On May 4th, 2024, Jamael Dean sat at the bench of a grand piano at 2220 Arts + Archives in Los Angeles. He didn’t know what he’d play until his fingers struck the ivory. For the next hour the prodigious jazz talent improvised a solo piano set, seamlessly weaving together original compositions, improvisations, and his reconstructions of jazz standards. Oriki Duuru, which means “piano poems” in Yoruba, is an unabridged recording of what unfolded that night.
Jamael’s concert at 2220 was curated by jazz archivist Harmony Holiday, who also wrote the liner notes for this record. Holiday places Jamael amongst “the greatest jazz pianists of all time,” both an heir to a musical tradition and defiant innovator unbound by expectations. This characterization is fitting for Oriki Duuru, which traces a line between Jamael’s own work and the music of his predecessors, creating cohesion between an archive going back eighty years and the present.
