Ahmad Jamal Trio Performances in Seattle

Ahmad Jamal on the cover of the first of the two albums to be discussed

Tomorrow the new Jazz Detective label produced by Zev Feldman will release two double-CD albums of previously unreleased live recordings by master jazz pianist Ahmad Jamal. Both albums have the title Emerald City Nights: Live at the Penthouse, citing the club in Seattle where all of the recordings were made. Recordings for the first album were made in June of 1963 and March and April of 1964. Those in the second release were made in March and October of 1965 and September of 1966. For those that cannot wait, both hyperlinks currently lead to Amazon.com Web pages that will process pre-orders.

As I have previously observed, “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.” My memory is a bit fuzzy in these matters; but I suspect these were both trio performances, the same as all of the Penthouse gigs. In 1964 and 1965 Jamal was joined by Jamil Nasser on bass and Chuck Lampkin on drums. In 1963 Jamal and Lampkin were joined by Richard Evans on bass, and Evans composed pieces for some of the performances in both 1963 and 1964. After March of 1965 Lampkin was followed by two different drummers, Vernel Fournier in the following October and Frank Gant in 1966. Over the course of all of these concerts, there were ample opportunities for both bass and drum solos, particularly in the more familiar standards.

With only a few exceptions, the individual tracks cover a generous duration. Jamal himself is consistently inventive, even when approaching the most familiar standards. He sets a high bar for his colleagues, but the interplay that unfolds on just about every trio offering leads the attentive listener down any number of adventurous paths. Listening to him in Herbst was particularly mind-blowing, leading me to suggest to the man sitting next to me that there was more than a little bit of Karlheinz Stockhausen in Jamal’s solo improvisations. That man ran into me at a later concert. He said he had approached Jamal after the Herbst concert, raising Stockhausen’s name. Jamal seems to have acknowledged that composer’s influence! However, the Seattle gigs predate my Herbst encounter by about 40 years. Do not expect any suggestions of Stockhausen on these new albums, but Ludwig van Beethoven is definitely lurking in Jamal’s take on “I Didn’t Know What Time it Was,” which began the set on March 18, 1965!

By now I have come to expect that every new Jamal release will lead my listening down new pathways. Given the abundance of content on these two albums, I would say that I am just beginning to get my head around what Jamal was doing at a time when I was presenting my own radio program of twentieth-century music on the campus radio station at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I was just becoming aware of Jamal through the jazz broadcasters for that station, so my path of awareness has been a long one. However, it was only after the turn of the century that I started making serious efforts to tune in to his inventiveness (with a little help from Beethoven and Stockhausen).

Now I can revisit what he was doing during my own distant past, and it would be fair to say that I have come away with considerable satisfaction with all of the tracks on both of these new albums!