Blue Moon (Jazz Village)
Ahmad Jamal
Released February 6, 2012
Grammy Nominee for Best Jazz Instrumental Album 2013
YouTube:
https://music.youtube.com/browse/MPREb_oudtBWucjOG
Spotify:
https://open.spotify.com/album/1mvwOo6yGSNRuPaSE9Yyae?si=UbMoZ3X3SjuuHIaC6-LRhQ
About:
Blue Moon is not just Ahmad Jamal’s latest album, it’s his latest masterpiece, suffused with a feeling reminiscent of his greatest periods with Chess and Impulse! Original compositions of pure majesty, brilliant new interpretations of American legends (the “film noir”, Broadway, the vast open spaces), each of these nine pieces showcases Jamal’s creative reinvention of swing, provides a pretext for some breathtaking melodies and calls on sophisticated
syncopations that will leave you gasping. Accompanied by three impeccable guardians of the tempo, Ahmad Jamal is at the peak of his art. Formerly a highly talented pianist of a type of music known as jazz, he is now the chief apostle of American classical music.
Track Listing:
1. Autumn Rain (Ahmad Jamal) 7:37
2. Blue Moon (Lorenz Hart / Richard Rodgers) 9:55
3. Gypsy (Billy Reid) 5:13
4. Invitation (Bronislaw Kaper) 13:13
5. I Remember Italy (Ahmad Jamal) 13:07
6. Laura (Johnny Mercer / David Raksin) 6:29
7. Morning Mist (Ahmad Jamal) 8:19
8. This Is the Life (Lee Adams / Charles Strouse) 7:08
9. Woody’n You (Dizzy Gillespie) 4:56
Personnel:
Ahmad Jamal: piano
Reginald Veal: double bass
Herlin Riley: drums Manolo Badrena: percussion
Recorded October, 2011, at Avatar Studios, New York, NY
Producer: Ahmad Jamal
Engineer: Todd Winmill
Mixing: Todd Winmill
Mastering: Gavin Lurssen
Executive Producer: Seydou Barry, Catherine Vallon-Barry
Review:
It is tempting to say that, at age 82, Ahmad Jamal
carries on getting better and better, but that would be to miss the point. The
pianist long ago reached a level of perfection from which it is simply not
possible to get better. It is a level, however, to which he habitually
returns. In 2010, Jamal released one of the most sublime albums in his long and
splendid career, the quartet set A Quiet Time (Dreyfus Records). Two
years later, he has released another one every bit as great.
The signature elements of Jamal’s style—elegance, lyricism and sophistication
on one side; vibrant, ostinato-driven grooves and riffs on the other; all
heard, more often than not, during the course of a single tune—are not just
still present on Blue Moon, they are still waxing. So too is Jamal’s gift
for writing arrangements which bring the sound of surprise to even the most
familiar material. To all intents and purposes, Richard Rodgers’ and Lorenzo
Hart’s “Blue Moon” here becomes a Jamal original, and so, among
others, does Dizzy Gillespie’s “Woody’n You.”
For the Blue Moon sessions, Jamal stayed with a quartet but
tweaked A Quiet Time’s personnel. The wonderfully inventive percussionist Manolo
Badrena is retained, but bassist Reginald Vealand drummer Herlin
Riley replace James Cammack and Kenny Washington. Riley and
Badrena have form with Jamal: Riley first came aboard on Live at the Montreal
Jazz Festival 1985(Collectables), and Badrena a year later, on Rossiter
Road (Atlantic, 1986).
These three guardians of the groove interact with each
other, and with Jamal, with micro-sensitivity. They are adept, too, at
following Jamal’s turn-on-a-pinhead arrangements. The quartet moves immaculately
from the liquid to the lusty, from a whisper to a shout and back again, like
birds of paradise in close formation. As Jamal observes in an All About
Jazz 2012 interview, the simpatico between Badrena and Riley makes them an
unusually effective percussionist /drummer team-within-a-team.
While nine of the 11 tunes on A Quiet Time were Jamal originals,
on Blue Moon he returns, in the main, to the arena in which he first
made his name: singular interpretations of Broadway show tunes, songs from the
movies, and jazz standards. Of the Jamal compositions—”Autumn Rain,”
“I Remember Italy,” “Morning Mist,” divine, each of
them—only “Autumn Rain” has previously been recorded,
on Rossiter Road. Jamal has also previously recorded three of the
half-dozen standards: Gillespie’s “Woody’n You” was first heard
on At the Pershing: But Not for Me(Argo, 1958), Bronislan Kaper’s
“Invitation” on Rhapsody (Cadet, 1965), and Johnny
Mercer’s “Laura” as part of a medley on Live in Paris
’92 (Dreyfus). The Blue Moon readings, as you would expect, are
new minted and fresh garbed.
Jamal’s critical acceptance in the mid 1950s was hard won and helped by the
support of trumpeter Miles Davis, who, along with a number of widely
reported endorsements, is said to have told his pianist of the time, Red
Garland, to “play like Jamal.” (True or not, Davis certainly valued
the Jamal-like qualities inherent in Garland’s playing). The then dean of
American critics, The New Yorker’s Whitney Balliett, on the other hand,
reviewing a Carnegie Hall performance in 1958, found listening to Jamal to be
“trying work.”
Balliett was, most of the time, an informed and intelligent critic, and it is
strange that he so totally did not get Jamal. Maybe Balliett had eaten
something earlier that did not agree with him; the historical record can be a
perverse beast. In any event, Jamal’s genius was officially recognized in the
US in 1994, when he was named a Jazz Master by the National Endowment
of the Arts. Many other honors have followed.
Entrancing and uplifting, Blue Moon is destined to make lovers of
Jamal’s pianism go weak at the knees all over again.
Chris May (All About Jazz)
