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Ahmad Jamal featuring Yusef Lateef Live at the Olympia: June 27, 2012: The Music of the Complete Concert
Ahmad Jamal (born Frederick Russell Jones, July 2, 1930) is an American jazz pianist, composer, group leader, and educator. For five decades, he has been one of the most successful small-group leaders in jazz
Track Listing: CD1: Autumn Rain; Blue Moon; The Gypsy; Invitation; I Remember Italy; Laura; Morning Mist; This is the Life. CD2: Exatogi; Masara; Trouble in Mind; Brother Hold Your Light; Blue Moon (reprise); Poinciana.
Personnel: Ahmad Jamal: piano; Reginald Veal: double bass; Herlin Riley: drums; Yusef Lateef: tenor saxophone, flute, vocals.
Record Label: Jazz Village
The ways the former chart-topping pianist Ahmad Jamal develops variations on a song stick closely to a trusted and popular script: start with a catchy unrelated hook, slip the tune in stealthily, jam on it, swap licks with the drummers, come back to the hook. That script regularly surfaces on this set, which devotes a disc to each half of the octogenarian's 2012 L'Olympia concert, plus a complete video DVD. The first set features the current Jamal quartet on originals – like the dreamy I Remember Italy and standards including a discreetly romantic Laura – and a dynamically funky This Is the Life, full of spirited exchanges with percussionist Manolo Badrena. The second half introduces pioneering world-jazz reeds-player Yusef Lateef, 18 months before his death, and respect for the honoured guest is palpable on the less coquettish character of the grooves. Lateef adds divertingly grumpy tenor-sax blurts and slithers to the quirky Exatogi, and quavery flute to the riffy Masara. But it's his passionate, yodelly vocal implorings and abstract flute effects on the gospel-steeped Brother Hold Your Light that gives this set a special character, less urbane than usual for Jamal. His 1950s pop hit Poinciana makes an obligatory, and rapturously received, appearance at the end