Word: jamal
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Chief delegate for the Middle East will be Jamal S'ad of the United Arab Republic, present head of the Arab Information Service in Washington. Other speakers from the area will include a Lebanese businessman, a Syrian professor of Economics at Beirut University, and an Iranian economists. Raden Sanoeisi, a former chief of the Indonesian Directorate, will head the Southeast Asian delegation...
...Ramsey Lewis Trio, a Chicago group fashioned after the Ahmad Jamal Trio (which got top festival billing, but favored too many innovations at the expense of recognizable jazz). The trio played its progressive music with such style that it was the second night's biggest...
Ahmad's five Argo albums have sold well, and one of his most recent, Jamal at the Pershing, was for months the top jazz LP in the country. For club engagements Ahmad now gets a top fee of $3,000 per week. Appearing last week at Indiana's French Lick Jazz Festival, he was at the top of his inventive form. A master of the dramatic effects of silence, he sometimes sits for as much as 16 bars without touching a key ("A pattern," he points out, "can be completed in space"). He rarely repeats himself...
...Pianist Jamal was born plain Fritz Jones 29 years ago in Pittsburgh. He changed his name legally in 1950, after he became a Moslem. Says he mystically: "When my people were brought over here from Asia and Africa, they were given various names, such as Jones and Smith. I haven't adopted a name. It's a part of my ancestral background and heritage: I have re-established my original name. I have gone back to my own vine and fig tree...
...Jamal studied piano privately, was sitting in with touring jazz groups as a sideman by the time he was eleven, had his own trio when he was 21. He has since composed (Seleritus, Ahmad's Blues) as well as performed. He did not develop his distinctively understated style until after his conversion, which, he feels, gave him the necessary "inner peace of mind" to play as he does...