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Hall of Fame " Ahmad Jamal
Patience
Prevails
By John McDonough " Photograph by Jimmy Katz
the hottest trio in jazz,” the magazine said
in August 1959.
“Currently
Not this magazine, mind you, but Time magazine,
which rarely stooped to notice the increasingly arcane goings-on
of the ’50s jazz world. But it’s a measure of the breadth
of Ahmad Jamal’s sudden and unexpected breakthrough that
year with “Poinciana” that it was both noticed and noted in the
global menu of America’s most august news weekly.
Back in the trenches of the jazz world, though, where suggestions of commercial popularity,
especially those reported in Time magazine, were like Kryptonite, a certain chill fell over Jamal’s
music, which was viewed by some with boredom if not suspicion. Examine the numbers he piled
up in the DownBeat Critics Poll during the early height of his popularity—say, from 1958 into the
middle ’60s—and the main number you find is zero. Believe it or not, Jamal never even appeared in
the Piano category, let alone rose to contender level. The Readers Poll numbers were not much better.
Jamal did crack the paydirt of single digits once—No. 9 in his big year of 1959—only to drop
down to No. 19 by 1964.
Such far-off trivia seems amusing today, now that history has finally caught up to Ahmad
Jamal and the pianist wears the mantle of an accredited and active living legend. So patience
does prevail. Sixty years after his first trio recordings (for the Okeh label) and 50 years after his
first DownBeat cover story (March 16, 1961), Jamal enters the community of his peers that is
the DownBeat Hall of Fame.
“Well,” he reacted a few weeks ago, “I’ve gotten a lot of awards in my life, and you always
appreciate them. And that’s it. I don’t underestimate or overestimate them. I give them their due.”
32 DOWNBEAT DECEMBER 2011