Ahmad Jamal, considered one of the most important pianists in the history of jazz and who performed several times in Portugal, died this Sunday at the age of 92, his wife revealed.
Laura Hess-Hey confirmed to the Washington Post the death of the musician, who began his professional career at the age of 14 in his native Pittsburgh, United States of America, but did not provide further information.
The pianist played several times in Portugal, at festivals such as Estoril Jazz, which ended in 1994, in his first performance in Portugal, Loulé, in 2001, and in Guimarães, in November 2007, in his last concert in the country, a few days after performing at the Belém Cultural Center.
Ahmad Jamal also played at Culturgest, in Lisbon, in 1996.
In recent years, the Portuguese guitarist Pedro Madaleno, together with the bassist Yuri Daniel and the drummer Alexandre Frazão, have taken “Homage to Ahmad Jamal” to different stages, reviewing their music.
Frederick Russell Jones, known in his childhood as Fritz, was born in Pittsburgh on July 2, 1930 and began playing at the age of 3, when an uncle challenged him to imitate him on the family piano.
In 1950 he moved to Chicago, where he converted to Islam, taking the name Ahmad Jamal.
He was considered the 1994 Master of Jazz by the National Endowment for the Arts and won a Grammy Lifetime Achievement in 2017.
Having the trio as their preferred musical format throughout their career of almost seven decades, they recorded, in 1958, “Ahmad Jamal at the Pershing: But Not For Me”, an album that reached one million copies sold and remained in the Billboard charts. magazine for more than 100 weeks.
One of the most prominent contemporary musicians to credit Jamal as an influence was trumpeter Miles Davis, and pianists as diverse as McCoy Tyner, Cedar Walton, and Bill Charlap have also acknowledged his influence.
Source: TSF
