Ahmad Jamal & Yusef Lateef: Live at the Olympia review – Paris goes wild

Two CDs and a DVD capture this concert before a packed and wildly enthusiastic Paris audience. Jamal, then approaching his 82nd birthday, is as adventurous and surprising as ever. A great pianist and one of the true pioneers of modernism in jazz, he creates formidable structures that grow like plants from the tiniest melodic seeds. Yusef Lateef, playing various flutes, saxophones etc, joins Jamal's quartet for the second set. His solos are long and rather disjointed, but Jamal keeps it all together with a few discreet touches. This may be Lateef's last recording; he died the following year.