a 1976 Jazz Showcase engagement that captures Jamal and his trio in full flight.
Resonance Records
Ahmad Jamal – piano; John Heard – bass; Frank Gant – drums
What strikes you immediately is how Ahmad Jamal uses the full architecture of the piano — classical, jazz, bossa nova, fusion — moving between them not as a stylist showing off, but as an improvisor composing in real time. Three volumes of “Emerald City Nights: Live at the Penthouse” made that case compellingly last year. Now producer Zev Feldman has gone back into Joe Segal’s vast Chicago tape archive and found something just as remarkable — a 1976 Jazz Showcase engagement that captures Jamal and his trio in full flight.
His near fifteen-minute original “Ahmad’s Song” opens the set with a classical impressionistic calm, bass and drums barely breathing beneath him, before shifting into jazz drive. That ability to pull back to near silence, then flood the room with cascading runs, is central to everything he plays — silence as punctuation.
Alongside him, bassist John Heard and drummer Frank Gant lock in with the kind of chemistry that sounds effortless and isn’t. Heard’s walking lines carry a melodic weight of their own, and Gant’s extended solo on ‘Swahililand’ — starting almost inaudibly, quiet stick work and cymbal washes, before a shuffle rhythm gradually claims the whole kit — mirrors Jamal’s own instinct for dynamics. This wasn’t the celebrated Pershing-era trio, leaner and more spacious. McCoy Tyner’s influence was now audible in how hard Jamal’s left hand was working, and Heard and Gant could match that muscle.
The repertoire spans continents and decades. Jobim’s ‘Wave’ dances between the melody and his own embellishments, Jamal pulling it apart and reassembling it. ‘Have You Met Miss Jones’ continues in the same southward direction but swings harder, Jamal finding a rhythmic bounce that feels as much bossa nova as Broadway. Johnny Mandel’s ‘Theme from M*A*S*H’ gets a forceful reading — Jamal hammering the melody hard, then piling on notes until it feels like the tempo is running away from itself, which it isn’t, he’s just doubling what he’s playing — before pulling back to almost nothing.
More intimate are the solo readings. ‘Prelude to a Kiss’ moves slower than most versions, Jamal building flurries of ascending and descending runs, throwing in classical-sounding passages with tremolos in the lower register, then suddenly dropping back into a line lifted straight from Ellington’s own version. ‘A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square’ closes the concert, the melody half-hidden beneath Jamal’s own invention, surfacing in fragments before he places the final notes in their proper order and the night is done.
Resonance has packaged all of this with the care the music deserves. The cover alone looks like it belongs in a frame. Inside, Eugene Holley Jr.’s liner notes place the recording in the full sweep of Jamal’s career, and Wayne Segal, Joe’s son, is among those interviewed. So is Pete Rock — ‘Swahililand’ was sampled by J Dilla on De La Soul’s ‘Stakes is High,’ and Jamal’s reach into hip-hop is part of the story being told here.
Jamal passed in 2023 at 93, and yet here he is on a Chicago night in 1976, chasing something down at the keyboard with everything he has.
