Jamal’s music with his trio — and then, in later years, a quartet with a hand percussionist added to the mix — reaches into a deep reserve of Black rhythmic practices, even as he wears the influence of Romantic piano music on his sleeve. In the process, as far back as the early 1950s he was sounding out grooves and feelings that would not catch on broadly until years later.
Plenty has been made of his influence on Miles Davis, who declared Jamal his favorite piano player. But it goes beyond that. Before James Brown had helped invent funk, Jamal was rearranging the organization of time in jazz, adding a heavier emphasis on the downbeat — like Brown eventually would — and syncopating the heck out of the rest of the measure, as an Afro-Cuban musician might.
“I think when he was creating those grooves that became iconic, he was finding another way: It left funk music, it left soul music, it left jazz,” said the pianist Jason Moran, who as the Kennedy Center’s artistic director for jazz has presented Jamal multiple times in recent years. “He was phrasing for the future. He wasn’t just phrasing for the ’60s, he was phrasing for the ’90s.”
“There are things that occur in your sound that you’ll never be able to trace, because they go too far back. And I feel like he is totally aware of that ancestral rhythmic connection,” Moran said. “Ahmad on the piano is one of the rare ones that figured out that sensibility that was gluing together so many decades, in the past and the future.”
It’s little wonder that he became one of the most sampled musicians in hip-hop history. Jamal’s piano phrasing haunts iconic tracks like Nas’s“The World Is Yours”(the producer Pete Rock sampled his“I Love Music,”from 1970) and De La Soul’s“Stakes Is High”(J Dilla plucked a few bars from Jamal’s“Swahililand,”from 1974).
