The influential American jazz pianist and composer Ahmad Jamal died this Sunday at his home in Ashley Falls, Massachusetts, at the age of 92 from prostate cancer. Over the course of eight decades of his professional career, Jamal, who began his formal piano studies at the age of 7, has won several awards, including the Grammy for his entire career in 2017.
Jamal was born Frederick Russell Jones in Pittsburgh in July 1930. At the age of three he began playing the piano, and four years later he began his formal studies. Upon joining the Musicians Union at the age of 14, pianist Art Tatum praised him as saying he had “a great future.” It was the decade of the forties, the moment in which he started his career coinciding with the bebop revolution in which, despite his young age, he integrated perfectly.
In the early and mid 1950s, he moved to Chicaho and led several trios and quartets there until he settled in the trio with double bassist Israel Crosby and drummer Vernel Fournier. It was in that decade -specifically, in 1952- when he decided to convert to Islam and change his name from Fritz Jones to Ahmad Jamal. The lineup released At The Pershing: But Not For Me in 1958, one of the most popular and influential recordings in jazz history. Not surprisingly, the album stayed for more than 100 weeks on the Billboard list, the US ranking of the most popular albums.
Those were other times and jazz could still compete in popularity with genres like pop-rock. The success of that album went far beyond jazz: Clint Eastwood used two songs from But Not for Me for the soundtrack of his film The Bridges of Madison.
Later, in the late 1960s, he recorded The Awakening, which was widely acclaimed for its originality by jazz standards. Likewise, he has composed music for soundtracks of several films and has founded several record labels. He released up to three albums a year in the late 1960s and early 1970s, recording more than 60 in his career.
His mark on jazz was remarkable. Without going any further, the trumpeter Miles Davis came to consider him one of his greatest influences: “All my inspiration comes from Ahmad Jamal.” His style is characterized by integrating elements such as surprise, breakups, the use of silences, with romantic accents, but combined with a dynamic and light phrasing.
The New Yorker, in an article published last year on the occasion of the release of several previously unreleased recordings, said that in the 1950s “his musical concept was one of the great innovations of the age.”
