BBC News...
Acclaimed jazz pianist, composer and band leader Ahmad Jamal has died aged 92, his wife has said.
The cause was prostate cancer, his daughter Sumayah Jamal told the New York Times.
Ahmad Jamal was a lifelong friend of jazz icon Miles Davis and influenced a generation of musicians.
He was know for a sparse playing style - often placing silence between notes - and critics hailed his "less is more dynamics".
Jamal, who called jazz "American classical music", said during his life that he liked to honour what he described as the spaces in the music.
He started his seven-decade jazz career as a teenager in the bebop age of virtuosic showmanship - but his style evolved rapidly.
His laid-back approach quickly became influential and commercial success followed with his 1958 album At the Pershing: But Not for Me - one of the best-selling instrumental records of its time.
In a piece written last year to mark the release of some of his unissued recordings, the magazine the New Yorker wrote that in the 1950s, "his musical concept was one of the great innovations of the time, even if its spare, audacious originality was lost on many listeners".
Jamal's life long friend, the trumpeter Miles Davis, once said: "All my inspiration comes from Ahmad Jamal"...
"The Awakening" album on Impulse! is the one that converted me. A superb trio recording.
http://youtu.be/L34b0ut8Loc
RIP
Acclaimed jazz pianist, composer and band leader Ahmad Jamal has died aged 92, his wife has said.
The cause was prostate cancer, his daughter Sumayah Jamal told the New York Times.
Ahmad Jamal was a lifelong friend of jazz icon Miles Davis and influenced a generation of musicians.
He was know for a sparse playing style - often placing silence between notes - and critics hailed his "less is more dynamics".
Jamal, who called jazz "American classical music", said during his life that he liked to honour what he described as the spaces in the music.
He started his seven-decade jazz career as a teenager in the bebop age of virtuosic showmanship - but his style evolved rapidly.
His laid-back approach quickly became influential and commercial success followed with his 1958 album At the Pershing: But Not for Me - one of the best-selling instrumental records of its time.
In a piece written last year to mark the release of some of his unissued recordings, the magazine the New Yorker wrote that in the 1950s, "his musical concept was one of the great innovations of the time, even if its spare, audacious originality was lost on many listeners".
Jamal's life long friend, the trumpeter Miles Davis, once said: "All my inspiration comes from Ahmad Jamal"...
"The Awakening" album on Impulse! is the one that converted me. A superb trio recording.
http://youtu.be/L34b0ut8Loc
RIP
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