Jazz Village to Release New Ahmad Jamal Album

courtesy of PIAS

Exactly one week from today Jazz Village will release Ballades, the latest album from pianist Ahmad Jamal, now at the age of 88. With the exception of three tracks, this is a solo album; and I was a bit surprised to see in the background material on the Amazon.com Web page that this was “something Jamal has never done before.” It is not that I disagree with the claim. However, to the best of my knowledge, Jamal is the only artist I have listened to on both coasts, at the Iridium club in Manhattan and in Herbst Theatre here in San Francisco. Both of those performances were solo gigs, and I have come to expect that Jamal has a wealth of inventiveness to explore without any backup. (The three tracks that are not solo involve only James Cammack on bass.) As usual Amazon is processing pre-orders through that aforementioned Web page.

Only three of the ten tracks on the album are Jamal originals: “Marseille,” “Because I Love You,” and “Whisperings.” The others sample different periods in songbook history, all providing first-rate platforms for Jamal’s prodigious (and frequently unorthodox) approaches to embellishment. When I heard him at Herbst, however, I was struck by his ability to incorporate the sorts of polyrhythms I might encounter in drum-work, often in passages that would depart from any secure sense of a tonal center. Just as there are any number of works by Karlheinz Stockhausen that show clear signs of having jazz influences, I found myself wondering if Jamal had much Stockhausen in his own collection of recordings!

I have to confess, however, that, where some standards are concerned, I find it difficult to get beyond some particular take on the tune that left a deep and indelible impression. On Ballades that tune is “I Should Care,” the 1944 joint effort of Axel Stordahl, Paul Weston, and Sammy Cahn. The Wikipedia page lists any number of vocal and instrumental treatments of that song.

When it comes to a solid straightforward account, I suppose I shall always go with the 1949 recording that Johnny Hartman made with Dizzy Gillespie’s band (with instrumental arrangement by Gillespie himself). On the other hand the most mind-bending recording would have to come from the 1957 solo session that Thelonious Monk had with Riverside for the album that would be released as Thelonious Himself. Monk’s rhythms are so eccentric that one has to wonder if he was thinking about some other tune while playing “I Should Care,” almost as if he was trying to take the title as literally as possible!

As can be seen above, this is not intended to criticize Jamal’s own rhythmic inventiveness. On this album he ventures into unorthodox rhythms in his treatment of Bob Haggart’s tune, “What’s New?” Indeed, he is already in arcane territory during an introduction that takes its own sweet time before getting around to the first phrase of the song itself. Ironically, the tune was first written as an instrumental selection (with a different title) in 1938 for Bob Crosby’s group, featuring a trumpet solo for Billy Butterfield.

Jamal shares with Monk such a broad capacity for inventiveness that each album-listening occasion is almost guaranteed to turn up one or more twists in treatment that had eluded prior listenings. Nevertheless, there is usually an undercurrent in Jamal that is not as provocatively disruptive as what one encounters on a Monk track. This is not to dismiss Jamal as being too smooth. It is simply to observe that there are any number of directions that invention can follow, and Jamal has put a distinctive stamp on his own particular paths.