Jazz Articles about Ahmad Jamal

Ahmad Jamal: It's Magic

by Ian Patterson
September 4, 2008

That a Japanese mountaineer successfully scaled Mount Everest in May 2008, at the age of 75, is proof that age is no barrier to those with new goals to conquer. If pianist Ahmad Jamal, at 78, were a mountaineer, he too would surely be attempting to scale Everest. There are those, however, who argue that Ahmad Jamal reached a creative peak in the late '50s, but the truth is that Jamal is neither better nor worse than when he recorded ...

Ahmad Jamal at The Blue Note

by AAJ Staff
July 10, 2008

Ahmad Jamal The Blue Note New York, New York May 11, 2008

Ahmad Jamal both caressed and shook the Blue Note during the second set of his appearance on this Sunday in May. Famous for his use of dynamics (soft- loud contrasts, sudden stops and starts, deferring to his section mates for extended stretches), the piano master gave a bravura display of the state of his art, as it has developed over the ...

Ahmad Jamal: It's Magic

by Andrew Velez
May 14, 2008

When asked what he's thinking about when he's at the piano, NEA Jazz Master and Kennedy Center Jazz Legend Ahmad Jamal replies, “Those songs that come up on my recordings or my concerts, sometimes I pull some things that are very distant and written years before I was here, things written by Mozart. That's the wonderful thing about music, the ability to interpret the good things beyond the wildest dreams of the composer. I'm doing what I do based on ...

The Ahmad Jamal Trio: Pavanne For Ahmad

by Ian Patterson
June 4, 2007

Always the musician's musician, Ahmad Jamal's unique approach to the piano has been a continuing source of inspiration for six decades, influencing such giants as Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Keith Jarrett, and a younger generation of keyboardist like Scott Kinsey.

Pavanne for Ahmad is a collection of eighteen of Jamal's earliest recordings for the Okeh and Argo labels between 1951 and 1955. Quite apart from the inherent beauty of Jamal's playing on these tunes, it is interesting to ...

Ahmad Jamal: The Evolution of the Piano Trio

by Chris Comer
March 30, 2007

Listen

Prior to an upcoming gig in Dayton, Ohio, Chris Comer had the opportunity to interview one of the most influential jazz pianists of all time, Ahmad Jamal. In this interview Jamal discusses his influence on jazz history and many of the players he's worked with over the course of his long and innovative career. In this spirited conversation Chris and Jamal compare views on the traditional jazz trio setting and how it has evolved from the early ...

Ahmad Jamal: Ahmad Jamal Trio: Complete Recordings

by Robert Iannapollo
March 9, 2007

It's surprising that Ahmad Jamal, clearly one of the benchmarks of jazz piano in the '50s, has been neglected by most jazz writers. Though he's clearly been a popular favorite, most of the positive commentary has focused on “Miles Davis really liked him. That's actually a bit of an understatement. One might even say Davis was obsessed with Jamal for a while. From the titles on this set, which collects 41 tracks (the first recordings from Jamal's trio recorded between ...

Ahmad Jamal: Pavane For Ahmad

by Nic Jones
November 28, 2006

Some of Ahmad Jamal's detractors over the years have expressed the opinion that his music belongs as much in a cocktail lounge as in a jazz club. The fact of the matter has perhaps always been that he's got no closer to that dubious location than Errol Garner did, and this collection of his sides from the early to mid-1950s is abundant testimony to just how fertile his musical imagination can be. It also offers a kind of alternative blueprint ...