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ahmad jamal
Jamal’s restraint was consistent with his
famous rectitude. But I wondered: Once, I told
him, I asked Frank Capra for his reaction to
becoming the 10th recipient of the American
Film Institute Life Achievement award. “It’s
about time,” the director snapped.
Any of that simmering beneath all that
rectitude “None of that,” Jamal laughed. “I
don’t mimic the quotations of others unless
they’re valid for me. That’s not a valid one
for me.”
DownBeat critics may not have been swept
away by Jamal at first. But two of the jazz world’s
most influential judges of talent were behind
him from the start. One was John Hammond,
whose uncanny ear had an incredible affinity
for the kind of raw originality that made us
reimagine what music could be: Billie Holiday,
Benny Goodman, Count Basie, Lester Young,
Charlie Christian and many more. In 1951, it
was Hammond who brought Jamal to Danny
Kessler at Columbia’s Okeh division.
“That happened,” Jamal says, “because John
was very locked into Israel Crosby, one of the
greatest bassists of all time. I was working with
Israel, and because of that he discovered me.
Interestingly enough, I was Israel’s pianist first
and then I managed to hire him when I formed
my own group.” (Hammond had found Crosby
in Chicago in 1935 and recorded the milestone
“Blue Of Israel” that year, perhaps the first jazz
work in which solo pizzicato bass carried a thematic
line.)
The other early adopter was Miles Davis,
who (along with pianist Red Garland) discovered
Jamal at the Pershing Hotel a few years
later and who began began recording his tunes
before either he or Jamal had become household
names. “Ahmad’s Blues” was on Workin’
for Prestige, and “New Rhumba” was arranged
by Gil Evans for Miles Ahead. “I’d love to have
a little boy,” Davis said in 1959, “with red hair,
green eyes and a black face—who plays piano
like Ahmad Jamal.”
What did Hammond, Davis and soon thousands
of fans hear in Jamal that seemed to
elude some critics Simplicity, perhaps, and an
authority that dared to exhault restraint. For 35
years the history of jazz had been a continually
expanding universe of virtuosity, speed, density
and intricacy. With the arrival of bebop, the last
frontiers of sheer technique had been conquered
and settled. Notes could not grow any higher or
faster, only more iconiclastic. Jamal, like Davis
in his way, declined to play the musical athelete—or
anarchist. Instead, he eased back on the
throttle and helped locate an alternate route into
a new modernity. Its spirit was open, ambivalent,
sometimes intellectual and seldom dependent
on olympian virtuosity (althougth Jamal
was and remains a first-rate technician). At a
time when many critics were beguiled by the
frontiers of total freedom, Jamal found his voice
by digging deeper into what more restless players
were trying to escape, and by anchoring his
material around recurring riffs and refrains.
Jamal’s untimate wedge into the big time
was an unlikely tune on an even more unlikely
label. To the extent that the new post-war
jazz scene retained any vestige of the once massive
mainstream market it had held during the
swing era, it was ruled by a handful of young
pianists who recorded for major labels and were
said to appeal to “people who normally didn’t
like jazz.” Dave Brubeck and Erroll Garner led
the pack, and both were skillfully nurtured and
marketed by Columbia Records (which was also
laying plans for Davis by the late ’50s). Another
was George Shearing, whose albums for Capitol
deftly served both art and commerce. Toward
the end of the ’50s, as Norman Granz’s Verve
andrea canter
34 DOWNBEAT DECEMBER 2011