Ahmad Jamal - First Impressions: Live in Paris [2LP]

Recorded for French radio in 1971 and left in the archive for more than five decades, Ahmad Jamal's First Impressions: Live in Paris finally surfaces as a double LP.

The Pittsburgh pianist played the date at Studio 104, the concert hall inside the Maison de la Radio in Paris, home of the Orchestre National de France. By then Jamal was long established as one of jazz's great architects of space, the player whose light touch and dramatic use of silence had shaped the thinking of Miles Davis back in the fifties.

He arrived with his working trio of the time, bassist Jamil Nasser and drummer Frank Gant, a group that knew each other's every move. The set includes "Poinciana", the tune that made Jamal famous in the late fifties, here stretched and reshaped by musicians who could find something new in it every night.

Expect long, patient builds, sudden bursts of block chords and hushed passages where the trio seems to hold its breath, all captured with the warmth of a fine broadcast recording.

For Jamal devotees, it is a precious new chapter, and for newcomers, a vivid way to hear exactly why so many musicians treated his every pause as a lesson.