You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - Solo Analysis: "No Greater Love" - Ahmad Jamal at the Pershing - #3

Episode Date: January 2, 2019

For this week's Solo Analysis Wednesday, Peter and Adam take a listener request and analyze Ahmad Jamal's solo on "No Greater Love" from Ahmad Jamal at the Pershing. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

I'm Adam Manis And I'm Peter Martin And you are listening To the Wednesday edition of the You'll Hear at podcast Daily Jazz Advice and solo analysis And maybe a little arrangement analysis Coming at you

There's so much analysis to be had with this track It is Wednesday That music means that it is solo analysis Wednesday. We have a request here that we're fulfilling for a solo analysis This is a little bit of a We're doing a double-edged sword here where we're answering a user's email

And then we're also doing solo analysis Wednesday. So we're using a double-edged sword in service of one of our listeners, not on one of our listeners, right? No. Okay, good. You got me scared there. We would never do that. We would never stab a listener.

This is... Stab him with information. This is a Mahjimal, live at the Pershing album, and the track is There is No Greater Love, of course. I just want to ask you. I noticed you said Live at the Pershing, because I always think it's Pershing. I think Pershing is a street here in St. Louis,

and that's where you get it confused. But why would it be... It can be several things. Pershing and Pershing. I just didn't know it's different. It's spelled P-E-R-S-H-I-N-G. How would you pronounce that? Pershing.

Jing. So is it spelled different than the street? Is that what you're saying? Well, I think St. Louisans have an odd way of saying every street name. Yeah. Yeah. You know that, what's that big street that goes? Gravoix?

Gravois? Yeah. No, the other one, Highway not 40. Farty? Farty, exactly. Highway 40. That's right. So I don't take, I take any street pronunciation in St. Louis with a grain of salt.

I'm going to call this live at the Pershing. You call it whatever you want. Okay. Let's just call it. Is that the way we're supposed to say it, though? Let's call it how it's supposed to be said. Okay. How's it supposed to be said?

Live at the Pershing. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Yeah. Okay, so we're already, the track's almost over. Okay. You'll hear it. Sorry, that's good.

We argued over the name of the club while, like, there's some of the most incredible trio playing. Maybe we should back it up to that very beginning. Let's back it up. Very beginning. Here we go. Okay, can we stop there? Because he's already, like this is, I think,

some of the greatness of Amad Jamal and his trio arrangement is, his trio arranging in general was his ability to use the trio as its own little kind of architectural tool. So he's got this very simple swinging, very well-executed rhythm. Tap-pap-pah.

Yeah. You know, with just, but instead of just repeating it over and over again, which would be fine, like he's a master of like taking one element out, adding it in. But if you listen to when he does that, like he lets go of that for the piano in the middle of the phrase, I think the second time. And then he totally and just lets the bass and drums.

But like it seems kind of random. But when you get the flow of everything, it's totally brilliant. And it just sets off the architecture of the. So what happens is a lot of people kind of try to steal this like these intros. And I definitely did this for a long time for trio. But if you miss that taking away and adding in and like the logic behind that, you'll miss it. big part of it. If you just sort of bang through it, it's like, wow, I don't I sound like I'm a mod. Why don't I sound like I'm at the Pershing? Taste. It's not like I'm at the Pershing.

I love this way that he plays. It really sounds like, you know, it's two different people, like the chords. And it's just like somebody real simply sort of voicing that. And then the melody is, it's like a horn player playing. I was going to say, this is a great lesson on range. And I've, I've stolen this concept, too, in my own playing, where I'll put the melody up an octave from where you might typically, you know what I mean? Where it's in a standard, like, singable range. You kind of put it, you know, we have all this range up here on the piano.

You know what I mean? That we can easily. No range, no change, like they say in basketball. Dang, right. Here we go. Little spread voicing qualities. Man, and then, look, it's been said many times. Said many ways, but, no, I mean,

Amad Jamal's use of space, you know. And, I mean, obviously, you know, Miles Davis talked about it and took a lot of that. but it's like the patience and like attention to detail and ability to put that space at the right. You know, when you let the bass come in. So strong. Yeah. Let's check out the solo. Segway, segue.

See? Phone rings. All right. I should have let the phrase finish, but why not start with the melody? I know. You know what I mean? It's so strong. He takes it up another octave and cycles through these two ideas.

And like that is such a hard range of the piano, especially like you can tell this is not a primo prepared instrument. It actually sounds like a little bit like a prepared piano. But I mean it's like what a that is such a hard range to like control to control and to be able to like in a very exposed part of the soul like normally we kind of get up there when the drums are kind of thrashing and we can sort of be covered. But I mean he that's a lot of confidence to get in there and start your solo there to be that expressive with it too. It's hard to be expressive up there. I mean there's a lot of precision and it's playing back. Classically executed triplet there. I mean I think he's really Sorry, sorry to talk on top of him No, but it's like he's like the precision of the rhythm And it's not that it's like so locked in And like, I mean it is locked in

But I mean, he's playing with the rhythm too But that's such a big part of the melody Like of his improvisational melodies And shout out to the rhythm section here For just holding it down Oh, blue, hello Melody all day, melody all day Different kinds of melody all day

And when he's not doing the melody on that A section, you know, those first three chords go up in fourth. Yeah. And he's cycling, you know, these ideas through those fourths. This is a great lesson to anybody who is kind of studying this tune is that you can move this around, you know, this A section the way the chords flow because it's, you know, B-flat, B-flat, A-flat, and then G usually. Yep.

And you can hear him do that several times here. Yeah. And those broken octas, I don't know what the technical term for that is. but you know that kind of. Yeah. Is that broken octaves kind of? Yeah, kind of. I mean, that's like such a cool technique to be able,

like this is a real textbook example of it. Yeah. And so it's a simple technique in a way in terms of like what it is, but where he places it in the solo kind of early on and then playing around with the melody and stuff is really textbook and just great execution of that. Let's keep going. Always with the blues too.

Man, the elegance of his line combined with the blues is such a, it's such a seamless and organic combination, you know, the kind of like almost flurries and then into the blues. It's not typical at all, you know. That's great. Check out this bridge. Come back to the same theme of kind of laying off and letting the space. Yeah. The melody. Yeah. What? It's not a 22-minute solo? And he's played the melody at least like five or six times in a solo. It's awesome.

In kind of different ways each time. Yeah. And then the whole theme of it is the intro. Yeah. You know, it's not just like bookends. It's really, it's the theme of the solo. But, you know, we've talked about this before. You know, the idea that you don't have to play every single note possible.

Yeah. Every single bar of every single tune. Yeah. That you can really get stretch information out. So he has this information to the melody. And here he's used it so much throughout the solo that he didn't have to like invent anything great. He just had to, to. you know, figure out clever ways to reintroduce the melody and expand on that with other things thrown in, you know.

And then in that last bridge, he quotes his own arrangement. Yeah. You know? Well, and think about this. Like this is this track and, of course, Porn Sienna from this same live recording. I mean, everything. Boopi, did it did. All this whole record is such a staple and foundation for jazz pianists and often is, like we hear it kind of early on in our career.

somebody like, oh, have you heard like the Pershing? Pershing? Are you saying however you want, bro? I'm not trying to. Got me self-conscious. But I do remember one day I was driving down Pershing Street listening to Live at the Pershing. What? Anyway.

But, you know, we hear this kind of early on in our piano development learning because it's one of those classic recordings. But sometimes we lose sight of like some of the big lessons, like what you just said about, like the melody. And yeah, we know that. but then we move on to these more complex things. And I mean, you know, what a great thing to kind of come back to this is like to use this as a textbook example of, especially for trio playing when you get to the solo. And like he always treated the soloing as being more integrated with the trio and the arrangement, I think, than we often do when we have, you know, like we were talking yesterday about Art Blakey and the jazz messengers and the piano's role there, whatever.

But this with the trio, it's really like a continual solo in terms of the thing. Do ba-bang, bang, bang. That rhythmic theme is what sets us off. And then the melody is always there in some form and then the different ways of playing it and everything. You know, and it's funny, even though he plays the melody so much through the solo, in no point are you bored or wishing he was blowing more or whatever.

Yeah, exactly. It's like so, it's so connected to the heart of the music. Yeah. It's a real lesson. Yeah. Well, thank you for this suggestion. Yep. Michael from New Jersey.

Happy Wednesday. Happy Solo analysis Wednesday. our first of 2019 this is our first solo announcement of 2019 yeah so you can go to you'll hearate.com you can suggest a solo for us to analyze and we're happy to go through it well we're happy if it's good

yeah this is the first one we actually did yeah I mean we're not gonna we haven't gotten bad suggestions I don't know if we've gotten a lot of said oh we have yeah we have that's right so don't make whack one I mean just because there's too many great like we could do this all year and we're gonna do it all year and not get to all the great solos so let's let's let's keep them good.

But what would be cool is if it's one maybe that we didn't know. I mean, this one we know so well because we both listen to it all our lives. Everybody has. What a fun thing to come back to. But we'd love to hear from you guys. We'll do some of those.

We might analyze some solos from that our best seven albums from 2018. Maybe we'll find it. That would be good, actually. Yeah, let's try to do that. Okay. Until then, you'll hear it.