The University Library System has acquired the archive of Pittsburgh native Ahmad Jamal, a  renowned jazz pianist and composer who died last year.

Jamal was received an American Jazz Masters award from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1994 and a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2017. He was cited as a significant influence by jazz legend Miles Davis.

Born in 1930, Jamal began playing piano at age 3, attended Westinghouse High School and played piano in the “K-Dets,” one of the first high school jazz orchestras in the country.

His big break came in 1958 when his album “At the Pershing” became a surprising smash hit, selling a million copies and staying on the Billboard charts for 108 weeks. His performance of 1930s jazz standard “Poinciana” on the album has become the definitive recording of the song. His trio became one of the most popular jazz performing acts of the 1950s and 1960s.

While Jamal continued to record and tour the world throughout the latter part of the 20th century, he never forgot his hometown. In 1989, he released an album called simply “Pittsburgh,” which he described as “a tribute to my beloved hometown.”

Jamal’s music took on a curious revival in the 1990s and the 2000s when his performances were sampled hundreds of times by hip hop artists, including The Game, De La Soul, Nas, Jay-Z, and Common. Jamal released his last album, the solo and duo album “Ballades,” in 2019.

The Ahmad Jamal Archive will join other notable jazz collections held at Pitt, including that of pianist Erroll Garner, a fellow Westinghouse alum and one of the artists Jamal said was an inspiration to him; pianist Dave Burrell, and saxophonist Sam Rivers, who never played with Jamal but was his contemporary.

“There could be no better home for my father’s collection than the University of Pittsburgh,” Sumayah Jamal said in an announcement on the University Library System website. “I know that he would have been thrilled to have his collection back home, alongside that of his friend and major influence, Erroll Garner.”

The collection contains hundreds of manuscript scores and compositions in Jamal’s hand, photographs, posters and publicity material, honorary degrees, audio recordings, notebooks, correspondence, scrapbooks, news clippings, and awards, including his NEA Jazz Master.