Ahmad Jamal was born Frederick Russell Jones in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on July 2, 1930. He began picking out music on the piano at three, when his uncle Lawrence challenged him to repeat what he was playing, and at seven he started formal lessons with Mary Cardwell Dawson, founder of the National Negro Opera Company. By eleven he was entering competitions with Liszt etudes. He grew up in the Pittsburgh scene of Earl Hines, Billy Strayhorn, Mary Lou Williams and Erroll Garner, studied with the pianist James Miller, and was working professionally at fourteen, when Art Tatum is said to have marked him as a coming great. After graduating from George Westinghouse High School in 1948 he toured with George Hudson's orchestra and then joined the violinist Joe Kennedy Jr.'s Four Strings, which broke up when Kennedy left.

He moved to Chicago in 1950, played with Von Freeman and Claude McLin, and worked solo at the Palm Tavern. He had become interested in Islam through the Muslim community in Detroit and converted in 1950, taking the name Ahmad Jamal. His first records, made in 1951 for Okeh, were by the Three Strings, later billed as the Ahmad Jamal Trio, although he disliked the word trio: Jamal on piano, Ray Crawford on guitar, and a bassist who was Eddie Calhoun from 1950 to 1952, Richard Davis in 1953 and 1954, and Israel Crosby from 1954 to 1962. The group became known after an engagement at the Embers in New York, where the producer John Hammond heard it and signed it to Okeh. Jamal recorded for Parrot from 1953 to 1955, including Ahmad Jamal Plays on May 23, 1955, and for Epic in 1955, all with the piano, guitar and bass lineup. His first album with a drummer, Count 'Em 88 (1956, Argo), added Walter Perkins and included his influential treatment of "On Green Dolphin Street."

In 1957 Vernel Fournier took over from Crawford, and the trio became the house band at the lounge of Chicago's Pershing Hotel. On January 16, 1958, every set of the night was taped; Jamal chose eight of the 43 tracks for At the Pershing: But Not for Me (Argo, LP-628), his first live album. It stayed on Billboard's album chart for about two years, carried his eight-minute reading of "Poinciana" onto jukeboxes and dance floors, and was credited by the National Endowment for the Arts, in its 1994 listing, with sales of more than a million copies. Miles Davis was among the musicians who took notice: he praised Jamal's sense of rhythm, space and understatement, became a friend in the 1950s, and is reported to have sent his own sidemen to hear the trio. Davis's quintet album Workin' carries Jamal's "Ahmad's Blues," played by the rhythm section alone, and Milestones (1958) uses Jamal's arrangement of "Billy Boy." The record's earnings let Jamal open a Chicago club and restaurant, the Alhambra, which lasted about a year; the trio recorded two albums there in June 1961. The Jamal, Crosby and Fournier trio made its last record at the Blackhawk in San Francisco on January 31 and February 1, 1962, and Crosby's death that August ended it. Jamal made Macanudo with an orchestra conducted by Richard Evans in December 1962 and then stepped back from performing until 1964.

He returned in 1964, living in New York and holding a residency at the Village Gate. A new run of trio albums began with Naked City Theme, recorded live at San Francisco's Jazz Workshop in June 1964, with the bassist Jamil Nasser, who stayed until 1972. Fournier returned for 1965 and 1966, and from 1966 into the 1970s the drummer was Frank Gant. After records for Argo and its Cadet imprint he signed with Impulse!, which issued the Village Gate set Ahmad Jamal at the Top: Poinciana Revisited and then The Awakening (February 1970), the last of his albums for a time on which he played only acoustic piano; Freeflight and Outertimeinnerspace came from his 1971 Montreux Jazz Festival concert. In the 1970s he also played electric piano, notably on the instrumental version of "Suicide Is Painless," the theme of the 1970 film M*A*S*H, and recorded for 20th Century and, in 1980, Motown. He played New Year's Eve at Blues Alley in Washington, D.C., from 1979 into the 1990s, and in January 1981 recorded a concert in Cannes on which the vibraphonist Gary Burton joined his trio for some tracks.

On Atlantic in the 1980s he made Digital Works (1985), Rossiter Road (1986), Crystal (1987) and Pittsburgh (1989), albums that AllMusic describes as a return to his classic acoustic small-group sound. In 1994 the National Endowment for the Arts named him an American Jazz Master. His Telarc albums Chicago Revisited and I Remember Duke, Hoagy & Strayhorn were followed by the Birdology albums The Essence Parts 1, 2 and 3 (1995 to 1998), recorded with the drummer Idris Muhammad, bassist James Cammack and percussionist Manolo Badrena, with George Coleman on tenor saxophone for two tracks of Part 1 and Stanley Turrentine on one track of Part 3. A series of studio and live albums followed for Dreyfus and then Jazz Village, including In Search of Momentum (2003), After Fajr (2005), It's Magic (2008), A Quiet Time (2009, with the drummer Kenny Washington), Blue Moon (2012, nominated for the Grammy for Best Jazz Instrumental Album), Saturday Morning (2013), a live album with Yusef Lateef recorded at the Olympia in Paris on June 27, 2012, and Marseille (2017). He received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2017, and Ballades (2019), mostly solo piano, was the last album of new material released in his lifetime. He mentored the pianists Hiromi Uehara and Shahin Novrasli.

Jamal was married and divorced three times. He passed away on April 16, 2023, at his home in Ashley Falls, Massachusetts, of complications from prostate cancer, at the age of 92. Archival releases include the Seattle Penthouse concerts issued as the Emerald City Nights series in 2022 and 2023, and a 1976 Chicago trio concert, At the Jazz Showcase, released in April 2026.

Jamal built his music on space, dynamics and abrupt changes of density rather than on speed. Trained in both jazz and European classical piano, and influenced by Erroll Garner, Art Tatum and Nat King Cole as well as by big-band and orchestral writing, he treated the piano trio as an orchestrated ensemble, working riffs, vamps and ostinatos into the improvisation and giving the bass and drums equal weight. In the 1950s some critics dismissed him as a cocktail pianist; Bill Evans, who rejected that label in a 1960 interview, and Miles Davis, who prized his lightness of touch, heard something harder, and the critic Stanley Crouch ranked him among the innovators of postwar jazz. By the time of his 1985 session for Marian McPartland's radio program he said about ninety percent of his repertoire was his own composition. Pianists who have named his example include Shirley Horn, who called him her Debussy according to her profile, Fred Hersch and Benny Green.