Ahmad Jamal is 92 years old and the history of jazz piano is at his fingertips.
He is the penultimate survivor of the golden age.
A whole legend.
His past has just sent him an anonymous letter in the form of two double discs of previously unreleased live recordings recorded at Seattle's Penthouse club between 1963 and 1966, but he's not one to gloat over the years.
“59 years ago that.
I was not enthusiastic about the idea, but they convinced me to publish these tapes.
It's not that I don't like my old music.
I don't think it exists.
The music is either good or bad," says Jamal in a telephone interview with EL PAÍS.
He agreed to do it in early November from his home in the Berkshires (in New York State) with a few conditions: among others, the journalist could not cite the names of two dead jazz critics, nor take information from a certain collaborative internet encyclopedia .
He also does not use his original name.
That concession could only disappoint civil registry lovers;
the pianist was always Ahmad Jamal.
Following his conversion to Islam, he changed his name as early as 1950.
The pianist Ahmad Jamal, in an image from the sixties.don bronstein
By then, he had lived in Chicago for two years, his “second home”, where he moved from his native Pittsburgh.
“I worked for 80 cents an hour installing kitchens, and I played in my spare time.
It was [double bassist] Israel Crosby who first hired me,” he recalls.
Crosby (died 1962) would become one of the stable members of a legendary trio (completed by Vernell Fournier on drums) that made its recording debut with one of the most famous albums in jazz history:
At The Pershing.
But Not For Me
(1958) was a phenomenal bestseller thanks to an unforgettable version of
Poinciana
that opened the second side.
The theme transcended the genre and rubbed shoulders on the charts with
Johnny B. Goode,
by Chuck Berry, or
La Bamba,
in the Ritchie Valens version.
“That record got all the spotlights…until today,” Jamal says proudly.
"Many have tried to imitate that sound, but have been unsuccessful."
The recipe is distinguished by its minimalist and spacious touch and by an overflowing imagination for the arrangements capable of giving infinite life to the songs.
Also for the rapport between the musicians.
Much later, Miles Davis put words in his memoirs to the influence of the musician.
“[In the mid-fifties] he admired his lyricism on the piano, his playing style, the spacing he used in putting his groups together.
I have always thought that he did not have the recognition he deserved ”, can be read in the most recent Spanish edition of the book (in Alba).
In the booklets that accompany the new recordings, the praise continues: from the recently deceased Ramsey Lewis, another Chicago legend, to the penultimate jazz-pop star, Jon Batiste, winner of an Oscar and a Golden Globe for the soundtrack of a Disney movie,
Soul
, as well as five Grammys, including Best Album of 2021. He points out three lessons he learned from the teacher: “1.
To trust the space between the music.
2. To compose and create spontaneously.
3. To incorporate humor”.
After the rescue of the unpublished is an American producer named Zev Feldman.
He's been working for years with the heirs of the club's owner, a guy named Charlie Puzzo.
“That was one of my favorite places to play at the time,” Jamal recalls.
“There was an extraordinary respect for music.
If you made noise they kicked you out of the joint.”
Charlie Puzzo, owner of the Penthouse club, and Ahmad Jamal, in Seattle.COURTESY OF CHARLIE PUZZo
Perhaps it was Puzzo's habit of recording artists doing residency at the Penthouse for a weekly radio broadcast on Thursday nights.
“There are an enormous number of tapes, about 100 hours in total, from a wide variety of artists,” Feldman explains in a telephone conversation from his home in Maryland, “the family made me co-custodian of that material.”
Unpublished records by artists such as The Three Sounds, Cannonball Adderley or Wynton Kelly have already come out of that trunk.
Feldman contacted the pianist without much hope.
"He has a reputation for saying no to these things," recalls the producer, whose release has served to launch his own label after more than a decade working to bring to light treasures lost in time for other record companies, large or little.
He has baptized it the same as they call him in the world: Jazz Detective (they also often call him "Indiana Jones of jazz").
He is accompanied on this adventure by the Spanish producers Jordi Soley and Carlos Agustín Calembert, with whom he had already collaborated in the past.
For the immediate future, Feldman promises a third volume of Jamal's Penthouse recordings (between 1966 and 1968) and new discoveries by big names in jazz.
The Seattle albums come to add to the dozens of albums that Jamal has recorded live in his career.
Or, as he prefers to say, “played remotely”.
In the interview he will recall that he does not like to be called jazz either, a label to which he attributes racist echoes, to what he does, if not "American classical music".
“The only genuine cultural products of this country are Native American art and American classical music.
Actually, I don't know Bach or Beethoven from Duke Ellington,” he says.
“Without Louis Armstrong, Billy Strayhorn, Sidney Bechet or Don Byas, the Beatles would not have existed, nor everything that came after.
Music no longer exists.
You put on the television and Billie Holiday doesn't sound, that's why the world is not going well.
When asked if that album,
But Not For Me,
made him rich as well as famous, Jamal replies: “Rico doesn't make you what you have in your pocket, my friend, but what you keep in your head.
peace of mind
That is why many millionaires are so poor.
To fix his story, the pianist recalls that in 2018 he performed in Ukraine.
“It was one of the biggest concerts of my life.
Everything was normal then, and now chaos reigns and there are six million refugees.
There is no peace of mind for these people, and I am sure they would give all the money in the world to get it back.
During the conversation, the pianist was often more interested in talking, not so much about music as about current events (from climate change to the protests in Iran or the tragedy of the Halloween parade in Seoul).
Or the strangeness of contemporary life.
For example: computer scams, like the one he just suffered, or "the thousands of passwords we have to enter to do anything."
He is now retired.
He has “two Steinways at home” but rarely touches them.
The pandemic took him off the road, although, as he remembers, he was behind the wheel until the end: his last album dates from 2019, and like almost all of those in recent decades, he recorded it for a French label, a country in which he is adored as a kind of Jerry Lewis of jazz.
(There they have just rescued another live recording for Parisian radio, from 1971).
“A few days before the lockdown I played in Washington, even then everything looked bad,” Jamal recalls.
It was the end of a career that he started professionally “at the age of 10”.
To put it in perspective, the boy made his debut at the piano around the time the British troops narrowly escaped Dunkirk.
He played “with a group of musicians in their fifties”, who “couldn't believe” that they already knew “the repertoire” inside out.
“The repertoire is the most important thing, whatever musical style you play”, he continues to think, so much time later.
Cover of the first of the two unpublished albums.
The new material, which hit stores in a special edition on Black Friday, is proof that, since that day 82 years ago, Jamal has never sat down at the piano in the same way twice.
And, unlike some material that feeds the retromaniac industry that jazz has become lately, it is relevant, both for its form (the quality of the recordings is optimal) and for its substance: it shows the pianist in front of different trios, with some of his usual collaborators of the time.
And it comes to aesthetically connect the time of his consecration in the early sixties with the maturity of the seventies, when he recorded the corpus that decades later would make him one of the most sampled musicians in
hip-hop.
Did that make you interested in rap?
“Everything seems fine to me, as long as they pay me, and that is very difficult.
I had an affair with Jay-Z and went to lawyers."
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