Now in his mid-80s, Jamal might be self-conscious about his legacy, his mind on musical autobiography-and with the best younger pianists having gone in Herbie Hancock’s direction, who better than Ahmad Jamal to play Ahmad Jamal? your sea and all its splendor and regret.”ĭespite its stated theme, Marseille is less a tribute to the city than a celebration of the Jamal-style that the French adore, a victory lap toward the end of a fine career. But Marseille features Jamal’s first original lyrics, with rapper Abd Al Malik and singer Mina Agossi interpreting Jamal’s spare, sentimental lines in French and English: “Marseille. Jamal always has been such a lyrical player that his notes feel shaped directly from a song’s words. But each 13-note figure on the title track, for example, can still tell a complete story as it stretches with tension and finds resolution. We hear warm harmonies, miraculously soft swing and indelibly long, fluid lines, maybe a bit shorter than they used to be. We hear vamps, an enthusiastic embrace of repetition. On six original tunes and two covers, we hear Afro-Cuban beats with drumming from Herlin Riley and percussion from Manolo Badrena James Cammack’s bass is foregrounded here, as Jamal’s bassists have been for at least 65 years. Marseille is in the same vein as Jamal’s recordings of the past 30 years, featuring sidemen who’ve played with him since the 1980s and ’90s. With Marseille, it’s as if the pianist took Davis’ advice himself: Ahmad plays like Ahmad here, giving this solid session a mood of retrospection. There was also Jamal’s affinity for show tunes, his classical drama and his concept of space, pauses rich with the resonance of the last chord and the possibility of the next one.įor all Jamal’s technique, he had the courage to play pretty against dominant trends in bebop’s era of firebrand artistes, and unlike Davis, he remained more or less devoted to one style through jazz’s restless 20th- and 21st-century innovations. This was just one of Ahmad Jamal’s well-documented influences on Davis’ music, which is to say on the development of jazz. “Play like Ahmad,” Miles Davis would tell his pianist Red Garland in the 1950s. Ahmad Jamal Marseille (Jazz Village/PIAS)īy Michelle Mercer | Published September 2017