Ahmad Jamal dead: Jazz legend and Grammy lifetime achievement winner dies at 92

Jordan Hoffman
Updated ·4 min read
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Groundbreaking jazz pianist and composer Ahmad Jamal died this weekend, as per reports in the New York Times and other outlets. He was the recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Grammys in 2017. He was also nominated for two Grammys, one for his 2013 album “Blue Moon,” and also for his funky 1980s cover of Bobby Womack’s “You’re Welcome, Stop on By,” which was later sampled by multiple hip-hop artists. He was also the recipient of an NEA Jazz Masters Award, and Kennedy Center Legend Award, and was named to the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government in 2007. He was 92 years old.    

The Pittsburgh-born pianist, who trained in Western classical music, was a noted prodigy in his youth, and began his professional career in his teens. On the road, the young man born Frederick Jones was welcomed by the Muslim community in the Detroit area, and converted to Islam. He changed his name to Ahmad Jamal at age 20 and, based from Chicago, recorded his first album at the age of 21. He was soon noticed by John Hammond, the legendary talent scout who also aided the careers of Billie Holiday, Benny Goodman, Charlie Christian, Leonard Cohen, Bruce Springsteen, and Stevie Ray Vaughan. 

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Jamal was a touring mainstay and prolific recording artist and pioneered a radical new direction in the post-bebop era. He was famous for his use of space—one could argue that the cliché of chin-stroking jazzbos saying “listen to the notes he doesn’t play” comes directly from Jamal. Miles Davis famously championed him, bringing his sidemen to his shows as he created his early groups. In Davis’s autobiography, he wrote “all my inspiration comes from Ahmad Jamal.”

In 1958 he released the album “At The Pershing: But Not For Me,” recorded at Chicago’s Pershing Hotel. It was a major success (in the 1990s it was listed platinum, pretty rare for jazz) and included Jamal’s signature number, a version of the show tune “Poinciana” remodeled in an elegant but still hip manner. 

At the time of this recording, jazz was coming out of the high-flying bebop era, with musicians like Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie racing up and down the scale at the speed of thought. The next development for most was the rump-shakin’ “hard bop” style, which is what many people just think of as “classic jazz” from the 1950s and 1960s. A break-off strain, West Coast Jazz, involved more orchestration and a less free-form manner, but nobody, really, was playing music like Ahmad Jamal. 

Following his Pershing success, Jamal opened a club and restaurant in Chicago called the Alhambra, but being a devotee to Islam he nixed the serving of alcohol. This didn’t take, and the club soon failed (though not without serving as a spot for a great live album.) Jamal put his career on pause for a few years but came roaring back, incorporating (with some restraint) electronic keyboards into his repertoire while others were going mad with the fusion trend. 

In 1973 he scored a hit with a groovy version of the “Theme from M*A*S*H” that was included on a cash grab album released as the television series proved to be a success which bundled scenes of dialogue from the original Robert Altman movie. (For some reason I had this tape cassette as a kid. It’s got Sally Kellerman screaming and yelling a lot, and then this one great track.)

In the 1990s, Clint Eastwood incorporated two songs of Jamal’s into his box office sensation that netted Meryl Streep another Oscar nomination, “The Bridges of Madison County.” The tracks were “Poinciana” and “(Put Another Nickel In) Music! Music! Music!” Lennie Niehaus’s original score for the film could be said to have a Jamal-esque element, too. 

Also in the ‘90s, Jamal’s piano and accompanying sidemen (from a 1974 track called “Swahililand”) can also be heard sampled on the De La Soul classic “Stakes Is High.”

Here’s Ahmad Jamal looking cool as hell playing “Autumn Leaves” in a Paris concert from 2017.

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