Miles Davis sent his band to study Ahmad Jamal. We did the same.

Miles Davis told his pianist Red Garland to sound more like Ahmad Jamal, and sent his entire rhythm section to sit in a Chicago club and study how the trio used space and silence.

Ahmad Jamal was born Frederick Russell Jones in Pittsburgh in 1930. Playing piano at three. Studying competition etudes at eleven. Gigging professionally at fourteen. Art Tatum heard him as a teenager and called him a coming great.

By 1950 he had converted to Islam and taken the name Ahmad Jamal. When asked why he changed his name he said, I haven't adopted a name, I have re-established my original name.

Here is the part that gets me. Jamal's whole philosophy was about what you don't play. Miles wrote in his autobiography that Jamal knocked him out with his concept of space, his lightness of touch, his understatement. Stanley Crouch wrote that no single artist after Charlie Parker has been more important to the development of fresh form in jazz.

And yet most people outside of crate diggers and producers have never sat with his music.

February 2nd and 3rd, 1970. Plaza Sound Studios, New York. Jamil Nasser on bass, Frank Gant on drums. They were recording during Ramadan. Jamal was fasting. Producer Ed Michel remembered him saying at six fifteen we have got to take a break, we are all hungry. Between those breaks they recorded seven tracks in two days.

I Love Music is four minutes of solo piano before the trio enters. Pete Rock heard those bars and built Nas' The World Is Yours from them. Dolphin Dance reimagines Herbie Hancock. Stolen Moments reimagines Oliver Nelson. Wave reimagines Jobim. Forty minutes of a trio breathing together.

Ahmad Jamal died April 16, 2023 at 92. When he passed, this was the record everyone posted.

We put it on, and found out why.