Art Blakey - On Riverside: Art Blakey '2023

Tracks list

Tracklist:

01. One By One
02. Thermo (Album Version)
03. Sweet 'n' Sour (Album Version)
04. Ugetsu
05. Skylark (Album Version)
06. Caravan (Album Version)
07. Kyoto
08. Ping-Pong
09. In The Wee Small Hours Of The Morning (Album Version)
10. Eva
11. The High Priest
12. This Is For Albert (Album Version)
13. Never Never Land
14. On the Ginza
15. The Theme


 moreThe 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
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Art Blakey - On Riverside: Art Blakey.rar - 627.3 MB

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