Master of Jazz, veteran pianist and composer Ahmad Jamal dies at 92: Videos, Photos

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. 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.”

Jamal was born Frederick Russell Jones in Pittsburgh on July 2, 1930. When he was 3 years old, his uncle challenged him to duplicate what he was playing on the piano, and the youngster actually could. He began formal studies of the piano at the age of 7 and quickly took on an advanced curriculum. He told Eugene Holley Jr. of Wax Poetics in a 2018 interview, “I studied Art Tatum, Bach, Beethoven, Count Basie, John Kirby, and Nat Cole. I was studying Liszt. I had to know European and American classical music. My mother was rich in spirit, and she led me to another rich person: my teacher, Mary Cardwell Dawson, who started the first African-American opera company in the country.”

Jamal grew up in a Pittsburgh community that was rich in jazz history. His neighbors included the legendary pianists Earl Hines, Erroll Garner and Mary Lou Williams. As a youth, Jamal delivered newspapers to the household of Billy Strayhorn. When Jamal began his professional career at the age of 14, Art Tatum, an early titan of the keyboard, proclaimed him “a coming great.” During a tour stop in Detroit, Jamal, who was born to Baptist parents, converted to Islam and changed his name.

His fluency in European classical music — Jamal disdained the term jazz, preferring American classical music as a descriptor for his work — was a highlight of his style. In a 2001 New York Times article, Ben Waltzer, a pianist and curriculum director at the University of Chicago, noted, “when we listen to his music, fragments from Ravel’s ‘Bolero’ and Falla’s ‘Ritual Fire Dance’ mingle with the blues, standard songs, melodic catch-phrases from bebop, and the ‘Marseillaise.'”

This may not seem remarkable today, when most jazz musicians are conservatory-trained and well versed in art music, from Louis Armstrong to Iannis Xenakis and from Laurie Anderson to John Zorn. But Jamal was a youth when there were significant barriers to African Americans entering the academy. “In Pittsburgh, we didn’t separate the two schools,” he told Waltzer.

Jamal’s style went well beyond a diverse range of source material; he expanded the borders and depth of improvisation. “Jazz improvisation is generally understood as a narrative melodic line composed spontaneously in relation to a song’s harmonic structure,” wrote Waltzer. “Jamal broadened this concept by using recurring riffs, vamps and ostinatos — tropes of big-band jazz that were employed as background accompaniment for featured instrumentalists — not just to frame solos, as many musicians did, but as the stuff of improvisation itself.”

The trio’s version of “Poinciana” sparked the popularity of the recording, and it became a signature tune for Jamal. He told Wax Poetics, “It was a combination of things: Israel Crosby’s lines, what I was playing, and Vernel—if you listen to his work on “Poinciana,” you’d think it was two drummers!”

His music was found in the soundtracks of movies like M*A*S*H and The Bridges of Madison County. In a 1985 episode of NPR’s Piano Jazz, Jamal told host and fellow piano legend Marian McPartland that his favorite recording was “the next one.” Then he allowed that the Pershing “was close to perfection.” He also said that he continued to focus on ballads. “They are difficult to play,” he told her, “it takes years of living to read them properly.” In 1994, he was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master Fellowship.

He continued making stellar recordings into the past decade. His 2017 release, Marseille, was noted in the NPR Music Jazz Critics Poll.

The recording featured all of the hallmarks that made Jamal a great pianist and bandleader, and the drummer Herlin Riley, like Fournier, was from New Orleans. It prompted Iyer to note that Jamal’s lineage of New Orleanian drummers — Fournier, Idris Muhammad and Riley — suggests rhythm as a ritual or cultural cornerstone.

Jamal’s work continued to impress other pianists. In 2014 Matthew Shipp told NPR’s Karen Michel, “His imagination is so deep. One of the joys of listening to him is to see how his fertile imagination interacts with the material he does pick and recombines it into a musical entity that we’ve never heard. I mean, he is a musical architect of the highest order.”

Waltzer added, “innovation in jazz can be subtle. Rather than reaching outward to create an overtly revolutionary sound, Mr. Jamal explored the inner workings of the small ensemble to control, shape and dramatize his music.”

Ahmad Jamal built a castle upon mighty foundations of what came before him. He ingeniously cultivated ideas from great bands of the 1930s such as Jimmie Lunceford and Count Basie, and pianists such as Basie, Art Tatum, Teddy Wilson, Nat Cole, and Erroll Garner, in brilliantly innovative ways that effectively cracked a conceptual egg and opened creative spaces for so much that’s come since in music.

If Ahmad Jamal didn’t actually single-handedly invent the pedal point ostinato vamp in contemporary music, he practically did so. Listening to the music of John Coltrane’s quartet from the 1960s, and much of the music that Stevie Wonder and the band Earth, Wind & Fire created in the 1970s and ‘80s, on through to post-hip hop loops of the present day, it’s difficult to imagine the generational emergence of so much musical magic of today, without Ahmad Jamal’s conception of drum-and-bass vamps, and the command of tension-and-release through supreme restraint that musical poets such as Count Basie, Lester Young, Miles Davis, and Ahmad Jamal have shown the world. They teach us what it is to possess all the power and knowledge, but to utilize such considerable means to make a far deeper and lasting emotional statement than mere shows of athleticism or bravura can reveal of the soul.

To my knowledge, other than the refrain sections in W.C. Handy’s “St. Louis Blues” from Ray Brown’s Some Of My Best Friends Are The Piano Players, Ahmad Jamal never recorded a 12-bar blues as a leader. His repertoire featured American popular songs and selected originals of his own as well as those of his colleagues. Among the American popular songs he helped to make into instrumental Jazz standards, it’s common knowledge that Mr. Jamal’s approaches to standards like “Autumn Leaves,” “On Green Dolphin Street,” “There Is No Greater Love,” and many others, are, according to statements by Miles Davis, what inspired him to incorporate some of these same selections into his quintet and sextet repertoire and immortalize them with his bands to the extent that they’ve become some of the most universally-called standards at jam sessions around the world for well over 60 years now.

Considering Miles Davis’ acknowledgment of the multi-faceted influence that Ahmad Jamal’s trio had on his music, not only did Ray Crawford’s bongo-like after beat percussion produced by tapping his guitar pickup purportedly inspire Miles Davis to ask “Philly” Joe Jones to incorporate after beat rimshots on the drums, but to my ears, Ahmad Jamal’s left hand accompaniment laid the template for the essential approach that’s been universally applied by influential pioneers such as Red Garland, Wynton Kelly, Bill Evans, McCoy Tyner, Herbie Hancock, and Chick Corea. Ahmad Jamal’s three and four-note left hand “rootless” voicings are the same spellings that more pianists of today use than not.

Some of my colleagues got to know Mr. Jamal on a personal basis, but I was always intimidated to speak to him. My only exchange with Mr. Jamal was mildly terrifying, and his presence spoke volumes. I was checking out of a hotel in Marciac, France, with no idea that Mr. Jamal was standing behind me. When I turned around, there was the man, wearing black sunglasses that I couldn’t see into and dressed head-to-toe in black leather, through to his kufi. Unprepared, as he looked back at me, I was compelled to speak. In my most humble and respectful tone, I said, “Hello, Mr. Jamal. My name is Benny Green. I play the piano.”

“Haha. ’THE’ piano,” replied Mr. Jamal dryly. Following that fleeting brush with genius, I was left to think throughout the rest of the day about the man and his music; of how immeasurably deep Ahmad Jamal’s contributions are to so-called “modern” music, and to Music itself.