Art Blakey & the Jazz Messengers

During the 1960s, as John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman established the foundations of an experimental jazz frontier, few informed observers expected that three decades later the genre's central current would largely overlook those advances and return instead to the hard bop idiom that free jazz had seemed to displace. Many listeners who first embraced jazz as a refined expression of popular song found the avant-garde's intense abstraction difficult to embrace, remaining attached instead to the fundamental qualities of swing and blues that defined the output of the Jazz Messengers, the definitive hard bop unit directed by drummer Art Blakey. Throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, while forward-looking musicians sought to reshape the music, Blakey maintained essentially the same approach he had followed since the 1940s, when his associates encompassed figures such as Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and Fats Navarro. By the 1980s the prevailing consensus had coalesced so strongly around hard bop that it came to represent the accepted definition of jazz itself, positioning Blakey, as the style's longest-tenured and most articulate proponent, at its forefront.

The Jazz Messengers had long functioned as a training ground for emerging players. Its roster of former members reads like a catalog of straight-ahead jazz figures from the 1950s onward, among them 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. In the 1980s, talented alumni of Blakey's ensemble continued to rank among the music's leading voices, most prominently trumpeter Wynton Marsalis. Marsalis emerged as the clearest emblem of the decade's mainstream jazz direction, through whom Blakey's traditional principles shaped public understanding of the art form. By the time of Blakey's death in 1990, the Messenger outlook held sway over jazz, rendering Blakey arguably the most consequential jazz musician of the preceding twenty years.

Blakey's earliest training consisted of piano instruction; he was already working professionally as a seventh grader, fronting his own popular-music group. He soon shifted to drums, absorbing the vigorous, propulsive manner of Chick Webb and Sid Catlett. In 1942 he performed with pianist Mary Lou Williams in New York. He traveled through the South with Fletcher Henderson's orchestra during 1943-1944. He next briefly directed a Boston-based large ensemble before entering Billy Eckstine's new band, remaining with it from 1944 to 1947. Eckstine's orchestra served as the renowned incubator of modern jazz and featured, at various points, pivotal participants in the emerging bebop movement such as Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, and Charlie Parker. After Eckstine's group dissolved, Blakey organized a rehearsal unit known as the Seventeen Messengers and also documented sessions with an octet that constituted the first ensemble bearing the Jazz Messengers name. In the early 1950s he began a close partnership with pianist Horace Silver, another musician of similar outlook, and they recorded together on multiple occasions. In 1955 they assembled a quartet with Hank Mobley and Kenny Dorham under the name Horace Silver and the Jazz Messengers. The group embodied the rising hard bop current, delivering a robust, earthy, blues-inflected sound that foregrounded the idiom's essential rhythmic and harmonic foundations. The following year Silver departed, leaving Blakey in charge. From that juncture the Messengers served as Blakey's central outlet, although he continued to appear in other settings. Among these were the 1963 Impulse date A Jazz Message alongside McCoy Tyner, Sonny Stitt, and Art Davis; the 1971-1972 international tour with the all-star collective Giants of Jazz that included Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Sonny Stitt, and Al McKibbon; and the landmark drum summit with Max Roach, Elvin Jones, and Buddy Rich at the 1964 Newport Jazz Festival. Blakey also frequently contributed as a sideman on recordings led by former Messengers members.

Blakey's stature as a bandleader would have remained limited had he not also been an exceptional instrumentalist. No drummer propelled a group with greater force or produced more sustained momentum within a single piece, and few maintained a lower threshold for intensity; Blakey commenced every performance at full volume and sustained that level. His accompanimental approach was unyielding, and any young saxophonist unable to match the pace risked being overtaken. Blakey diverged from other bop drummers by concentrating almost exclusively on the music's physical dimensions. Whereas his peer Max Roach explored the drummer's connection to melody and timbre, Blakey displayed scant concern for those aspects. For him, jazz drumming centered on rhythm above all else. His kit operated as the mechanism driving the ensemble forward. Although he displayed minimal conceptual evolution across his lengthy career, either in performance or in leadership, Blakey nevertheless excelled at one pursuit and executed it with exceptional skill, vitality, and openness until the close of his life.