PITTSBURGH — Ahmad Jamal bolted out of Pittsburgh at 17 with his cap and gown practically flying in the breeze, but you can't say he never looked back.
The legendary jazz pianist, who died Sunday at 92 at his home in Ashley Falls, Massachusetts, from complications of prostate cancer, maintained a fondness for the city where he was born and raised — even naming a 1992 album simply "Pittsburgh."
Jamal, whose childhood nickname was Fritz, was born into a Baptist family, the son of a domestic worker mom and steelworker father. Spurred on by his Uncle Charlie, he began playing piano by the age of 3. By 7, he was training with Mary Cardwell Dawson, a North Carolina native who studied music at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston and who was running the Cardwell Dawson School of Music in Homewood.
His musical interests stretched beyond jazz to such classical composers as Ravel and Debussy. His studies continued at Westinghouse High School, where he was a few years behind Pittsburgh legends Billy Strayhorn and Erroll Garner.
By 14, he was playing professionally in Pittsburgh union halls and nightclubs. "I'd do algebra during intermission, between sets," he told Down Beat magazine. Pianist Art Tatum declared the teenage Jamal "a coming great."
Right out of high school, in the summer of 1948, he began touring with George Hudson's Orchestra, led by the Mississippi native and another Westinghouse alumnus. Jamal went on tour with The Four Strings and in 1950 settled in Chicago, where he converted to Islam and took a Muslim name.
He began recording for the Okeh label in 1951 with guitar-bass-piano trio The Three Strings and had his breakout success in 1958 with "At the Pershing: But Not for Me," which was recorded in Chicago. Buoyed by the track "Poinciana," it stayed in the top 10 of the jazz charts for 108 weeks.
Over the next few years, he launched a nightclub (alcohol free) and other Chicago businesses, all of which were fleeting.
"My business did not fail, financially," he told the Pittsburgh Courier in 1962, upon his move to New York and a divorce. "I just walked away from it. I was just trying to do too many things at once: playing music, running a nightclub and directing my other businesses." He went on to say that he was bad at delegating, adding, "Now I realize hard work does not mean doing everything by yourself."
Back in full recording and touring mode, Jamal came home in June 1965 for the biggest Pittsburgh concert performance of his career. He played the Pittsburgh Jazz Festival at the Civic Arena on a bill with Dave Brubeck, Dizzy Gillespie, Muddy Waters and Woody Herman.
In the '70s and early '80s, he returned to play a few more modest venues, including the Encore in Shadyside, Daq's Lounge at the Pittsburgh Hyatt, and Harper's, the club run by fellow pianist Walt Harper at One Oxford Centre.
In August 1986, he was part of a stunning Pittsburgh Jazz Festival bill at Heinz Hall with fellow Pittsburgh legend Billy Eckstine and the Count Basie Orchestra.
From there, he began a decades-long association with the Manchester Craftsmen's Guild, which would present him on five different occasions, most recently in 2013.
More than just a performer for the MCG, he was a friend.
"When we started in 1987-88," says Marty Ashby, vice president and executive producer of MCG Jazz, "he came here to visit, he was in town playing Walt Harper's club. And he came over with Nelson Harrison and Monty Alexander and toured the building with Bill Strickland and I, and he was very impressed with what we were doing. We'd only been up for maybe six or eight months and he said, 'What can I do to help?'
"And we said, 'Well, we have to rent a piano every time we do a concert,' and we'd had Billy Taylor and Donald Byrd and Kenny Burrell by then. He said, 'Well, I'm a Steinway rep and a Steinway artist, meet me in New York on this date.'"
So they flew up to New York and met at Steinway headquarters on 57th Street, where seven of their finest pianos were on display for them.
"We walked in and Ahmad came in about five minutes later," Ashby says. "He touched a few of the pianos and he said, 'These aren't tuned well enough, let's go to lunch.' So we had lunch around the corner, came back about two hours later and then he sat down and played the pianos. And it was a monumental experience to just hear Ahmad playing these seven pianos. He narrowed it down to three very quickly, and he got to the last two and I remember he looked up and he said, 'Which one, Marty?'"
In '88, he came back to Pittsburgh for his MCG debut to play the one they chose, the one they found to be "open and consistent," Ashby says.
A year later, he released "Pittsburgh," an eight-song tribute to his hometown with arranger Richard Evans led by a brassy, elegant title track that sounds almost like a James Bond theme.
MCG has a new piano now, and the original Steinway is on loan at Point Park University with a list of some of the legends who played it.
The 2010 concert for MCG was a sold-out event at the Byham, where the pianist, at 79, did the first half with a quartet and the second with the Pittsburgh Jazz Orchestra.
"He had come out with the thing he did at Lincoln Center, and it was for jazz orchestra and Ahmad," Ashby says. "We got all those charts and we played that music at the Byham Theater, sold out, and it was fantastic. He'd only played that music one other time, with Jazz at Lincoln Center."
In its obit, Variety stated that Jamal inspired such jazz giants as McCoy Tyner, Herbie Hancock, Bill Charlap and Miles Davis, who, in his 1989 autobiography, "Miles," noted that Jamal "knocked me out with his concept of space, his lightness of touch, his understatement, and the way he phrases notes and chords and passages."
"I first heard Ahmad when I was 13 or 14 years old," says longtime Pittsburgh jazz pianist Max Leake. "My older sister had been given an album that Ahmad released called 'Tranquility' by her boyfriend. She really didn't listen to it. I wore the grooves off of it. I was heavily influenced by that album. Ahmad to me was unique because of the range of dynamics and emotions that he played with."
"I think his voice in jazz is one that changed the music," Ashby says. "You hear every pianist have a little Ahmad Jamal in them, just like every bassist has a little Ray Brown, every saxophone player has a little Stanley Turentine. And all these Pittsburghers, Ahmad being right up with all of them, had a voice that changed jazz forever. It's an honor to have spent as much time as I did with him."
