Review of Ahmad Jamal : Olympia 2000/Live in Paris 1992
In 2001, Dreyfus Jazz issued the Olympia 2000 album on which Jamal joined forces with saxophonist George Coleman. The album, recorded in celebration of Ahmad's 70th birthday, was well received by critics and quickly became a popular favorite with fans. It is paired, for this new set, with the wonderfully unique Live in Paris 1992 album, featuring a different repertoire and sound (with his long time cohort James Cammack on bass guitar rather than upright).

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Your latest reviews - Ahmad Jamal : A unique take on the piano trio
I got into Jamal backwards, starting from his recent discs with the James Cammack/Idris Muhammad trio & working backwords. This one's from 1970, & already shows Jamal moving towards the maximalist style of his recent work. He's a "thematic" improvisor in a way that's not really in the mainstream of jazz, where improvisation tends to focus on developing new melodies out of the basic chords of a tune. Jamal's in the company of Thelonious Monk & Art Tatum in that he often simply plays the tune over & over, with the interest coming in the differences of decoration, emphasis, harmony, mood & tempo. These can be quite striking: witness for example the way that he stretches out "You're My Everything" here, & then when he launches into the solo he gives it a sour twist with some altered, minor-key chords. He's an underrated composer (here, two tunes, both of them the liveliest, funkiest moments on the album: "The Awakening" and "Patterns"); & he always picks interesting repertoire: Oliver Nelson's "Stolen Moments" is given one of the few readings worthy of the original recording (I love Jamal's opening chorus, which is all dark bar-long chords), Herbie Hancock's "Dolphin Dance", Emil Boyd's "I Love Music" (which is virtually a solo piece, with the bassist & drummer coming in just at the end; this is the only version of the tune I've heard outside of Joe Lovano's several recordings of it, & I think Jamal does a better job); Jobim's "Wave", not an obscure tune by any means but not one of the Jobim tunes that's been done to death either: Jamal gives it a dark 1970s funk intro with a little Baroque twist at one point. Above all, I like how Jamal (one of the first players to explore modal jazz) responds to the music of younger, modally-inclined musicians like Hancock & Tyner, & works it all back into his own idiosyncratic style. An excellent disc, one of my favourite of recent Impulse reissues. -- Now I just wish the other record companies would get around to reissuing Jamal's early stuff properly, rather than truncating the original releases of his 1950s work to squeeze it to CD-length......