He was a famous American jazz pianist, composer and conductor. Ahmad Jamal died at the age of 92, French and American media announced on Sunday. The artist’s widow, Laura Hess-Hey, has confirmed his death, reported the Washington Post. His daughter Sumayah Jamal told the New York Times that he was suffering from prostate cancer.
Ahmad Jamal has influenced the work of famous musicians such as trumpeter Miles Davis and pianist McCoy Tyner. Ahmad Jamal – born Frederick Russell Jones in Pittsburgh and who converted to Islam in 1950 – received multiple awards during his seven-decade career. He was notably made a knight of the Order of Arts and Letters of France in 2007 and had won a Grammy Award for his entire career in 2017.
“One of the greatest innovations of the time”
African-American, he began his career in the 1940s during the bebop revolution and helped attract a wider audience to jazz. His style is described as based on surprise, ruptures, the use of silences, with romantic accents, with a phrasing that is both dynamic and light.
THE New Yorker, in an article published last year on the occasion of the release of several unreleased recordings, said that in the 1950s “his musical concept was one of the great innovations of the time, even if its originality stripped down and audacious has eluded many listeners”. The album “Ahmad Jamal at the Pershing: But Not for Me”, released in 1958, marked the beginning of his success.
A “catalogue strewn with jewels”
It spent more than 100 weeks on the Billboard chart, the American ranking of the most popular titles. According to New York Times, it became one of the best-selling instrumental records of the time. Dozens of others followed in what the Times called it a “jewel-studded catalog”.
In an interview given to Times at the end of 2022, Ahmad Jamal said: “I am still evolving, every time I sit at the piano. “I always have new ideas,” he added.