Ahmad Jamal, 92, jazz pianist with a spare, hypnotic touch
From the moment he first sat down at piano, barely past when he was a toddler, Ahmad Jamal told tales that he spelled out in notes and chords.
“To play music is to be a storyteller,” he told the Globe in 1989. “I’m a wordless storyteller, someone who cares about the dynamics of music. Music reflects highs and lows, joys and sorrows. Musical dynamics are human dynamics. What you play and how you play it is what you feel.”
A musician whose performances influenced and inspired jazz greats such as trumpeter Miles Davis, Mr. Jamal counted among his honors a lifetime achievement Grammy Award and a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Masters Fellowship, the nation’s highest jazz honor.
Mr. Jamal, who had lived in the Sheffield village of Ashley Falls at various points over the years, including for the past decade or so, was 92 when he died in his Berkshires home Sunday. His daughter, Sumayah Jamal, told The New York Times that his death was due to prostate cancer.
With a longevity few could match, Mr. Jamal began playing at 3 when an uncle asked if he could match the notes he was playing. Mr. Jamal dazzled audiences from his days as a child prodigy to long past when most musicians set aside their instruments. In February 2020, a few months before turning 90, he performed at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.
Even then, every performance was a learning experience.
“I’m trying to figure out what the black and white keys do after 86 years,” he quipped to the CapitalBop website before that performance. “I first sat down at the piano when I was 3 years old, and I’m still trying to figure out what they do! I learn something new every time I sit down.”
Unforgettable at any age, Mr. Jamal was “at the top of his game,” at 72, as he opened a three-night stand at the Regattabar, Steve Greenlee, then a Globe editor and critic, wrote in 2003.
“From his unexpected phrasings to his abandonment of theme-solo-theme formats to his habit of standing to punctuate the last bar of each tune, Jamal reminds us about the versatility of the piano trio, and about the possibilities of jazz itself,” Greenlee, who is now executive editor of the Portland Press Herald, wrote in a review in which he praised Mr. Jamal for “balancing elegance and experimentation in piece after piece.”
In his 1989 autobiography, Davis wrote that Mr. Jamal “knocked me out with his concept of space, his lightness of touch, and the way he phrases notes and chords and passages.”
“All my inspiration comes from Ahmad Jamal,” Davis once remarked.
And renowned jazz critic Stanley Crouch, who died in 2020, said in a 2004 Globe interview that Mr. Jamal was the greatest living jazz pianist.
“He’s the king, as far as I’m concerned,” Crouch said. “I don’t think anybody plays with greater freedom than he does.”
Mr. Jamal, however, was never entirely comfortable with the word jazz.
“Jazz is sophisticated and is stuck with an unsophisticated name. Jazz is unique to American culture the way a MercedesBenz is unique to Germany and a Rolls-Royce is unique to England,” he said in the 1989 Globe interview with Marian Christy.
“Jazz should be renamed ‘American Classical Music,’ “Mr. Jamal said. “Jazz originated in the United States. The jazz innovators are American.”
Usually performing as part of a trio — he preferred the term “small ensemble” – Mr. Jamal distinctively interpreted pop standards such as “Love for Sale,” “A Gal in Calico,” and “Don’t Blame Me.” His own compositions included “Ahmad’s Blues,” which other jazz musicians widely incorporated into their own repertoires.
In 1958, when his ensemble was the house band at Chicago’s Black-owned Pershing Hotel lounge, he recorded “Ahmad Jamal at the Pershing: But Not For Me.”
That album sold more than 1 million copies, remaining on Billboard magazine’s charts for more than 100 weeks.
Among the cuts was an eightminute rendition of “Poinciana,” a 1930s pop ballad, which became Mr. Jamal’s signature number from then on, including during his 2003 run at the Regattabar.
The financial windfall of a million-selling jazz album had its downside, though, he told the Globe.
“When I became a success, I had a lot of distractions,” he said in the 1989 interview. “I invested money in various businesses. I became a mercantile man. It was the price of success. But a musician doesn’t need to be involved in any business but music.”
Born in Pittsburgh on July 2, 1930, Frederick Russell Jones was known as Fritz. His mother was a domestic worker, and his father worked in the steel mills.
After his auspicious start at 3, imitating his uncle’s playing note for note, Mr. Jamal began formal lessons four years later, studying with Mary Cardwell Dawson, the founder of the National Negro Opera Company.
“When I was 7, my mother arranged for me to take piano lessons. They cost one dollar a lesson. She was a domestic. She walked to work to save that dollar,” Mr. Jamal said in 1989. “As the pastor said at her funeral: ‘Here was a good woman.’ Just five words. But her goodness is the reason there is an Ahmad Jamal today. I have been rewarded for her efforts.”
A musicians’ union member by 14, he performed in Pittsburgh nightclubs, later telling DownBeat magazine that he’d “do algebra during intermission, between sets.”
Mr. Jamal began touring with a big band upon graduating from Westinghouse High School and settled in Chicago in 1950. Converting to Islam, he and his first wife, Virginia Wilkins, changed their names — he to Ahmad Jamal, she to Maryam.
“When I was 21, I thought of becoming a theologian,” he told the Globe in 1989. “I studied the writings of the great sages. I’m not really a convert to Islam. I feel I was born a Muslim even though I was taught another philosophy.”
According to the Times, Mr. Jamal’s three marriages — to Maryam, Sharifah Frazier, and Laura Hess-Hay — ended in divorce. Mumeenah, his daughter with Maryam, died in 1979, according to The Washington Post.
In addition to Sumayah, his daughter with Frazier, Mr. Jamal leaves two grandchildren, according to the Times. Hess-Hay was his manager and continued to represent him until he died.
The business ventures that Mr. Jamal would later call distractions from his music including founding record labels, a management company, and a Chicago nightclub and restaurant that didn’t serve alcohol, in accordance with his faith.
The demise of his businesses brought about financial difficulties that led him to take a break from recording and touring.
By 1970 he had returned to performing, including a lengthy residency at New York City’s Village Gate nightclub. With bassist Jamil Nasser and drummer Frank Gant, he released “The Awakening,” one of Mr. Jamal’s albums that hip-hop artists would later sample in their mixes.
The National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master Fellowship arrived in 1994, and he was awarded a lifetime achievement Grammy in 2017.
“My music changes every hour, every day, overnight,” he told CapitalBop before the 2020 Kennedy Center performance.
“The thing is, we’re just receiving vessels, and if you’re in tune with your surroundings, we’re fortunate enough to maybe contribute something to this world, he said, adding that he tried to “make some meaningful contribution — first of all, to myself, and maybe to others.”