Ahmad Jamal: At The Jazz Showcase: Live In Chicago

Ahmad Jamal (1930 -2023) began his recording career in 1951, laying down the tracks to the 1959-released album The Piano Scene of Ahmad Jamal (Epic Records). It was a trio affair, with Jamal at the keyboard, Ray Crawford on guitar, along with bassists (separately) Ray Calhoun and Israel Crosby. But before those earlier sessions saw the light of day, Jamal's At The Pershing: But Not For Me (Argo Records, 1958) hit the record racks. Jamal had switched out the guitar in his trio for a drummer. The album was not initially embraced critically, but it sold well, and the tune "Poinciana," became a huge radio hit. Thus began Jamal's success over a 60-plus-year span of uniformly excellent recordings and live shows.

This brings us to another live recording from Jamal: At The Jazz Showcase: Live in Chicago, a two-CD/two-LP set produced by Zev Feldman, a jazz archaeologist who has devoted a good deal of his life to digging up unreleased and forgotten live recordings from some of jazz music's greatest names—pianist Bill Evans the most notable among them—on releases such as Bill Evans in England (Resonance Records, 2018), Bill Evans Behind The Dikes (Elemental Music, 2021) and Some Other Time (Resonance Records, 2016), and more..

If any player can rival Evans for the 'Crown Jewel of Piano Jazz' title, it is Jamal. Where Evans was often brooding, introspective and lonely, Jamal was elegant and gregarious. His style was relaxed; it was sometimes flashy, in the Art Tatum/Erroll Garner mode, splashing notes like a dozen glass wind chimes hung from a patio overhang in a gust of a cool spring breeze. He always sounded as if he is wearing a tuxedo when he played. He was class personified.

For his At The Jazz Showcase: Live In Chicago, he works with his then-current trio—John Herd on bass and Frank Gant in the drummer's chair. Jamal and his compatriots indulge in stretching out, extending some of the tunes beyond the scope of what he did on the previously mentioned At The Pershing: But Not For Me and The Awakening (Impulse, 1970). This is top-notch Jamal. There is no other kind of Jamal, and his extended tunes—especially his original "Swahililand," at 21 minutes duration, and another, the revisitation of his tune "Ahmad's Song," twelve minutes of pure beauty—are particularly revealing of his unwavering, joyful genius in the crafting of interpretations on the fly.

Jamal's daughter, Sumayah Jamal, says of At The Showcase: Live in Chicago, "I believe that these shows are some of my father's best." She might be right.

A note on the Jazz Showcase, a Chicago club owned and run by impresario Joe Segal, who recorded this show. Segal reportedly left us with archives that he had compiled over the years: 8,000 to 10,000 tapes. Sounds like Feldman has some more digging to do.