Legendary American Musician Ahmad Jamal Passes Away at Age 92

Music artist Ahmad Jamal died at the age of 92, this Sunday, April 16 as announced his widow Laura Hess-Hey. He was suffering from prostate cancer according to statements from his daughter at the New York Times.

It was on July 2, 1930 that Ahmad Jamal, born under the name of Frederick Russell Jones, was born in Pittsburgh into an African-American family. He comes from a modest background. It was at the age of 3 that he began to reproduce musical notes on the piano that he heard on the family piano. His career, however, began in the 1940s, but success, meanwhile, was delayed until 1958 when he released his first album entitled Ahmad Jamal at the Pershing : But Not for Me and which remained on the Billboard charts for more than 100 weeks. According to our colleagues from New York Times, it is one of the best-selling instrumental albums of the time. It was in 1952 that he took the name Ahmad Jamal when he converted to Islam. As for his political positions, he has always been discreet about them.

Ahmad Jamal has been awarded several times throughout his career. For example, he won a Grammy Award for his body of work in 2017 and was made a knight of the Order of Arts and Letters of France in 2007.

“I live an exciting life, and when you live an interesting life, you keep discovering. The musicians flourish, build themselves. Some basic things are still there in my music, the melodic sense for example, but the density of sound has changed with age, and the rhythmic part becomes more elaborate“, he told AFP in 2012. His last album, meanwhile, was released in 2019 and was titled Ballads.

Ahmad Jamal influenced other musicians such as Miles Davis and McCoy Tyner.

MM