ART BLAKEY

"This is the music of my culture: good, bad, or indifferent. It's the only culture America has brought forth." 

-Art Blakey

Arthur (Art) Blakey, October 11, 1919 – October 16, 1990), born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Also known as Abdullah Ibn Buhaina, he was an American jazz drummer and bandleader. He was a member of the American Black Muslim Community. Art Blakey began his musical career, as did many jazz musicians, in the church. The foster son of a devout Seventh Day Adventist Family, Art learned the piano as he learned the Bible, mastering both at an early age. 

Along with Kenny Clarke and Max Roach, he was one of the inventors of the modern bebop style of drumming. He is known as a powerful musician and a vital groover; his brand of bluesy, funky hard bop was (and remains) profoundly influential on mainstream jazz. Over more than 30 years his band the Jazz Messengers included many young musicians who went on to become prominent names in jazz. The band's legacy is thus not only the often exceptionally fine music it produced, but as a proving ground for several generations of jazz musicians; Blakey's group is equivalent only to those of Miles Davis in this regard.

But as Art himself told it so many times, his career on the piano ended at the wrong end of a pistol when the owner of the Democratic Club —the Pittsburgh nightclub where he was gigging —ordered him off the piano and onto the drums.

Art, then in his early teens and a budding pianist, was usurped by an equally young, Erroll Garner who, as it turned out, was as skilled at the piano as Blakey later was at the drums. The upset turned into a blessing for Art, launching a career that spanned six decades and nurtured the careers of countless other jazz musicians. 

As a young drummer, Art came under the tutelage of legendary drummer and bandleader Chick Webb, serving as his valet. In 1937, Art returned to Pittsburgh, forming his own band, teaming up with Pianist Mary Lou Williams, under whose name the band performed.

From his Pittsburgh gig, Art made his way through the Jazz world. In 1939, he began a three-year gig touring with Fletcher Henderson. After a year in Boston with a steady gig at the Tic Toc club, he joined the great Billy Eckstine, gigging with the likes of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Sarah Vaughn.

In 1948, Art told reporters he had visited Africa, where he learned polyrhythmic drumming and was introduced to Islam, taking the name Abdullah Ibn Buhaina. It was in the late ’40s that Art formed his first Jazz Messengers band, a 17-piece big band.

After a brief gig with Buddy DeFranco, in 1954 Art met up with pianist Horace Silver, altoist Lou Donaldson, trumpeter Clifford Brown, and bassist Curly Russell and recorded "live" at Birdland for Blue Note Records. The following year, Art and Horace Silver co-founded the quintet that became the Jazz Messengers. In 1956, Horace Silver left the band to form his own group leaving the name, the Jazz Messengers, to Art Blakey.

Art’s driving rhythms and his incessant two and four beat on the high hat cymbals were readily identifiable from the outset and remained a constant throughout 35 years of Jazz Messengers bands. What changed constantly was a seeming unending supply of talented sidemen, many of whom went on to become band leaders in their own right. 

In the early years luminaries like Clifford Brown, Hank Mobley and Jackie McLean rounded out the band. In 1959, tenor saxophonist Benny Golson joined the quintet and — at Art’s behest — began working on the songbook and recruiting what became one of the timeless Messenger bands — tenor saxman Wayne Shorter, trumpeter Lee Morgan, pianist Bobby Timmons and bassist Jymmie Merritt.

The songs produced from ’59 through the early ’60s became trademarks for the Messengers — including Timmon’s Moanin’, Golson’s Along Came Betty and Blues March and Shorter’s Ping Pong.

By this time, the Messengers had become a mainstay on the jazz club circuit and began recording on Blue Note Records. They began touring Europe, with forays into North Africa. In 1960, the Messengers became the first American Jazz band to play in Japan for Japanese audiences. That first Japanese tour was a high point for the band. At the Tokyo airport, the band was greeted by hundreds of fans as Blues March played over their airport intercom and their visit was televised nationally.

In 1961, trombonist Curtis Fuller transformed the Messengers into a proper sextet, giving the band the opportunity to incorporate a big band sound into their hard bop repertoire. Throughout the ’60s, the Messengers remained a mainstay on the jazz scene with jazz greats including Cedar Walton, Chuck Mangione, Keith Jarrett, Reggie Workman, Lucky Thompson and John Hicks. In the jazz drought of the ’70s, the Messengers remained a strong force, with fewer recordings, but no less energy. At a time when many jazz musicians were experimenting with electronics and fusing their music with pop, the Messengers were a mainstay of straight-ahead jazz.

Art’s steadfast belief in jazz music left him well positioned to take advantage of the music’s resurgence in the early ’80s. Art had been working with musicians including trumpeter Valery Ponomarev, tenor Billy Pierce, alto saxman Bobby Watson and pianist James Williams. Trumpeter Wynton Marsalis’ 1980 entrance into the band coincided — and played no small part in — the resurgence of the music in the ’80s.

Throughout the ’80 and until his death in 1990, Art maintained the integrity of the message, incubating the careers of musicians including trumpeters Wallace Rooney and Terence Blanchard, pianists Mulgrew Miller and Donald Brown, bassists Peter Washington and Lonnie Plaxico and many others.

Art died at the age of 71 after a career that spanned six of the best decades of jazz music. The messenger has moved on, but his message lives on in the music of the scores of sidemen whose careers he nurtured, the many other drummers he mentored and countless fans who have been blessed to hear the Messengers’ music.

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Art Blakey, master of the drums, leader of the music. A native of Pittsburgh, went to New York in 1938 with pianist Mary Lou Williams. Later left Mary Lou to join Fletcher Henderson where he earned his wings, he was soon off to join the Billy Eckstine band along with Charlie Parker and Sarah Vaughan. After his stint with Mr. "B" Art went on to form the 17 Messengers which would develop over the years into the Jazz Messengers, which included some of the finest musicians 
that would influence the music; Clifford Brown, Horice Silver, Wayne Shorter, Lee Morgan, Freddie Hubbard, Etc.. Art would also perform as a sideman for some of the most important musicians in the business.

Art Blakey's name has become synonymous with hard drive and pulsating excitement. He was a musician who believed that a jazz group should be a solid cohesive unit, not just "five guys blowing on the same changes." What made the Jazz Messengers different, was that the rhythm section did not just play time behind the horns, they backed up the horn section solidly and would set up the soloist, who in turn would would listen and pick up cues that would be thrown 
his way.

Those press rolls, that sock cymbal, his imaginative ride, the cohesiveness and form of his solo's, and most of all his ears; how he could listen to the band as a whole and as individuals. This is why any musician who came out of his school would always say that they never sounded as good they did when they had Art lighting that fire underneath them.

Excerpt from

Successful Mission for Influential Drummer

By G. Pascal Zachary

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. 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 1960s 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...