Latest Release
- JUL 12, 2024
- 6 Songs
- Moanin' (Remastered) · 1958
- Jazz Messengers · 1961
- Moanin' · 1958
- Caravan (Original Jazz Classics Series / Remastered 2024) · 1962
- Late Night Art Blakey · 1954
- Just Coolin' · 2020
- Moanin' (Remastered) · 1958
- A Night In Tunisia · 1960
- Moanin' (Remastered) · 1958
- The Big Beat (Remastered) · 1960
Essential Albums
- Art Blakey's career-long zeal for showcasing young musicians reached its pinnacle on this powerful hard-bop masterpiece: Wayne Shorter (saxophone), Bobby Timmons (piano), and Lee Morgan (trumpet) were all dazzling 20-somethings when this 1960 release was recorded. Tunisia opens with a bang: One feverish solo follows another during an extended scramble with Dizzy Gillespie's then-exotic title tune. The rest—including "Sincerely Diana," the bluesy "So Tired," and the closing standard "When Your Lover Has Gone"—feels like a cool, refreshing breeze in comparison.
- In the latter half of the '50s, drummer Art Blakey seemed to be searching for a certain sound and mood. He’d taken full control of the Jazz Messengers—a proving ground for immensely talented young guns who would become some of jazz's biggest names—in 1956, a few years after he co-founded the group with pianist Horace Silver. The magic that that mentorship promised was there from the start, as was Blakey’s general musical vision: The Messengers’ 1957 album Hard Bop, which featured Jackie McLean on alto sax, presented a fusion of bebop, gospel, and funk in distinct contrast to the austere cool jazz of Dave Brubeck. But Blakey wanted an even stronger emphasis on jazz’s roots in the blues and the church. And by 1958, Blakey had found the right sidemen for the job: trumpeter Lee Morgan, saxophonist Benny Golson, pianist Bobby Timmons, and bassist Jymie Merritt—four Philadelphia musicians who provided the Messengers with down-home soul and sturdy compositions. Those galvanizing elements made 1959’s Moanin’ both a creative triumph and an immensely popular recording. For a jazz record, Moanin’ is laden with hits. Foremost is 22-year-old Timmons’ title track, a tune with simpler harmony than most bebop charts but a fiercely percussive sound and a never-ending sense of swing. Golson and Morgan preach as they play on “Moanin’”; Morgan’s leaping solo exercises the trumpet’s full range and, for all his invention, testifies that the main message is in the melody. The Jazz Messengers’ vibrancy and longevity had much to do with Blakey encouraging his players to compose, giving over bandstand and studio time to any young sideman with strong tunes in hand. Dominating this session is saxophonist Benny Golson, with an impressive four of the album's six tunes. Along with “Moanin’,” two of Golson’s charts, “Along Came Betty” and “Blues March,” not only became standards in Blakey’s live repertoire but found their way to the heart of the jazz songbook. Jazz aficionados like to add that Golson’s less canonic “The Drum Thunder Suite” is a dynamic three-movement showcase for the rumbling strengths of Blakey’s playing—including his sound-of-Armageddon snare press roll, which jazz historian Dan Morgenstern once described as the “sound of a giant clearing his throat.” Considering that iterations of Blakey’s Jazz Messengers over the next 30-plus years included composers and players such as Wayne Shorter, Freddie Hubbard, Keith Jarrett, Terence Blanchard, and Wynton Marsalis, it’s no small thing that Moanin’ may be the best single album the drummer ever made.
- 2020
- 2005
Live Albums
Compilations
About Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers
In the '60s, when John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman were defining the concept of a jazz avant-garde, few knowledgeable observers would have guessed that in another 30 years the music's mainstream would virtually bypass their innovations, in favor of the hard bop style that free jazz had apparently supplanted. As it turned out, many listeners who had come to love jazz as a sophisticated manifestation of popular music were unable to accept the extreme esotericism of the avant-garde; their tastes were rooted in the core elements of "swing" and "blues," characteristics found in abundance in the music of the Jazz Messengers, the quintessential hard bop ensemble led by drummer Art Blakey. In the '60s, '70s, and '80s, when artists on the cutting edge were attempting to transform the music, Blakey continued to play in more or less the same bag he had since the '40s, when his cohorts included the likes of Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and Fats Navarro. By the '80s, the evolving mainstream consensus had reached a point of overwhelming approval in regard to hard bop: this is what jazz is, and Art Blakey -- as its longest-lived and most eloquent exponent -- was its master. The Jazz Messengers had always been an incubator for young talent. A list of the band's alumni is a who's who of straight-ahead jazz from the '50s on -- Lee Morgan, Wayne Shorter, Freddie Hubbard, Johnny Griffin, Jackie McLean, Donald Byrd, Bobby Timmons, Cedar Walton, Benny Golson, Joanne Brackeen, Billy Harper, Valery Ponomarev, Bill Pierce, Branford Marsalis, James Williams, Keith Jarrett, and Chuck Mangione, to name several of the most well-known. In the '80s, precocious graduates of Blakey's School for Swing would continue to number among jazz's movers and shakers, foremost among them being trumpeter Wynton Marsalis. Marsalis became the most visible symbol of the '80s jazz mainstream; through him, Blakey's conservative ideals came to dominate the public's perception of the music. At the time of his death in 1990, the Messenger aesthetic dominated jazz, and Blakey himself had arguably become the most influential jazz musician of the past 20 years. Blakey's first musical education came in the form of piano lessons; he was playing professionally as a seventh grader, leading his own commercial band. He switched to drums shortly thereafter, learning to play in the hard-swinging style of Chick Webb and Sid Catlett. In 1942, he played with pianist Mary Lou Williams in New York. He toured the South with Fletcher Henderson's band in 1943-1944. From there, he briefly led a Boston-based big band before joining Billy Eckstine's new group, with which he would remain from 1944-1947. Eckstine's big band was the famous "cradle of modern jazz," and included (at different times) such major figures of the forthcoming bebop revolution as Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, and Charlie Parker. When Eckstine's group disbanded, Blakey started a rehearsal ensemble called the Seventeen Messengers. He also recorded with an octet, the first of his bands to be called the Jazz Messengers. In the early '50s, Blakey began an association with Horace Silver, a particularly likeminded pianist with whom he recorded several times. In 1955, they formed a group with Hank Mobley and Kenny Dorham, calling themselves "Horace Silver and the Jazz Messengers." The Messengers typified the growing hard bop movement -- hard, funky, and bluesy, the band emphasized the music's primal rhythmic and harmonic essence. A year later, Silver left the band, and Blakey became its leader. From that point, the Messengers were Blakey's primary vehicle, though he would continue to freelance in various contexts. Notable was A Jazz Message, a 1963 Impulse record date with McCoy Tyner, Sonny Stitt, and Art Davis; a 1971-1972 world tour with "the Giants of Jazz," an all-star venture with Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Sonny Stitt, and Al McKibbon; and an epochal drum battle with Max Roach, Elvin Jones, and Buddy Rich at the 1964 Newport Jazz Festival. Blakey also frequently recorded as a sideman under the leadership of ex-Messengers. Blakey's influence as a bandleader could not have been nearly so great had he not been such a skilled instrumentalist. No drummer ever drove a band harder; none could generate more sheer momentum in the course of a tune; and probably no drummer had a lower boiling point -- Blakey started every performance full-bore and went from there. His accompaniment style was relentless, and woe to the young saxophonist who couldn't keep up, for Blakey would run him over like a fullback. Blakey differed from other bop drummers in that his style was almost wholly about the music's physical attributes. Where his contemporary Max Roach dealt extensively with the drummer's relationship to melody and timbre, for example, Blakey showed little interest in such matters. To him, jazz percussion wasn't about tone color; it was about rhythm -- first, last, and in between. Blakey's drum set was the engine that propelled the music. To the extent that he exhibited little conceptual development over the course of his long career, either as a player or as a bandleader, Blakey was limited. He was no visionary by any means. But Blakey did one thing exceedingly well, and he did it with genius, spirit, and generosity until the very end of his life. ~ Chris Kelsey
- ORIGIN
- New York, NY, United States
- FORMED
- 1954
- GENRE
- Jazz