2023 reissue as part of the Verve By Request series, 180g vinyl & gatefold jacket - Heralded by Miles Davis, sampled by both Nas and Gang Starr, the great pianist’s 1970 album is alive with a buoyancy and jubilance that went overlooked in its day.
Miles Davis was a great admirer and defender of the pianist Ahmad Jamal, who in the 1950s was not taken seriously by some jazz critics. But the sublime ear of Miles instead recognized a light, exquisite touch, one of varied complexity despite Jamal’s commercial success.
“I loved his lyricism on piano, the way he played, and the spacing he used in the ensemble voicings of his groups,” Miles wrote in 1989. “ I have always thought Ahmad Jamal was a great piano player who never got the recognition he deserved.”
That recognition would eventually come, and Jamal’s stature has only grown over the decades. The Awakening, recently reissued on vinyl by Be With Records, is a fine example of Jamal’s stately—and understated—elegance punctuated with doodles of whimsy. The album, recorded in early February 1970, is made up of two Jamal originals, a standard, and pieces by Antonio Carlos Jobim, Oliver Nelson, and Herbie Hancock, a pianist of similar disposition who Miles famously hired in his “Second Great Quintet.”
In Michael Jarrett’s new book, Pressed For All Time, Ed Michel, who produced the original album for Impulse!, remembers that “Jamal absolutely knew what he wanted to record….We were recording during Ramadan. He was fasting during the day, until sunset. The only real condition was, he said, ‘At six fifteen, we’ve got to take a break. You’ve got to tell us precisely. We’re all hungry.’”
The “we” Jamal is likely referring to is his working trio at the time, the drummer Frank Gant and bassist Jamil Nasser, who sounds especially inspired on this outing. Hip-hop was still years away, but by the 1980s, MCs would begin sampling Jamal extensively—The Awakening in particular. The compelling Jamal-penned title track, for instance, turned up in Gang Starr’s 1989 “DJ Premier In Deep Concentration” and in Shadez Of Brooklyn’s “Change.” The following track, “I Love Music” (written by Hale Smith and Emil Boyd), is almost a total solo performance for Jamal. It ended up on a classic recording of a different kind, nearly a quarter-century later, Illmatic, where Nas, intimately connected with the jazz idiom, and producer Pete Rock used Jamal’s lush interpretation on “The World Is Yours.” When the esteemed jazz critic Leonard Feather—of whom Miles also approved—wrote in The Awakening’s original liner notes that “Ahmad Jamal is one of the most pianistic of pianists,” it’s especially resonant here.
| A1 | The Awakening |
| A2 | I Love Music |
| A3 | Patterns |
| B1 | Dolphin Dance |
| B2 | You're My Everything |
| B3 | Stolen Moments |
| B4 | Wave |
