Ahmad Jamal, a famous jazz pianist, band leader, and songwriter, died at 92.
Sumayah Jamal, his daughter, told the New York Times he died of prostate cancer.
Jamal started making music professionally when he was 14. Over the course of seven decades, he created a sound that was all his own and didn’t fit into any one genre. Ahmad was sometimes compared to Thelonious Monk in his ability to develop new ideas and inspire other musicians. For example, De La Soul, Jay-Z, Common, and Nas used his piano samples in their music. Miles Davis once said, “All my inspiration comes from Ahmad Jamal.
“All my inspiration comes from Ahmad Jamal,” writing in his memoir that his friend had “knocked me out with his concept of space, his lightness of touch, and the way he phrases notes and chords and passages”
Jamal was born Frederick Russell Jones in Pittsburgh in 1930. When he was three, an uncle told him to copy him on the family piano, and Jamal did. He ate “reams of sheet music” in all styles that his aunt gave him. He started official training when he was seven and started writing music when he was ten. French classical artists Maurice Ravel and Claude Debussy’s music caught his attention. By the time he was a teenager, he was already playing in bars. He once told Down Beat magazine,
” he once told Down Beat magazine”
After getting married in 1950, he moved to Chicago and changed his family’s Baptist faith to Islam. He was among the first African American artists to publicly discuss his Muslim faith. When asked about his name, Ahmad Jamal, he told Time magazine:
“I haven’t adopted a name. It’s a part of my ancestral background and heritage. I have re-established my original name. I have gone back to my own vine and fig tree.”
Jamal played jazz, which he called “American classical music,” all his life in the house band for Chicago’s Pershing Hotel lounge, a Black-owned favorite of Sammy Davis Jr. and Billie Holiday, and where he recorded his 1958 breakthrough album, Ahmad Jamal at the Pershing: But Not For Me. The record sold 1 million copies and stayed on the Billboard magazine charts for over 100 weeks. This made Ahmad Jamal a household name when rock’n’roll was becoming popular and jazz was starting to lose popularity.
Jamal bought a mansion and opened his own nightclub, the Alhambra, which didn’t serve alcohol because of his religious beliefs. The club was one of the unsuccessful business ventures that left him in debt.
In 1962, he got divorced from his first wife, and in 1963, he was taken to the hospital after what seemed to be an overdose. He went to New York for an extended stay at the Village Gate nightclub and didn’t start touring or making records again until 1964.
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In 1970, his version of the M*A*S*H theme on the keyboard was praised by critics. After that, he made another essential record called The Awakening with bassist Jamil Nasser and drummer Frank Gant.
“I used to do 20% of my own work and 80% of others,” he told the Guardian in 2013. “Now it’s the other way around.” “After a certain amount of time, you realize you are Mozart, Duke Ellington, or Billy Strayhorn. It takes time to figure out who you are. You must also find and keep people in sync with your actions. This is called “breathing together.”
In the 1980s and 1990s, Jamal kept playing shows and putting out live albums, adding to his status as one of the best jazz artists. In 1994, the National Endowment for the Arts named him a Jazz Master, and in 2017, he got a Grammy for his life’s work.
Mumeenah Counts, his first daughter, died in 1979. Laura Hess-Hay, his third ex-wife and manager, and his daughter Sumayah, who he had with his second ex-wife, are the only people left in his life. He also has two grandkids.
“It’s a divine gift, that’s all I can say,” he told the Guardian about how he could still act and tour in his 80s. We don’t make things, we find them, and that process gives us life. Rhythm is essential in music, and your energy needs beats too.
“You can work out right and eat right, but the most important thing is how you think.” Things are a mess, and that’s putting it mildly. Greed is causing so much to be lost.
“There aren’t many real, honest ways to live life now. But this song is and always has been one of them.”
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