Jazz pianist Ahmad Jamal dies at 92; his laid-back style inspired generations of musicians

Ahmad Jamal, whose measured, spare piano style was an inspiration to generations of jazz musicians, died Sunday at his home in Ashley Falls, Massachusetts. He was 92.

The cause was prostate cancer, his daughter, Sumayah, said.

In a career that would bring him a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master award, a lifetime achievement Grammy, and induction into France’s Order of Arts and Letters, Jamal made his mark with a stately approach that honored what he called the spaces in the music.

That approach stood in marked contrast to the challengingly complex music known as bebop, which was sweeping the jazz world when Jamal began his career as a teenager in the mid-1940s. Bebop pianists, following the lead of Bud Powell, became known for their virtuosic flurries of notes. Jamal chose a different path, which proved equally influential.

Critic Stanley Crouch wrote that bebop’s founding father, Charlie Parker, was the only musician “more important to the development of fresh form in jazz than Ahmad Jamal.”

In his early years, Jamal listened not just to jazz, which he preferred to call “American classical music,” but to classical music of the non-American variety.

“We didn’t separate the two schools,” he told The New York Times in 2001. “We studied Bach and Ellington, Mozart and Art Tatum. When you start at 3, what you hear you play. I heard all these things.”

Jamal’s laid-back, accessible style — with its dense chords, its wide dynamic range and, above all, its judicious use of silence — led to more than his share of dismissive reviews in the jazz press early in his career; Martin Williams’ canonical history “The Jazz Tradition” described his music as “chic and shallow.”

But it soon became an integral part of the jazz landscape. Herbie Hancock and Keith Jarrett are among the prominent jazz pianists who looked to Jamal as an exemplar.

Ahmad Jamal was born Frederick Russell Jones in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on July 2, 1930. Fritz, as he was called, began playing piano at age 3 and began studying with Mary Cardwell Dawson, founder of the National Negro Opera Company, a few years later. By the time Fritz joined the musicians union at age 14, Tatum, a celebrated jazz piano virtuoso, had hailed him as “a coming great,” and he began touring with George Hudson’s big band after graduating from high school.

In 1950, he moved to Chicago, where he converted to Islam, changed his name to Ahmad Jamal and assembled a piano-guitar-bass trio known as the Three Strings. During an extended stay in 1951 at the Embers, a nightclub in the New York City borough of Manhattan, the trio came to the attention of noted record producer and talent scout John Hammond, who signed them to the Okeh label.

In 1955, Jamal recorded his first full-length album, “Ahmad Jamal Plays,” with guitarist Ray Crawford and bassist Israel Crosby, for the small label Parrot. Tellingly, when the album was acquired and rereleased the next year by Argo, a subsidiary of the seminal blues label Chess, it was retitled “Chamber Music of the New Jazz.”

Jamal received his first major national exposure with the Argo album “At the Pershing: But Not for Me,” recorded at a Chicago nightclub in 1958 with Crosby and drummer Vernel Fournier. It spent more than two years on the Billboard album chart, an all-but-unheard-of stretch for a jazz album.

Jamal’s output was as prodigious as his light-fingered style was economical: He released as many as three albums a year in the late 1960s and early ’70s, and more than 60 in his career.

He also founded a handful of record labels, a management company and a Chicago nightclub and restaurant called the Alhambra, although that venture lasted less than a year. In keeping with his religious beliefs, the Alhambra did not serve alcohol, which presumably hastened its demise.

The Alhambra’s financial difficulties marked the beginning of a dark period of Jamal’s life, in which he walked away from performing for almost three years. The club closed in December 1961; three months later, he filed for divorce from Maryam Jamal, formerly named Virginia Wilkins, whom he had married when he was 17.

Five years of court action followed, during which Jamal was arrested and charged with nonpayment of child support for their daughter. (He was later cleared.) He was hospitalized in 1963 after an apparent overdose of sleeping pills. Not until 1964 did he begin touring and recording again.

He married first as a teenager, and that marriage ended in divorce. He married Sharifah Frazier, the mother of Sumayah, in the early 1960s, and they divorced in 1982. He married Laura Hess-Hay, his manager, the same year, and they divorced in 1984, although she continued to represent him until his death. In addition to his daughter, he is survived by two grandchildren.

Last year, Jamal released two separate double-disc collections: “Emerald City Nights: Live at the Penthouse (1963-64)” and “Emerald City Nights: Live at the Penthouse (1965-66),” consisting of previously unreleased live recordings made in Seattle. A third set, “Emerald City Nights: Live at the Penthouse (1966-68),” is planned.

The reverence with which Jamal was held stretched well beyond the jazz world. Clint Eastwood used two tracks from “But Not for Me” on the soundtrack of his film of “The Bridges of Madison County.”

But the more extensive tributes have come from the world of hip-hop. Tracks such as De La Soul’s “Stakes Is High” and Nas’ “The World Is Yours,” along with dozens of other rap songs, have sampled Jamal’s piano riffs.