But Not for Me

Jamal takes a Gershwin standard and refuses to play it straight. His approach is almost mischievous — fragmenting the melody, interrupting himself mid-phrase with dramatic pauses, varying the tempo with a freedom that could only be called conversational. The emotional content of the original lyric (a song about unrequited love, about being kept from happiness by circumstance) is honored in a sideways fashion: you feel the wistfulness without being told to feel it. The trio interaction here is extraordinarily tight, each player listening with exceptional sensitivity, ready to respond to any sudden change in direction. What makes Jamal's version distinctive against the hundreds of recorded interpretations of this standard is its wit — there's a lightness, an awareness of its own artifice, that keeps the sentiment from becoming sentimental. The original Gershwin harmony is navigated with sophistication, Jamal finding surprising chord substitutions that feel inevitable once heard. This is one of those recordings that rewards repeated listening precisely because the spontaneity of the performance becomes more impressive the more familiar you are with the material. It belongs on a Sunday morning playlist, at a volume low enough to work against rather than over, the music existing as a kind of benign presence rather than a foreground event.