Ahmad Jamal

In October 1973 DownBeat gave Ahmad Jamal '73 two stars and complained about the sugar. The record then went out of print for half a century and got steadily more expensive. This is its first official reissue.

Ahmad Jamal had come off a run of albums for Impulse - The Awakening, Freeflight, Outertimeinnerspace - on which a Fender Rhodes had started to appear next to the Steinway. By his own account he had kept one at home for two years without touching it, until Herbie Hancock sat him down at the instrument during a Sonny Stitt session Jamal was producing. For his debut on 20th Century Records he went back to Chicago and to Richard Evans, the bassist and arranger he knew from the Argo and Cadet years and from Macanudo in 1962. They co-produced, Evans wrote and conducted the orchestra, and Paul Serrano engineered at his P.S. Studios. It remains the only album in Jamal's discography on which he plays no acoustic piano at all.

Side one is the pop of the moment: War's The World Is a Ghetto stretched to nearly ten minutes, the Stylistics' Children of the Night, Stevie Wonder's Superstition. Side two is stranger and better. Orlando Murden's Trilby, the slow-rolling Sustah, Sustah, Soul Girl, and Peace at Last, written by the Chicago bassist Charles Colbert, six minutes of hard funk that the writer Doug Payne calls the funkiest thing Jamal ever did. Around the Rhodes Evans places strings, a soul-band horn section, wah-wah guitar and background voices that sing scraps of the lyrics. The rhythm section has never been identified: the sleeve credits Jamal and Evans and nobody else.

Opinion has always been split. Neil Tesser's DownBeat review heard Muzak, and AllMusic still finds the production overblown. People who love the Fender Rhodes hear one of the great records made on it - Payne files it next to Hancock's Thrust - and DJs and producers have been buying and sampling original copies for decades. Both camps are describing the same thing: a pianist famous for restraint, inside the fullest arrangements of his career, on an instrument he had resisted for years.

The 20th Century albums stayed unavailable for the rest of Jamal's life; Payne, who tried to get them reissued through Universal around 2010, reports that the pianist himself said no. Jamal died in April 2023. Apart from a short-lived unofficial Korean CD, nothing has appeared since the original mid-70s pressings. The Verve Vault edition is all-analog, cut by Ryan K. Smith at Sterling Sound from what the label states are the original master tapes, and pressed on 180-gram vinyl. Two stars in 1973. Time to check the verdict.