The Ahmad Jamal Tone

I was introduced to Ahmad Jamal through curiously interconnected events.

In any case, I find that only a handful of pianists play in his phrasings. To demonstrate, I attach two of his compositions from his album The Awakening. I do not know much about this album, nor do I care in the light of this discussion.

 

One song is I Love Music. This song has a chord progression (or maybe a series of those) that has been sampled (one section of it sliced and looped as the backing progression) in multiple songs over multiple years.

• The most famous example would be The World is Yours by Nas (an "East Coast hip-hop" rapper). The song is regarded as one of the greatest hip-hop songs ever produced.

The other song is Dolphin Dance. It does not have a lore as such, but rolls in a similar Ahmed-Jamal style.

Every pianist adds his flavour to any composition he plays -- even if his own. Flavour that resides outside the composition on paper. An interesting way to think of this is that every pianist has kinks in his playing. These kinks are developed --

1. through ergonomic adjustments: e.g. what kind of embellishments does the pianist find most comfortable to play
2. through genre adaptations: e.g. what kind of embellishments does he play the most in his homeground genre of music
3. through imitative knacks: e.g. what kind of embellishments did the musician like the most to hear and would be motivated to imitate.

A mixture of these, unique to every individual, trains the individual in becoming the musician he is.

Let's talk about Ahmad Jamal's phrasings. The extremely intriguing thing about Jamal is that he will take a happy tune and give it a dark, strong, moving vibe so much so that it now has a narrative of its own. Another observation is his compositions are extremely 'rootless'. It is one thing to reharmonise a tune laid in a conventional scalic setting into something polytonal and jazzy, but it is entirely another to destroy the need for static foundation in a song. Instead, the base is shifted to something dynamic, transient and coexisting with other platforms of the song's progression.

Robert Glasper is one pianist that plays in a style that in many ways resembles Jamal.

 

Even without his accolades and a decorated musical career, Glasper is a brilliant musician -- which is the first and foremost fact that matters. I found the above two performances very similar in spirit to Jamal's playing.