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"Celebrating Our Shared Musical Heritage"
Celebrating Our Shared Musical Heritage
Blakey - Ken Burn's Jazz
This recording is not available via iTunes.
To buy this recording from Amazon.com, click here: Ken Burns JAZZ Collection: Art Blakey
____________________________________________________________________
Art Blakey plays drums on all tracks, accompanied by:
01. CONFIRMATION (9:08)
- C. Parker -
Clifford Brown, trumpet;
Lou Donaldson, alto saxophone;
Horace Silver, piano;
Curly Russell, bass;
Blakey, spoken introduction
Recorded February 21, 1954
Available on CD: A Night at Birdland, Vol. 2 (Blue Note CDP 7 46520-2)
02. DOODLlN' (6:44)
- H. Silver -
Horace Silver and the Jazz Messengers:
Kenny Dorham, trumpet;
Hank Mobley, tenor saxophone;
Horace Silver, piano;
Doug Watkins, bass
Recorded November 13, 1954
Available on CD: Horace Silver and the Jazz Messengers (Blue Note CDP 7 46140-2)
03. EVIDENCE (6:42)
- T. Monk -
Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers with Thelonious Monk:
Bill Hardman, trumpet;
Johnny Griffin, tenor saxophone;
Monk, piano;
Spanky DeBrest, bass
Recorded May 15, 1957
Available on CD: Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers With Thelonious Monk (Rhino R2 75598)
04. MOANIN' (9:32)
- B. Timmons -
05. BLUES MARCH (6:14)
- B. Golson -
Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers:
Lee Morgan, trumpet;
Benny Golson, tenor saxophone;
Bobby Timmons, piano;
Jymie Merritt, bass
Recorded October 30, 1958
Available on CD: Moanin' (Blue Note COP 7 46516-2)
06. A NIGHT IN TUNISIA (11:13)
- J. Gillespie - F. Paparelli -
Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers:
Lee Morgan, trumpet;
Wayne Shorter, tenor saxophone;
Bobby Timmons, piano;
Jymie Merritt, bass
Recorded August 14, 1960
Available on CD: A Night in Tunisia (Blue Note CDP 7 84049 2)
07. FREE FOR ALL (11:07)
- W. Shorter-
Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers:
Freddie Hubbard, trumpet;
Wayne Shorter, tenor saxophone;
Cedar Walton, piano;
Reggie Workman, bass
Recorded February 10, 1964
Available on CD: Free for All (Blue Note CDP 7 84170-2)
08. WHEN LOVE IS NEW (6:02)
- C. Walton -
Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers:
Lee Morgan, trumpet;
Curtis Fuller, trombone;
Wayne Shorter, tenor saxophone;
Cedar Walton, piano;
Reggie Workman, bass
Recorded April 24, 1964
Available on CD: Indestructible (Blue Note CDP 7 46429-2)
09. MS. B.C. (6:44)
- B. Watson -
Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers:
Wynton Marsalis, trumpet;
Bobby Watson, alto saxophone;
Bill Pierce, tenor saxophone;
James Williams, piano;
Charles Fambrough, bass
Recorded April 12, 1981
_____________________________________________________________________
Art Blakey escaped the noise, tumult, and danger of the coal mines and steel mills of Pittsburgh into a life of music, carrying , with him a volcanic force. He channeled his energy into drumming, leadership, teaching, and development of talent, and became a prime mover in postwar jazz.
Blakey often told people that he had no childhood. At fourteen he was working among the blast furnaces in the daytime, moonlighting in clubs as a pianist, leading a professional dance band, and trying to finish high school. He was a husband and father at fifteen. He said that he switched instruments when another Pittsburgh youngster, Erroll Garner, showed him up at the piano and the tough guy who ran the club ordered Blakey to play the drums. To teach himself, he took as his models a pair of Swing Era titans.
"Chick Webb and Sid Catlett were the two most fantastic drummers I have ever heard,” Blakey told his fellow drummer Art Taylor in Taylor's book Notes and Tones. Of Catlett, he said, "He could play just as soft with a pair of sticks as you can play with a pair of brushes, and he could take the brushes and play with them like sticks. Sid was so big that when he sat down at a twenty-eight-inch bass drum it looked like a toy. He was a master. I tried to pattern myself on him. He said, 'Just roll."
At eighteen, Blakey took his own big band west.
Broke and stranded, he returned to Pittsburgh, eventually joining Mary Lou Williams, the brilliant pianist and arranger, who had formed her own group after years with Andy Kirk's band. He worked with Williams at Kelly's Stable in New York in 1942. He toured with Fletcher Henderson's band, then led his own big band in Boston for a time in 1944. He left for St. Louis at the call of vocalist Billy Eckstine, whose band was a hothouse for the development of modern jazz in the transition from swing to bebop. Among Blakey's colleagues at various times with Eckstine were a budding Who's Who of the new music: Miles Davis, Fats Navarro, Dexter Gordon, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Budd Johnson, Wardell Gray, Lucky Thompson, Gene Ammons, Sarah Vaughan, and Sonny Stitt.
Blakey made emphatic what Gillespie implied when the trumpeter brought Blakey into the Eckstine band - that he was, along with Kenny Clarke and Max Roach, in the top rank of the new jazz drummers. The unrelenting power and aggressiveness of his swing were matched by an independence of limbs that he used to set up polyrhythms with subtleties that a corps of drummers could not have duplicated. Taking to heart Catlett's admonition to "just roll,” Blakey developed a press roll so exquisitely forceful and so unmistakably his that drum manuals give it a formal name, the Blakey Press Roll. He employed it behind soloists to elevate them into higher degrees of swing. His crisp hi-hat cymbal claps on the second and fourth beats, his accents using triplets and offbeat interjections, the irresistible tidal movement of his beat, electrified musicians and audiences. When I asked the saxophonist Cannonball Adderley in a radio interview about the highlight of his early career in New York, he said that it was when he learned that he was going to record with Art Blakey. "You can imagine my excitement,” he said.
In his understated way, the pianist Tommy Flanagan summed up Blakey's playing. "Art Blakey,” he once told me, "was the most definite drummer I've ever known.” The trumpeter Freddie Hubbard put it to me this way: "Blakey had a heavy foot, and he kept his foot in your ass. You had to play.”
After Eckstine disbanded in 1947, Blakey formed the first of his many groups incorporating the name Messengers: a rehearsal band called the Seventeen Messengers. He also recorded that year with an octet, the Jazz Messengers; that was to become the name of his groups beginning in 1955. He established another career pattern in 1947: the employment of young musicians he spotted as full of talent and promise. The octet included trumpeter Kenny Dorham, saxophonist Sahib Shihab, and pianist Walter Bishop.
"Yes, sir,” Blakey told the audience for a celebrated recording date at Birdland in 1954. "I'm gonna stay with the youngsters. When these get too old, I'm gonna get some younger ones. Keeps the mind active.” He was a doddering 34-year-old.
The youngsters in that instance were trumpeter Clifford Brown, alto saxophonist Lou Donaldson, and pianist Horace Silver, all of whom graduated from Blakey's finishing school to become major figures. The other member of the band was bassist Curly Russell, a senior citizen nearly as old as Blakey. In that edition of his band, Blakey began tending toward what would come to be known as hard bop: jazz heavily invested with blues harmonies and gospel feeling. By the next edition, with Hank Mobley on tenor saxophone and Kenny Dorham on trumpet, Blakey and Silver had established hard bop, and it became a crucible in which Blakey for more than three decades forged young musicians who populated the jazz scene and in many cases lead it today. Here are some of their names: Freddie Hubbard, Wayne Shorter, Curtis Fuller, Cedar Walton, Jymie Merritt, Lee Morgan, Jackie McLean, Bill Hardman, Benny Golson, Johnny Griffin, Bobby Timmons, Keith Jarrett, Chuck Mangione, Woody Shaw, Walter Davis, Jr., Joanne Brackeen, Ronnie Mathews, John Hicks, Victor Sproles, Wynton Marsalis, Branford Marsalis, Dennis Irwin, Bobby Watson, Brian Lynch, Frank Lacy, Benny Green, Geoff Keezer, Mulgrew Miller, Terence Blanchard, Kenny Garrett, Donald Harrison, Philip Harper, Peter Washington, Billy Harper, Gary Bartz, Bill Pierce, Lonnie Plaxico.
Blakey's instruction in the essentials of jazz and life helped to shape those musicians. Many of them, in turn, are band leaders and style setters influencing the course of the music in a century Blakey did not live to see. He died in 1990, but Art Blakey will be with us for a long time.
Doug Ramsey
MAY 2000
Doug Ramsey is the author of Jazz Matters: Reflections on the Music and Some of its Makers (University of Arkansas Press). He is a regular contributor to Jazz Times and the winner of an ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for writing about music.
_____________________________________________________________________
Compilation Produced by Richard Seidel
A&R: Steve Berkowitz, Sarah Botstein, Michael Brooks, Ken Bums, Michael Cuscuna, Peter Miller, Seth Rothstein, Lynn Novick, Richard Seidel, and Ben Young
Mastered by Kevin "Secret 479002" Reeves at Universal Mastering-East
Discographical information: Didier Deutsch, Carlos Kase, and Ben Young
Liner notes edited by Peter Keepnews
Photo credits: Paul J. Hoeffler: outside tray card, p.5, p.6; Herman Leonard: back cover of booklet, p.9; Lee Tanner: front cover of booklet, inside tray card
Courtesy credits: "Confirmation," "Doodlin'," "Moan in'," "Blues March; "Night in Tunisia; "Free For All," "When Love Is New” courtesy of Blue Note Records; "Evidence" produced under license from Rhino Entertainment Co. by arrangement with Warner Special Products.
To buy this recording from Amazon.com, click here: Ken Burns JAZZ Collection: Art Blakey
____________________________________________________________________Art Blakey plays drums on all tracks, accompanied by:
01. CONFIRMATION (9:08)
- C. Parker -
Clifford Brown, trumpet;
Lou Donaldson, alto saxophone;
Horace Silver, piano;
Curly Russell, bass;
Blakey, spoken introduction
Recorded February 21, 1954
Available on CD: A Night at Birdland, Vol. 2 (Blue Note CDP 7 46520-2)
02. DOODLlN' (6:44)
- H. Silver -
Horace Silver and the Jazz Messengers:
Kenny Dorham, trumpet;
Hank Mobley, tenor saxophone;
Horace Silver, piano;
Doug Watkins, bass
Recorded November 13, 1954
Available on CD: Horace Silver and the Jazz Messengers (Blue Note CDP 7 46140-2)
03. EVIDENCE (6:42)
- T. Monk -
Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers with Thelonious Monk:
Bill Hardman, trumpet;
Johnny Griffin, tenor saxophone;
Monk, piano;
Spanky DeBrest, bass
Recorded May 15, 1957
Available on CD: Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers With Thelonious Monk (Rhino R2 75598)
04. MOANIN' (9:32)
- B. Timmons -
05. BLUES MARCH (6:14)
- B. Golson -
Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers:
Lee Morgan, trumpet;
Benny Golson, tenor saxophone;
Bobby Timmons, piano;
Jymie Merritt, bass
Recorded October 30, 1958
Available on CD: Moanin' (Blue Note COP 7 46516-2)
06. A NIGHT IN TUNISIA (11:13)
- J. Gillespie - F. Paparelli -
Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers:
Lee Morgan, trumpet;
Wayne Shorter, tenor saxophone;
Bobby Timmons, piano;
Jymie Merritt, bass
Recorded August 14, 1960
Available on CD: A Night in Tunisia (Blue Note CDP 7 84049 2)
07. FREE FOR ALL (11:07)
- W. Shorter-
Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers:
Freddie Hubbard, trumpet;
Wayne Shorter, tenor saxophone;
Cedar Walton, piano;
Reggie Workman, bass
Recorded February 10, 1964
Available on CD: Free for All (Blue Note CDP 7 84170-2)
08. WHEN LOVE IS NEW (6:02)
- C. Walton -
Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers:
Lee Morgan, trumpet;
Curtis Fuller, trombone;
Wayne Shorter, tenor saxophone;
Cedar Walton, piano;
Reggie Workman, bass
Recorded April 24, 1964
Available on CD: Indestructible (Blue Note CDP 7 46429-2)
09. MS. B.C. (6:44)
- B. Watson -
Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers:
Wynton Marsalis, trumpet;
Bobby Watson, alto saxophone;
Bill Pierce, tenor saxophone;
James Williams, piano;
Charles Fambrough, bass
Recorded April 12, 1981
_____________________________________________________________________
Art Blakey escaped the noise, tumult, and danger of the coal mines and steel mills of Pittsburgh into a life of music, carrying , with him a volcanic force. He channeled his energy into drumming, leadership, teaching, and development of talent, and became a prime mover in postwar jazz.
Blakey often told people that he had no childhood. At fourteen he was working among the blast furnaces in the daytime, moonlighting in clubs as a pianist, leading a professional dance band, and trying to finish high school. He was a husband and father at fifteen. He said that he switched instruments when another Pittsburgh youngster, Erroll Garner, showed him up at the piano and the tough guy who ran the club ordered Blakey to play the drums. To teach himself, he took as his models a pair of Swing Era titans.
"Chick Webb and Sid Catlett were the two most fantastic drummers I have ever heard,” Blakey told his fellow drummer Art Taylor in Taylor's book Notes and Tones. Of Catlett, he said, "He could play just as soft with a pair of sticks as you can play with a pair of brushes, and he could take the brushes and play with them like sticks. Sid was so big that when he sat down at a twenty-eight-inch bass drum it looked like a toy. He was a master. I tried to pattern myself on him. He said, 'Just roll."
At eighteen, Blakey took his own big band west.
Broke and stranded, he returned to Pittsburgh, eventually joining Mary Lou Williams, the brilliant pianist and arranger, who had formed her own group after years with Andy Kirk's band. He worked with Williams at Kelly's Stable in New York in 1942. He toured with Fletcher Henderson's band, then led his own big band in Boston for a time in 1944. He left for St. Louis at the call of vocalist Billy Eckstine, whose band was a hothouse for the development of modern jazz in the transition from swing to bebop. Among Blakey's colleagues at various times with Eckstine were a budding Who's Who of the new music: Miles Davis, Fats Navarro, Dexter Gordon, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Budd Johnson, Wardell Gray, Lucky Thompson, Gene Ammons, Sarah Vaughan, and Sonny Stitt.
Blakey made emphatic what Gillespie implied when the trumpeter brought Blakey into the Eckstine band - that he was, along with Kenny Clarke and Max Roach, in the top rank of the new jazz drummers. The unrelenting power and aggressiveness of his swing were matched by an independence of limbs that he used to set up polyrhythms with subtleties that a corps of drummers could not have duplicated. Taking to heart Catlett's admonition to "just roll,” Blakey developed a press roll so exquisitely forceful and so unmistakably his that drum manuals give it a formal name, the Blakey Press Roll. He employed it behind soloists to elevate them into higher degrees of swing. His crisp hi-hat cymbal claps on the second and fourth beats, his accents using triplets and offbeat interjections, the irresistible tidal movement of his beat, electrified musicians and audiences. When I asked the saxophonist Cannonball Adderley in a radio interview about the highlight of his early career in New York, he said that it was when he learned that he was going to record with Art Blakey. "You can imagine my excitement,” he said.
In his understated way, the pianist Tommy Flanagan summed up Blakey's playing. "Art Blakey,” he once told me, "was the most definite drummer I've ever known.” The trumpeter Freddie Hubbard put it to me this way: "Blakey had a heavy foot, and he kept his foot in your ass. You had to play.”
After Eckstine disbanded in 1947, Blakey formed the first of his many groups incorporating the name Messengers: a rehearsal band called the Seventeen Messengers. He also recorded that year with an octet, the Jazz Messengers; that was to become the name of his groups beginning in 1955. He established another career pattern in 1947: the employment of young musicians he spotted as full of talent and promise. The octet included trumpeter Kenny Dorham, saxophonist Sahib Shihab, and pianist Walter Bishop.
"Yes, sir,” Blakey told the audience for a celebrated recording date at Birdland in 1954. "I'm gonna stay with the youngsters. When these get too old, I'm gonna get some younger ones. Keeps the mind active.” He was a doddering 34-year-old.
The youngsters in that instance were trumpeter Clifford Brown, alto saxophonist Lou Donaldson, and pianist Horace Silver, all of whom graduated from Blakey's finishing school to become major figures. The other member of the band was bassist Curly Russell, a senior citizen nearly as old as Blakey. In that edition of his band, Blakey began tending toward what would come to be known as hard bop: jazz heavily invested with blues harmonies and gospel feeling. By the next edition, with Hank Mobley on tenor saxophone and Kenny Dorham on trumpet, Blakey and Silver had established hard bop, and it became a crucible in which Blakey for more than three decades forged young musicians who populated the jazz scene and in many cases lead it today. Here are some of their names: Freddie Hubbard, Wayne Shorter, Curtis Fuller, Cedar Walton, Jymie Merritt, Lee Morgan, Jackie McLean, Bill Hardman, Benny Golson, Johnny Griffin, Bobby Timmons, Keith Jarrett, Chuck Mangione, Woody Shaw, Walter Davis, Jr., Joanne Brackeen, Ronnie Mathews, John Hicks, Victor Sproles, Wynton Marsalis, Branford Marsalis, Dennis Irwin, Bobby Watson, Brian Lynch, Frank Lacy, Benny Green, Geoff Keezer, Mulgrew Miller, Terence Blanchard, Kenny Garrett, Donald Harrison, Philip Harper, Peter Washington, Billy Harper, Gary Bartz, Bill Pierce, Lonnie Plaxico.
Blakey's instruction in the essentials of jazz and life helped to shape those musicians. Many of them, in turn, are band leaders and style setters influencing the course of the music in a century Blakey did not live to see. He died in 1990, but Art Blakey will be with us for a long time.
Doug Ramsey
MAY 2000
Doug Ramsey is the author of Jazz Matters: Reflections on the Music and Some of its Makers (University of Arkansas Press). He is a regular contributor to Jazz Times and the winner of an ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for writing about music.
_____________________________________________________________________
Compilation Produced by Richard Seidel
A&R: Steve Berkowitz, Sarah Botstein, Michael Brooks, Ken Bums, Michael Cuscuna, Peter Miller, Seth Rothstein, Lynn Novick, Richard Seidel, and Ben Young
Mastered by Kevin "Secret 479002" Reeves at Universal Mastering-East
Discographical information: Didier Deutsch, Carlos Kase, and Ben Young
Liner notes edited by Peter Keepnews
Photo credits: Paul J. Hoeffler: outside tray card, p.5, p.6; Herman Leonard: back cover of booklet, p.9; Lee Tanner: front cover of booklet, inside tray card
Courtesy credits: "Confirmation," "Doodlin'," "Moan in'," "Blues March; "Night in Tunisia; "Free For All," "When Love Is New” courtesy of Blue Note Records; "Evidence" produced under license from Rhino Entertainment Co. by arrangement with Warner Special Products.
