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Like many venerable jazz musicians, the drummer Art Blakey hung on long enough to see his approach to music come back into style.
A leading drummer of the post-World War II bop style epitomized by Charlie Parker, Blakey was better known for his leadership of his Jazz Messengers, one of the longest-running and consistently-excellent groups in jazz. The road to legendary status was winding, however. Eschewing the avant-garde, Blakey was ignored by jazz critics in the experimental 1960s and shunned by American audiences in the 1970s, when rock exerted its hegemonic control over the business of pop music. Unable to land a U.S. recording contract, he released numerous albums for European labels in the 1980s and won belated attention from American critics for his brief association with trumpet prodigy Wynton Marsalis. Ten years ago, Marsalis burst onto the jazz scene as a mature leader of his own tasteful group, and he credited a stint with Blakey's Messengers for his own poise and artistic direction. By the time of Blakey's death in 1990, a tour with the peripatetic Messengers was viewed as a sort of pre-requisite for up-and-coming jazz musicians. A quick way to be taken seriously by critics, record producers and audiences was to pass through Blakey's free-form university. Blakey's influence on young musicians was always hard to guage. He seemed to imbue in his acolytes an attitude of exuberant professionalism and fidelity to jazz acoustics rather than any particular compositional style.
EARLY CAREER
In 1947 Blakey organized the Seventeen Messengers, a rehearsal band, and recorded with an octet called the Jazz Messengers. He claimed that he then travelled to Africa; however, no documentation has been uncovered that supports this claim. In the early 1950s he performed and broadcast with such musicians as Charlie Parker, Miles Davis and Clifford Brown, and particularly with Horace Silver, his kindred musical spirit of this time. Blakey and Silver recorded together on several occasions, including the album A Night at Birdland (1954, BN), having formed in 1953 a cooperative group with Hank Mobley and Kenny Dorham, retaining the name Jazz Messengers. By 1956 Silver had left and the leadership of this important band passed to Blakey, and he remained associated with it until his death. It was the archetypal hard-bop group of the late 1950s, playing a driving, aggressive extension of bop with pronounced blues roots. Over the years the Jazz Messengers served as a springboard for young jazz musicians such as Donald Byrd, Johnny Griffin, Lee Morgan, Wayne Shorter, Freddie Hubbard, Keith Jarrett, Chuck Mangione, Woody Shaw, Joanne Brackeen and Wynton Marsalis. Blakey also made a world tour in 1971-1972 with the Giants of Jazz (with Dizzy Gillespie, Kai Winding, Sonny Stitt,
Thelonious Monk and Al McKibbon.
From his earliest recording sessions with Eckstine, and particularly in his historic sessions with Monk in 1947, Blakey exuded power and originality, creating a dark cymbal sound punctuated by frequent loud snare- and bass-drum accents in triplets or cross-rhythms. Although Blakey discouraged comparison of his own music with African drumming, he adopted several African devices after his visit in 1948–1949, including rapping on the side of the drum and using his elbow on the tom-tom to alter the pitch. His much-imitated trademark, the forceful closing of the hi-hat on every second and fourth beat, was part of his style from 1950 to 1951. A loud and domineering drummer, Blakey also listened and responded to his soloists. His contribution to jazz as a discoverer and molder of young talent over three decades was no less significant than his very considerable innovations on his instrument
In the 1940s, Blakey was a member of bands led by Mary Lou Williams, Fletcher Henderson, and Billy Eckstine. He converted to Islam during a visit to West Africa in the late 1940s and took the name Abdullah Ibn Buhaina (which led to the nickname "Bu"). By the late forties and early fifties, Blakey was backing musicians such as Miles Davis, Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk — he is often considered to have been Monk's most empathetic drummer, and he played on both Monk's first recording session as a leader (for Blue Note Records in 1947) and his final one (in London in 1971), as well as many in between.
Up to the 1960s Blakey also recorded as a sideman with many other musicians: Jimmy Smith, Herbie Nichols, Cannonball Adderley, Grant Green, and Jazz Messengers graduates Lee Morgan and Hank Mobley, amongst many others. However, after the mid-1960s he mostly concentrated on his own work as a leader.
THE JAZZ MESSENGERS
The Messengers originated in a series of groups led or co-led by Blakey and pianist Horace Silver, though the name was not used on the earliest of their recordings. The name "Jazz Messengers" had however been used by Blakey in the late forties for various groups. The most celebrated of these early records (credited to "The Art Blakey Quintet"), is A Night at Birdland from February 1954,[citation needed] one of the earliest commercially released "live" jazz records. This featured Silver, Blakey, the young trumpeter Clifford Brown, alto saxophonist Lou Donaldson and bassist Curly Russell. The "Jazz Messengers" name was first used for this group on a 1954 recording nominally led by Silver, with Blakey, Hank Mobley, Kenny Dorham and Doug Watkins — the same quintet would record The Jazz Messengers at the Cafe Bohemia the following year, still as a collective. Donald Byrd replaced Dorham, and the group recorded an album called simply The Jazz Messengers for Columbia Records in 1956. Blakey took over the group name when Silver left after the band's first year (taking Mobley, Byrd and Watkins with him to form a new quintet with a variety of drummers), and the band was known as "Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers" from then onwards.
From 1959 to 1961 the group featured Wayne Shorter on tenor saxophone, Jymie Merritt, Lee Morgan, and Bobby Timmons. The second line-up (1961–1964) was a sextet that added trombonist Curtis Fuller and replaced Morgan and Timmons with Freddie Hubbard and Cedar Walton, respectively. Shorter was the musical director of the group, and many of his original compositions such as "Lester Left Town" remained staples of Blakey's repertoire even after Shorter's departure. (Other players over the years made permanent marks on Blakey's repertoire — Timmons, composer of "Dat Dere" and "Moanin'", Benny Golson, composer of "Along Came Betty" and "Are You Real", and, later, Bobby Watson.) Shorter's more experimental inclinations pushed the band at the time into an engagement with the 1960s "New Thing", as it was called: the influence of Coltrane's contemporary records on Impulse! is evident on Free For All (1964), often cited as the greatest document of the Shorter-era Messengers (and certainly one of the most fearsomely powerful examples of hard bop on record)
LATER CAREER
Blakey went on to record dozens of albums with a constantly changing group of Jazz Messengers — he had a policy of encouraging young musicians: as he remarked on-mic on A Night at Birdland (1954): "I'm gonna stay with the youngsters. When these get too old I'll get some younger ones. Keeps the mind active." After weathering the fusion era in the 1970s with some difficulty (recordings from this period are less plentiful and include attempts to incorporate instruments like electric piano), Blakey's band got revitalized in the early 1980s with the advent of neotraditionalist jazz. Wynton Marsalis was for a time the band's trumpeter and musical director, and even after Marsalis's departure Blakey's band continued as a proving ground for many "Young Lions" like Terence Blanchard, Donald Harrison and Kenny Garrett. Blakey continued performing and touring with the group into the late 1980s; Ron Wynn notes that Blakey had "played with such force and fury that he eventually lost much of his hearing, and at the end of his life, often played strictly by instinct." Blakey died in 1990 in New York City, leaving behind a vast legacy and approach to jazz which is still the model for countless hard-bop players
STORY DRAW TO HIT BLAKEY.
While a passionate drummer, Blakey almost never composed a song, relying instead on his sidemen for songs. Though his vintage-1950s groups produced solid recordings, filled with impressive solos, they suffered from a shortage of original material. It wasn't until the early 1960s that Blakey remedied this situation by assembling a series of small groups that rank with the best-ever in jazz. With Freddie Hubbard or Lee Morgan on trumpet, Curtis Fuller on trombone and Wayne Shorter on tenor saxophone, Blakey's Jazz Messengers had a Hall-of-Fame front-line whose compositional savvy was outstripped only by their extraordinary skills and emotional fire. Wedded to "hard" bop, Blakey's drumming was predictably swinging and his solos were astonishing for their power, wit and poly-rhythms. Yet he relied heavily on his sidemen to provide an aesthetic for his group; he was an unusually generous leader when it came to passing out assignments (which may well explain the longevity of the Jazz Messengers). Hubbard, Fuller and especially Shorter embraced new jazz idioms even as the rock-steady Blakey clung to more catholic tastes.
Blakey wasn't standing still, however. In the 1970s, he showed ample signs of absorbing the language of both the so-called "free" jazz and rock-tinged fusion. Blakey's flirtation with fresh styles would not last long, however. By the end of the decade, he had returned to his roots and essentially spent his remaining years re-creating the hard bop sound, relying on a new generation of musicians who revered him and were obsessed with turning post-War jazz into a kind of American classical music.
In this regard, Wynton Marsalis became Blakey's most important disciple, a testament to the fiery drummer's seminal influence. The easy romanticizing of hard bop, and its surprising prominence in the 1990s, elevated in importance the Jazz Messengers's first early recordings. The emphasis by critics on purity and swing lent a new luster to these tired 1950s records and brought belated-acclaim for Blakey's stunning early 1960 releases (especially the adroit "Free For All" and the haunting "Freedom Rider" in which Blakey's extended solo is the paragon of jazz modernism). In this fresh critical light, Blakey's recordings from the 1980s and early 1990s were viewed as a welcome revival.
His younger-generation Messengers performed jazz standards with verve and, at times, brilliance but contributed few original tunes worth remembering. Still, Blakey was a magnet for young talent, and he showcased such top young players such as Mulgrew Miller, Javon Jackson, Bobby Watson and Donald Harrison. The nostalgia for Blakey's most fertile period and the renewed appreciation for straight-ahead jazz has meant that music from the 1970s - Blakey's "down" period in terms of popularity - has been unfairly neglected.
During the decade of the 1970s, American audiences abandoned acoustic jazz, and Blakey struggled to retain first-class musicians and the support of record labels and club owners in the U.S. Setting aside his neo-bop classicism, which he pioneered, Blakey took in band members whose tastes were decidedly more pop than jazz. Chuck Mangione's little-known stay in the Messengers's trumpet chair was perhaps the ultimate reflection of the breakdown in the cultural concensus about the elements of authentic jazz. Yet for Blakey afficianados, the 1970s have much to offer, as a new re-issue from Fantasy Records demonstrates. Mission Eternal contains two full albums recorded by a superb Blakey band in March 1973 and originally released by the Prestige label under the titles of "Buhaina" and "Athenagin." A cut below Blakey's best recordings of the 1960s, these albums nevertheless show an awareness of the avant-garde, a taste for Latin beats and inspired performances by strong sidemen. Cedar Walton anchors the group on piano and contributes some strong compositions, notably Mission Eternal. Carter Jefferson, an inventive saxophonist who deserves wider appreciation, strikes a good balance between fidelity to standards and the inevitable search for new sounds. His solo on "Gertrude's Bounce" is brutish yet melodic. Vocalist Jon Hendricks, who joins the group on two cuts, is mesmerizing on the jazz standard "Moanin'" and ghostly on "Along Came Betty," an original by Benny Golson that Hendricks put lyrics to. And conga player Tony Waters is steady throughout, no small achievement given Blakey's commanding presence on drums...
