Here's the Ahmad Jamal Thread Folks Have Been Clamoring For

Also, just from interviews and stuff, it seems like every drummer has played with him at one time or another over the years.

Musically, the Ahmad Jamal Trio is in peak form on this performance, there's no other way to put it. Bassist Israel Crosby and drummer Vernell Fournier constantly predict Jamal's next movements, or goad him into unforseen rhythmic possibilities. The interplay between the three is elastic and fluid, and as tight as any jazz you will hear. The drums sound slack (maybe tuned down?) giving the preceedings a gallop and a buoyance, more than a shuffle. The whole thing set the piano trio stakes incredibly high, and I imagine Bill Evans had something to mull over until, a mere three years later, he dropped the incendiary Waltz for Debby with sidemen Scott Lafaro and Paul Motian just weeks before Lafaro's death.

I remember once at this old job I had doing computer work for a university, and this professor invited me over to his house to do some work on his home pc. I had to do some really boring reinstall of some software, and I scanned this guy's meager cd shelf for something to listen to. It was all total 12-cd hell; some generic classical stuff, some boring pop stuff, but there to rescue me was a copy of At the Pershing!

I know what you guys mean about the drums...I think you're right Broheems, he's playing brushes with the snares turned off. Some guys always have them on for a little extra snap, some guys leave them off so you just get the sound of the brush on the head, and I think Vernell Fournier usually has them off (I'll have to go back and listen).

Listen to the toms though, too. They're kinda hollow and lower in tone. They sound great, actually.

Jordan, didn't you study with Israel Crosby or was that another one of Ahmad Jamal's bassists?

Yowza!
http://neverenoughrhodes.blogspot.com/2008/10/ahmad-jamal-freeflight-1972-discography.html

FWIW, Jamal Plays Jamal is the most underrated album of all time.

thanks for the recommendation -- I love Ahmad, but (as that discography reminds me) there's still a ton of stuff (esp. post 60s) that I haven't heard. The one 70s record I do have is pretty good, OuterInnerSpace. Just two long tracks, some stuff on electric piano. Also have some of the weird vocal records he did in the 60s. Occasionally really good/interesting, but occasionally a little painful.

the Newport 1959 Ahmad set up at Wolfgang's Vault is tiiiiight.

good lookin out

The Monk set from Newport is worth listening to as well ... But the Ahmad one is rockin' my world right now.

Just picked this up:

http://www.woodgrainfronts.com/media/aj_1.jpg

I didn't know he was on Impulse! at one point (guess a lot of people were). This is 2xLP, trio stuff from 1968 to '71. Cover is a little beat up, vinyl in great shape, cost me $5. I'm one happy dude.

new album coming out next month!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74P0708htk0
i love this dude.

cosine

i would go so far as to suggest that he's my favorite pianist.

dig the percussion on the blue moon stuff.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcnQID8Y954

The Awakening has ruled my mornings all this week. Such a damn perfect album.

yes

had a brief "uh oh is he okay" when this got bumped

seen him play live about five times now; his dexterity is a thing of beauty

I like Happy Moods a lot but confess to not hearing much more by him, will be getting acquainted with The Awakening

Jamal Plays Jamal has been a desert island disc for me since childhood
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-lQGUBiaqA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sehWtGF1MXQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDmopX4mYhk

Out of curiosity I looked at JPJ on Discogs earlier to find that it's **never** been reissued.

What a shame.

It is an amazing album and not too difficult to find these days. Email me if you're having trouble.

Oh no, I have a copy (thanks for offering!). Just thought it was pretty amazing (in a bad way) that it's not been reissued. It is an amazing album.

Just picked up "The Awakening" and Alice Coltrane's "Journey to Satchidananda" as a 2/$20 at my local HMV. This death of CD trend is spewing out some deals.

That is a fine deal indeed.

Yes, yes, yes to the love for Jamal Plays Jamal. Absolutely love that album. Was just playing it and thought there must be more in his discography that is similar, but listening through what I have, nothing quite feels the same. What else should I be listening to that channels the same feel as Jamal Plays Jamal?

Nothing, honestly. All of his other albums with orchestration are unfortunately kind of cheesy. There's songs that come into the same territory but not for the entire duration of an album.

I was afraid that was the case. I definitely love Awakening and Outertimeinnerspace, but those still don't have the same feel. Any other individual songs anyone can recommend?

This guy rules ass, and hes still alive. does anyone know if he still performs? id like to see him

cant believe how long it took me to get into his work

He just put out a new album in June - I'm hoping he'll tour a little.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDga7tJL2UU
His new album hasn't stuck with me really, but Ahmad still rules. It has only just occurred to me that Pete Rock built The World is Yours from this one.

the new one is quite good imo - the use of an extra percussionist is really what sells it. the material seems a little thin on occasion but Jamal never sounds anything less than prime, which is not unexpected, but still somewhat noteworthy considering his advanced age.

https://is3-ssl.mzstatic.com/image/thumb/Music128/v4/6e/90/1d/6e901d95-cb12-542d-f4ac-4161ca6044cf/cover.jpg/268x0w.jpg

noted saxman Ahmad Jamal

unbelievable that we live in the year 2022 and jamal plays jamal has still not been properly reissued. not even digitally.

i'm with you

Ahmad Jamal ‘73 is rhodes-tastic

I found a copy of 'Jamal Plays Jamal' last year - incredible!

for the record
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrCnzcGC0Hw

one of the times i saw him (with idris muhammad and james cammack), they played "swahililand" as the last tune. standing ovation at the end and, as they were getting together to take a bow, ahmad smiles at james cammack and says, "our biggest hit!"

he's turning 92 this year.♥

Discovered Blue Moon a few years back and love walking around to it.

I saw him play in May 2019, and wrote about it for Stereogum. TL;DR: It was awesome.

Ahmad Jamal will turn 89 on July 2, and he doesn’t perform live very often anymore. So when the opportunity to see him play at the McCarter Theater in Princeton, NJ arose last week, I jumped. I’d recently interviewed his longtime drummer, Herlin Riley, and was expecting an evening of dignified swing that combined bluesy vamps with some classical flourishes and lush, romantic melodies. That was not at all what transpired.

Jamal began his professional career playing a kind of chamber jazz, before that was really a thing: his early albums featured a piano/guitar/bass trio. When he formed a more traditional group, though, with bassist Israel Crosby and drummer Vernel Fournier, he broke out. His 1958 album At The Pershing: But Not For Me stayed on Billboard’s album charts for over two years, and ultimately sold over a million copies. It contained his best-known song, “Poinciana”.

At the Princeton show, Jamal was joined by bassist James Cammack, who’s been playing with him for something like 40 years; Riley on drums; and Manolo Badrena on percussion, which in this case encompassed everything from congas to trap drums to wind chimes to a small electronic device that played a sample of Mr. T shouting, “Quit the jibber-jabber!”, surprising audience and band alike. This was a high-powered rhythm section: Riley anchored the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra for 17 years, and has made two albums as a leader since 2016, and Badrena was a member of Weather Report and Spyro Gyra, among many other groups. And they came to play.

Jamal announced the title of every tune either before or after he played it, and conducted from the bench, starting pieces solo and pointing to Riley or Badrena when he wanted them to come in, then offering additional gestures to indicate tempo changes or returns to the main melody. The set began with “Quest For Light,” from his 1987 album Crystal, an uptempo vamp with ornate melodic fills that set the tone for the night. Badrena was doing every bit as much work as Riley — the two of them, and Cammack, swung ferociously hard and fast. Jamal clanged out rumbling chords from the low end of the keyboard, created suspense by hanging onto a two-note figure until it felt like an explosion was coming, and danced across the higher keys.

As the set went on, it only seemed to increase in intensity. The band swung harder and harder, the drummer and percussionist practically dueling with each other, speeding things up to a frantic, breakneck pace without ever losing control of the hypnotic groove, as Jamal and Cammack encouraged them and kept the music flowing. After the fourth number, I was astonished to see Riley — impeccably dressed in what was clearly a three-piece suit with the jacket left backstage — slip his shoes off. Between tunes, Jamal mentioned that he likes to hire drummers from New Orleans; in addition to Riley and Fournier, he also worked with Idris Muhammad for years. The grooves these men set up for him allow him to take pieces as far out as seemed possible, and then keep on going. Even the expected closing version of “Poinciana” was far from a rote recitation of a familiar tune; these guys were on a quest to somewhere, and we were just following along. This was as far from a mellow evening out as I could have imagined. I’m incredibly glad to have seen Ahmad Jamal live, and if you’re inclined to investigate his catalog, you could do a lot worse than starting with his latest album, 2017’s Marseille, which features this same band, and working your way backwards.

wow, that sounds completely amazing. i only ever got to see him with a trio. he closed with "poinciana" every other time i saw him, except the show that i saw in support of after fajr. i saw the early and late sets and they played a variation on the same set, but closed with "swahililand" both times.

i thought it was hilarious when he made that comment to james cammack that time. it was obvious he was being sarcastic, but it was a really genuine moment. he wasn't being malicious at all.

unrelated, but sort of related because it's what inspired this revive: sometimes living with dissociative identity disorder is alright. i found this yesterday being used as a bookmark in my ocd workbook (which i've only had for a few weeks). no idea how it got there or how long/where i'd been carrying it around before it ended up there.

anyway. i saw him play at yoshi's a lot. most of the time it was the trio with idris muhammad and james cammack. i don't even remember how many actual sets we got to see. any time i went over to the bay area to see him, i would make sure to get tickets for both sets and sometimes we would go two nights in a row. there were so many highlights and unforgettable moments but the thing that stuck with me the most was that he never seemed anything less than enthusiastic. even when he would start out some of those newer (at the time) ballads with that kind of melancholy brood that he does so distinctly, he would always build up to something redemptive and just undeniably happy. the way he played at yoshi's all those times with nearly with his back to the audience and he does this funny little rocking dance on the bench. it's like his body was the conductor. again: just completely unforgettable.

Really enjoying that '73 record, a boom bap producer's dream.

even in his seventies, watching his fingers on the piano was super impressive. dextrous as all get out.

RIP

RIP Jamal :(

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmvwCTMO1Lg

rip, brilliant and singular player

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiARr9JhLEo

RIP

i was so primed to love the awakening from all the hip hop/r&b samples. having the sources of teedra moses be your girl and nas the world is yours as tracks 1 and 2 was mindblowing when i first listened.. i feel like having those melodies already earwormed into my brain let me appreciate jamal's composition in a way it's not always so easy for me to do with jazz. rip

I wrote about Jamal in October, when an amazing live performance from 1971 was released.

I used his name and some numbers as my bank acct password, so it's no exaggeration to say I think about this dude just about every day.

RIP! I wonder if Herlin Riley will write something public, AJ gave him his first professional break and I love that he stuck with him and kept up the relationship ever since.

A fantastic clip from 1973, introduced by James Earl Jones(!):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1UWWW2UzzY

i've been 5250 for the past two weeks and this is the news that greets me upon discharge. i had a running list of things i wanted to hear as soon as we got out and of course jamal plays jamal was near the top.

think the only person i saw more often live was ron carter. saw ahmad's trio with idris muhammad 3 times? probably more. always stuck around for early and late sets. have probably said this already upthread, but he was always so happy and proud - but not gloaty proud, very aware of his audience and simultaneously grateful for them.

unreal. he was like the optimus prime of jazz or something. faulty of me to take him for immortal, but can you really blame me? i remember when this album came out and i thought, "this'll probably be one of his final recordings." lol. (all of the dreyfus/birdology records are easily as good as that one, btw.)

(also to future readers looking for a digging in point: the impulse years!! it's all just trio stuff, but the grooves they got into for some of that shit were just so abstract and there's these polyrhythmic textures that just float, esp when ahmad takes a turn on the rhodes. hiphop sample favorites for a reason. he was a baaaad man when the time was right.)

whenever anybody in later generations made reference to 'keeping it real', i always assumed they meant they were following examples set by people like ahmad jamal. he recorded steadily for over half a century, influenced the most influential, always played with heart firmly on display, and best of all: you only need one hand to count the amount of bad records he made. rest well to an authentic legend.

(hello friends💙👋🏻 i'm okay and grateful to be able to read/see you all. here's some prime ilxor bait: ahmad smooths steely. love all around. wish we could have met again under happier circumstances. here's to hoping that the next time this sees a revive, it will be for the jamal plays jamal reissue)

Really like walking around with this one in the headphones:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRGFM6ra2lU

Great posts! Just heard this, w good excerpts of interviews and music:

Ahmad Jamal, a prodigious pianist, composer and bandleader whose seemingly effortless mastery resulted in part from a childhood dare, has died at age 92.

RIP! I've been loving some of the archival stuff that's been emerging recently — the Emerald City Nights release (recorded in the mid 60s) is terrific. The guy could really create a vibe.

Always loved "The Awakening" (which reminds me of A Charlie Brown Christmas) and his cover of "Stolen Moments."

I was bumping that comp of his okeh/epic sides the other week and thought about bumping this thread, the man had such incredible musical instincts. Spinning live at Alhambra’s rn

Thanks for the recommendations Austin and others, there's a whole lot of AJ I haven't heard

have you had a dose of jamal plays jamal recently, friends?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBBDjl3roQk

today is a great day to listen to ahmad's trio album extensions from 1965. first album with jamil nasser in the group, it's another complete masterpiece that's not seen reissue since the 70s. check out the multi-movement, 13 minute title track!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0kOYRMtBqI

https://www.discogs.com/master/289131-Ahmad-Jamal-Extensions