first time Ahmad Jamal I put out a live recording with his trio and it was an unexpected big hit. 1958’s “At the Pershing: But Not for Me” became his one of the best-selling instrumental records of its time. Since then, in an extraordinary career that spans over 75 years, the celebrated pianist has released dozens more live albums, a catalog studded with gems.
But what if the concerts he played were captured on tape but never released? When I asked him about digging them up for archival release, he almost certainly replied, “No Thank you.” Even at 92, Jamal resists looking behind him. “Every time I sit at the piano, I’m still evolving,” he said over the phone from his home in Berkshire one recent afternoon. “I still come up with new ideas.”
So when he listened to the winds of an old set of recordings made during a performance at the Penthouse Club in Seattle in the mid-to-late 1960s, he hesitated. It took some coaxing before Jamal approved the release. In the end, “I went with it,” he said. “But it’s rare for me.”
His reluctance was overcome by Zev Feldman, the accomplished and dedicated producer who unearthed the tape, and the quality of the performance itself. Penthouse’s Reel-to-Reel His Tapes Excerpts from his half-hour radio broadcast caught on his machine, these recordings will see the light of day in November, along with the release of two separate double-disc collections. increase. Live at the Penthouse (1963-64) and (1965-66) were the first albums released on Feldman’s new label, Jazz Detective. The third set “(1966-68)” will be released soon.
At five-and-a-half hours of music in all, the album, due out in November, is a celebration of both Jamal’s stylistic flexibility and certainty, a modernist marvel that’s almost a genre in its own right. It’s a thing. His music can sometimes seem like lighthearted acoustic his jazz with catchy hooks, which explains its wide appeal. But in fact, it was packed with fiery overlays of rhythm and a connection so deep and vast to the history of music that it actually foreshadowed the future.
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“I think he found a different way when he was creating that iconic groove. He left funk music, he left soul music, he left jazz.” . “He was phrasing for the future. He wasn’t just phrasing the ’60s, he was phrasing the ’90s.”
Jamal’s music in his trio, and later in the quartet, which added a hand percussionist to the mix, wears the influence of romantic piano music on its sleeves, but reaches deep reserves of black rhythmic practice. . In the process, he traced himself back to his early 1950s, discovering grooves and sentiments that wouldn’t spread until years later.
His influence on Miles Davis, who declared Jamal his favorite piano player, is many. But it goes beyond that. Before James Brown contributed to the invention of funk, Jamal reorganized the temporal organization of jazz, putting more emphasis on the downbeat (as Brown eventually did) and more like Afro-Cuban musicians do. , fully syncopated the rest of the bars. .
“There’s something about your sound that goes too far in the past to never be traced, and I feel like he’s fully aware of the ancestral rhythmic connection,” said Moran. “Piano Ahmad is one of the few who understands the sensibilities that have linked decades of past and future.”
No wonder he became one of the most sampled musicians in hip-hop history.Jamal’s piano phrasing haunts iconic tracks like Nas “The world is yours” (Producer Pete Rock said his “I like music,” from 1970) and De La Soul’s “The stakes are high” (J Dilla plucked a few bars from Jamal’s. “Swahililand” from 1974).
The year Franklin Delano Roosevelt was inaugurated as President of the United States, he first approached the piano at the age of three. He has been playing ever since. At the time, pianists were still playing the role of jukeboxes, but Pittsburgh was as sure to produce future jazz stars as it produced steel. Jamal was preceded by future great piano players at Westinghouse High School, including Errol Garner, Mary Lou Williams and Dodo Marmarosa. The city was also full of Western classical music. This is a tradition that Jamal learned from his piano teacher, Mary Cardwell his Dawson, who would later found the National Negro Opera Company.
“In Pittsburgh, we didn’t just study American classical music, sometimes called jazz,” he said. (Jamal has always dismissed the term “jazz” as imprecise and unracist.) That’s the difference. “
He joined the local musicians’ guild at age 14 and toured with the George Hudson Orchestra three years later. While playing for Detroit, he was exposed to the growing Ahmadiyya Muslim movement. He converted, changed his name and began studying Islam with zeal. This, he believes, saved him from the trap of living on the streets. It also reinforced his belief in adhering to his own norms.
“I always tried to get out of the music business. I wasn’t very excited about the music business at any point,” he said. “So I’ve always tried to do other things.”
Soon, Jamal began traveling to Africa, where he says he was the first company to import greeting cards from Africa into the United States. (He was first mentioned in his 1959 New York Times article entitled “Pianist and Investor Succeeds in Cairo.”) He briefly ran the Alhambra music venue in Chicago. . 1950’s. And for a while he stopped performing in public altogether, instead devoting himself to running his label, a series of small records putting out his LPs by musicians from both sides of the Atlantic.
The Emerald City Nights album marks a period in which Jamal had just returned to tour, and although his piano playing was always centered around finely crafted patterns and lean, interwoven phrases, was getting richer. Penthouse was one of his favorite clubs, so the new collection features Jamal in a variety of engagements, with a diverse trio line-up.
Tracks include Jamal originals such as “Minor Moods”. Contributions from his bandmates. Jazz standards by Cole Porter and Benny Golson. There were also pop songs like “Feeling Good” played here months before Nina’s famous rendition of Simon was released. “(1965-66)” features a particularly exciting (and rarely recorded) line-up. His drummer Vernel Fournier, whose famous beat laid the gamble groundwork for “Poinciana”. A consistent collaborator in the 1960s and his 70s.
“He oversaw every part of this production. He listened to the music and identified the tracks,” Feldman said of Jamal’s involvement in the archive release.
“There were some things that went wrong,” Feldman admitted. Then, with a clever understatement, he explained, “He has his discerning ear.”