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Originally Posted by jaduffy007 /img/forum/go_quote.gif
Your name (Tru Blu) reminds me of Tina Brooks' album of the same name. Talk about underrated!
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Nice record, indeed. Not what I was thinking about when I chose the name, but a few more folks could stand to hear Tina. (For some reason, the last couple of days I've been playing his equally obscure labelmate Hank Mobley.) It's really a shame that the list of undervalued jazz cats is so long.
I think the thing about Ahmad Jamal is that his groundbreaking use of space got kind of diminished once others got hold of the idea. Thankfully, Miles Davis
always gave Jamal credit, even though, for obvious reasons, Miles' use of space eclipsed just about everything else. (And if you've read anything about Miles Davis, you know that sometimes he could be weird about giving up credit for stuff.)
Now I'm no jazz-piano scholar, but pianistically speaking, I think someone like Bud Powell was influential in a different, and perhaps broader, way than Jamal, but these days what Powell did is so much in the jazz DNA that his music often doesn't seem as groundbreaking as it actually was, either. Not too long ago I had a somewhat idiosyncratic peek at Jamal's popularity, though: I walked into a local bar that sometimes projects videos, films and whatever else on a screen with the sound down, and some of his concert footage from the early '60s was on the screen big as life. The bartender had on '70s funk or something, but you could see random folks in the hub-bub look up at the projection and tell others who it was: "Oh, that's Ahmad Jamal." It didn't seem like a particularly hip crowd or anything, so at first this really surprised me. Then I kinda figured that once you make the pop charts it's like a cycle; somehow, your name will always kinda be in circulation.
