Berkshire Theatre Group Presents Ahmad Jamal at the Colonial, 3/31

Jazz legend, Ahmad Jamal, will be celebrating the release of his newest CD, Blue Moon, at The Colonial Theatre on March 31 at 8pm. Listening to this true-blue American Jazz master is sure to make the audience stand up and listen hard. 

Tickets to Ahmad Jamal are $15–$50. Tickets may be purchased in person at The Colonial Theatre Ticket Office at 111 South Street Pittsfield, MA 01201 or by calling (413) 997-4444 or online at www.BerkshireTheatreGroup.org. The Ticket Office is open Monday-Friday 10am–5pm, Saturdays 10am–2pm or on any performance day from 10am until intermission. 

Celebrated pianist-composer Ahmad Jamal continues his performance schedule around the world, as he has for well over the last four decades. Noted for his outstanding technical command and identifiable sound as a piano stylist, Mr. Jamal considers his ensemble "an orchestra." Jamal not only achieves a unified sound, but subtly inserts independent roles for the bass and drums. 

The hallmarks of Jamal's style are rhythmic innovations, colorful harmonic perceptions, especially left hand harmonic and melodic figures, plus parallel and contrary motion lines in and out of chordal substitutions and alterations and pedal point ostinato interludes in tasteful dynamics. He also incorporates a unique sense of space in his music, and his musical concepts are exciting without being loud in volume. Augmented by a selection of unusual standards and his own compositions, Jamal notably impressed and influenced, among others, trumpeter MiLes Davis.

In 1994, Jamal received the American Jazz Masters fellowship award from the National Endowment for the Arts. That same year he was named a Duke Ellington Fellow at Yale University, where he performed commissioned works with the Assai String Quartet. In 2007 the French Government inducted Mr. Jamal into the prestigious Order of the Arts and Letters by French Culture Minister Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres, naming him Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. In December of 2011 Mr. Jamal was awarded with DownBeat’s 76th Reader’s Poll Hall of Fame.

Mr. Jamal’s previous recording A Quiet Time (Dreyfus Records), released in January 2010, was the number #1 CD on jazz radio for the year 2010 and continues to soar. Also this year the French Jazz Academy has voted "The Complete Ahmad Jamal Trio Argo Sessions 1956-1962" released by Mosaïc as the "Best reissue of the year with outstanding research work." His music remains, youthful, fresh, imaginative and always influential.

For more information, visit www.BerkshireTheatreGroup.org

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