, but I’m the only living headliner.”

“I’ve toured enough. I’ll only go out on the road on occasion,” Jamal said. “That’s it for me. I don’t travel like I used to. I’ve traveled the last 70 years. I started when I was 17. That’s enough, right?”

Jamal advised young musicians to attack the industry from multiple perspectives. If you play, he said, also learn how to compose and conduct.

“If you can’t find a venue, then teach for a while. And if you can’t teach, then write for a while,” he said. “Go to school and increase your knowledge.”

“When you stop discovering things, you’re dead,” he said. “I sat at the piano when I was 3 years old, and I’m still discovering things within me.”

– Don Heckman
Excerpted from “Ahmad Jamal, Innovative and
Influential Jazz Pianist, Dies at 92”
Los Angeles Times
April 16, 2023

For many admirers, Ahmad Jamal will always be synonymous with a groove: the terse yet buoyant evocation of New Orleans second-line rhythm on “Poinciana,” in the version he recorded with Israel Crosby on bass and Vernell Fournier on drums on Jan. 16, 1958. Others will reach first for his 1970 studio album The Awakening, with bassist Jamil Nasser and drummer Frank Gant. Wherever you drop in on his body of work, spanning a magisterial 70 years or so, you’ll find a balance of elegance and exuberance, keenness and composure.

. . . [Although] I knew he’d been ailing, the fact of his passing was tough to process. I last spoke with him in September, for a feature on NPR, and he was gracious and alert in conversation. As it ran on Morning Edition, the story used a pair of spectacular archival releases – Emerald City Nights: Live at The Penthouse, in two volumes – as the pretext for an appreciation. Basically, I wanted to give a living master his flowers. I’m proud of the piece, including the host intro, which begins: “Few musicians have stood at the top of their field longer than pianist Ahmad Jamal.”

In preparation for this piece, I spent a lot of time mulling over Jamal’s legacy. He has been a core part of my listening, of course, for decades. I’ve reviewed him in concert a few times. But stepping back and really meditating on his career, I was struck anew by something I don’t think gets emphasized often enough: to a truly exceptional degree, Jamal set his own coordinates as an artist, making the music he wanted the way he wanted, and never conforming to any other ideal. Consider this: can you name a record where he appears as a member of someone else’s rhythm section?

I’d be happy to hear from an indefatigable jazz researcher like Lewis Porter, but I am not aware of such a record – an exceedingly rare distinction for a jazz pianist. (Even Erroll Garner, a Jamal lodestar, can be heard comping behind Charlie Parker.) This speaks not only to Jamal’s precocity, or the freedom that comes with a hit record, but also to the purity of his convictions – and a willingness to test the power of refusal.

His name is a key manifestation of that impulse. This fine Washington Post obit, by Gene Seymour, refers to a quote Jamal gave Time magazine in 1959: “I haven’t adopted a name. It’s a part of my ancestral background and heritage. I have re-established my original name. I have gone back to my own vine and fig tree.”

The repudiation of a birth name that he saw as a yoke of oppression was in tune with both an upwelling of Black pride and the tenets of his Muslim faith. And this is a conceptual leap, but when Jason Moran posted a tribute on Instagram this week, he recalled the first time he saw Jamal perform, witnessing “Ahmad’s groundbreaking approach: future-phrasing.” More than a point about the placement of rhythmic emphasis, Moran’s nodding here in the direction of Afro-Futurism, which we more naturally associate with Sun Ra – another pianist-composer who spent key years in Chicago, reclaimed his origin narrative, and forged his own path forward.

– Nate Chinen
Excerpted from “Ahmad Jamal and the Power of Refusal”
The Gig
April 18, 2023

[Ahmad Jamal] began his career when bepop took the jazz world by storm. Jamal’s wistful sensibilities operated in stark contrast to the genre’s restless new direction, prioritizing hushed simplicities over angular, convoluted soundscapes. “What I look for is character, perception, understanding of the music, philosophically, and some ability to empathize with the leader,” he told the San Diego Tribune of the criteria he used to select band members in a 2007 profile. “If you don’t have character, you can’t really perform up to a certain level.” His music was held to the same set of standards – it is perceptive, understanding, philosophical, empathetic. In a sense, what continues to make Ahmad Jamal stand out in a litany of jazz pioneers is his unashamedly human approach. Whereas peers like Miles Davis and Duke Ellington bewitched listeners with all-out experimentation and technical skill, Jamal’s music was heavy enough to move you, but light enough to do it gently.

In an era that sees us try, as we always have, to escape the bounds of our mortal limitations – whether by means of self-driving cars, artificial intelligence, or ambitious outer-space endeavors – Jamal’s catalogue remains a testament to the ability of a single individual to create something infinite. As I write this, a controversial joint song by the AI-generated voices of Drake and the Weeknd is at the top of my Twitter feed. The song is objectively pleasing at surface level, but there is something about it not being real that makes it feel perpetually out of reach. An out-of-reach sensibility is something that has defined artistry in the internet era, and perhaps this is only a new face of it. This past Sunday, Frank Ocean drew controversy for a Coachella set rife with artist-to-audience miscommunications; that same night, longtime recluse Jai Paul played his first-ever live show at the festival – to the pleasure of those in attendance, and to the chagrin of those at home who were shocked to learn that there would be no livestream. What makes Jamal interesting, in retrospect, is that he never really did seem to have what may now be a prerequisite of compelling artistry: something to hide.

“I would like to be a scholar in whatever I do,” he said in a 2004 interview. “A scholar is never finished. He’s always seeking. I’m seeking.” Because Jamal sought, countless others – including myself – may now seek.

– Samuel Hyland
Excerpted from “Dear Ahmad Jamal (1930-2023)”
032c
April 19, 2023

Related Off-site Links and Updates:
Ahmad Jamal: Walking History – An In-depth Profile of the Legendary and Influential Pianist – Ashley Kahn (Jazz Times, July 9, 2024).
ULS Acquires Archive of the Late Jazz Pianist Ahmad Jamal – University Times (October 4, 2024).
What Ahmad Jamal Taught – Joe Alterman (Jazz Times, January 6, 2025).


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