Nathan Lean

How Islam Inspired the Music of the Late Jazz Legend Ahmad Jamal

Ahmad Jamal’s style was so formative to the development of jazz that Miles Davis once revealed that the Pittsburgh-born pianist, who died in April 2023 at the age of 92, was the source of all his inspiration. Thrumming below his success, though, was a distinctive part of his identity that is often treated as biographical trivia rather than a meaningful insight about art: his conversion to Islam.