Ahmad Jamal - Saturday Morning (JAZZ VILLAGE 2013)

"Jamal has always been unpredictable; it's part of his charm, and at 83 he's as wayward as ever. Embarking on Duke Ellington's I Got it Bad, he finds snatches of other tunes by Duke keep occurring to him, so he stitches them into the fabric of his improvisation. Mischievous and imperious by turns, his piano playing is so packed with ideas and sudden changes of direction that you take for granted the remarkable technique that makes all this invention possible. Because there's no one like him, he's immune to fashion and thus always up to date. We're lucky to have him."  Dave Gelly/The Observer

Following on from Blue Moon, Ahmad Jamal and his dream team are back with a joyful album made up of the kind of ballads to which only he holds the key. Each one is a moment of grace, shining like a star in the sky of American Classical Music it also features one wonderful Duke Ellington cover and a tribute to Horace Silver. With his light-fingered but rhythmic style, he sends us into a sensuous trance and leads us to a musical climax: a sound which is pure groove. 'At 82, he was in tremendous form, winning standing ovations from a packed house with an elite quartet that embodied the classic Jamal virtues - rejecting jazz formulas and cliches to create infinite textures and possibilities, spontaneous compositions at once visceral and playful, witty and swinging. It was like the emancipation of the groove, the essence of jazz reclaimed by Jamal's intellect, virtuosity and imagination, as piece after piece left the audience enraptured.' Geoffrey Smith, BBC Music Magazine