Ahmad Jamal: a lasting impression - jazz pianist and composer - includes list of sound recordings

Pianist-composer Ahmad Jamal, a small, dignified man of 63, has achieved the musical equivalent of a hat trick: an identifiable style, respect from both his audience and his peers, and financial success.

Best known for his ability to rearrange songs so completely that you think he wrote them himself ("But Not for Me" and "Let's Fall in Love" are prime examples), Jamal has garnered a legion of fans all over the world. His work--primarily in a trio format of piano, bass and either guitar or drums--also has garnered him the label "jazz musician," which arouses a certain passion in him: "I started the phrase 'American classical music.' ... The term 'jazz' is certainly not sufficient; it was used to try and downgrade the music, but the music was so viable and it was so potent, nothing could keep it down."

Jamal's professional career began in the late 1940s in his hometown of Pittsburgh with the George Hudson Orchestra. In the early '50s, he started his own trios and began recording, and in the mid-'50s, he was discovered by jazz impresario John Hammond. Five to eight trios and 40 to 50 recordings later, Jamal this year received a $20,000 Jazz Masters Award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

But his musical career began far earlier, in Pittsburgh, when the 3-year-old Jamal began playing the piano. By age 7, he was performing, while studying with classical teachers Mary Cardwell Dawson and later James Miller. His classical learning remains influential, and in conversation takes him back to his refrain about "American classical music": "There are very few people playing European classical music that also know Art Tatum and Duke Ellington. However, it's not the same position with the so-called jazz musician, who has to be twice as good as the so-called classical musician and know both worlds in order to get work."

Violinist Joe Kennedy, who grew up with Jamal and later employed him in his group the Four Strings, remembers Jamal as a talented teenager. "When he was 13 and 14," Kennedy recalls, "his harmonic sense even way back then was beyond his years. One night we heard Art Tatum, and Ahmad played a tune for him, and Tatum said that that boy is a coming great."

Tatum's judgment has been borne out. Jamal's first trio--with guitarist Ray Crawford (from the Four Strings) and bassist Eddie Calhoun--brought Jamal's "chamber jazz" sound into being. As Crawford created a congalike effect by hitting the guitar strings, Jamal reinterpreted the popular standards of the day, adding Latin rhythms, blues vamps and orchestral voicings to them.

Not long after, he caught the ear of Miles Davis, who in his autobiography said of Jamal, "He knocked me out with his concept of space, his lightness of touch, his understatement, and the way he phrased notes and chords and passages." Davis recorded many of the standards Jamal played, including "A Gal in Calico," "My Funny Valentine," and "Surrey With the Fringe on Top." On his Miles Ahead recording with Gil Evans in 1959, Davis transcribed Jamal's composition "New Rhumba," note for note.

The excitement Jamal generated at clubs came through clearly on his 1958 recording Ahmad Jamal at the Pershing, which contained his version of a little-known Broadway standard, "Poinciana." This instrumental jazz LP rose to the top of the Billboard charts for an astounding 108 weeks. Buoyed by the success of that album, Jamal recorded and toured in the late 1950s and early '60s, and opened a nonalcoholic nightclub in Chicago called the Alhambra, which closed in 1962.

He later moved east to New York and formed another trio, with bassist Jamil Nasser and drummer Frank Gant. Many of today's established jazz stars got their start with Jamal in the 1970s and '80s: Bassist Richard Davis, composer-arranger Richard Evans and drummer Walter Perkins are but a few of his "graduates."

Particularly since his 1981 recording Digital Works, which contained new versions of "But Not for Me" and "Poinciana," Jamal has been recording and performing more of his own compositions. "I believe that we've done enough adaptation of popular songs," he says. "Now is the time for the musician to write his own repertoire rather than to keep resurrecting the things that are in somebody else's mind."

With a new trio, consisting of Arti Dixson on drums and Ephriam Wolfolk on bass, Jamal continues to take this great African-American art form to higher levels. Conceptually, he has expanded over the years--back to his classical beginnings. As Joe Kennedy remarked when listening to Jamal's music, "I hear Liszt preludes, Chopin, Ravel ... with some of the things he used to play in jam sessions in Pittsburgh. He's drawing from a tremendous legacy of world music."

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