Art Blakey

During the 1960s, as John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman shaped notions of a jazz avant-garde, few informed observers anticipated that three decades later the music’s central current would largely sidestep those advances in favor of the hard bop idiom that free jazz had seemed to displace. Many listeners who had embraced jazz as a refined form of popular expression found the avant-garde’s extreme abstraction unacceptable; their preferences remained anchored in the fundamental traits of swing and blues, qualities amply present in the work 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 overhaul the idiom, Blakey stayed within roughly the same stylistic frame he had occupied since the 1940s, when his associates included Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and Fats Navarro. By the 1980s the prevailing mainstream view had coalesced around hard bop so decisively that this became the accepted definition of jazz, with Art Blakey—its longest-tenured and most articulate proponent—serving as its foremost representative.

The Jazz Messengers had long functioned as a training ground for emerging players. The 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, notable graduates of Blakey’s informal academy for swing continued to rank among jazz’s leading figures, most prominently trumpeter Wynton Marsalis. Marsalis emerged as the decade’s most conspicuous emblem of the jazz mainstream; through his example, Blakey’s traditional principles came to shape public understanding of the music. At the time of Blakey’s death in 1990, the Messenger outlook held sway across jazz, and Blakey himself could reasonably be viewed as the most consequential jazz musician of the preceding twenty years.

Blakey received his earliest musical instruction through piano lessons and was already working professionally as a seventh grader while fronting his own dance-oriented group. He soon shifted to drums, absorbing the robust, propulsive approach associated with 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. After that engagement he briefly directed a Boston-based big band before joining Billy Eckstine’s newly formed ensemble, remaining with it from 1944 to 1947. Eckstine’s orchestra served as the renowned cradle of modern jazz and featured, at various points, key participants in the emerging bebop movement such as Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, and Charlie Parker. Following the group’s dissolution, Blakey organized a rehearsal big band called the Seventeen Messengers. He also made recordings with an octet that became the first ensemble to carry the name Jazz Messengers. In the early 1950s he began a close partnership with pianist Horace Silver, a kindred spirit with whom he appeared on several sessions. In 1955 the two musicians assembled a quartet that also included Hank Mobley and Kenny Dorham and billed itself as Horace Silver and the Jazz Messengers. The group embodied the rising hard bop current—vigorous, earthy, and blues-inflected—while stressing the music’s essential rhythmic and harmonic foundations. One year later Silver departed, leaving Blakey in charge. From that moment the Messengers served as Blakey’s principal outlet, although he continued to accept freelance work in other settings. Among those projects were the 1963 Impulse album A Jazz Message, recorded with McCoy Tyner, Sonny Stitt, and Art Davis; a 1971–1972 international tour with the all-star unit the Giants of Jazz alongside Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Sonny Stitt, and Al McKibbon; and a landmark drum summit with Max Roach, Elvin Jones, and Buddy Rich at the 1964 Newport Jazz Festival. Blakey also appeared frequently on recordings led by former Messengers.

Blakey’s stature as a bandleader would have been considerably smaller had he not also been an exceptional instrumentalist. No drummer propelled a group with greater force or produced more unrelenting forward motion within a single piece, and few maintained so consistently intense an energy level; he opened each performance at full intensity and sustained that drive. His accompaniments were unyielding, and any young saxophonist unable to match the pace risked being overpowered. Blakey stood apart from other bebop drummers in that his conception centered almost exclusively on the music’s physical dimensions. Whereas his peer Max Roach explored the drummer’s connection to melody and timbre, Blakey showed scant interest in such concerns. For him, jazz drumming was not a matter of tonal nuance but of rhythm—primary, secondary, and continuous. His drum kit functioned as the motor that moved the ensemble. Although this approach meant he displayed limited conceptual growth across his lengthy career, either as performer or director, and although he was never an innovator in the strict sense, Blakey executed one task with extraordinary skill, doing so with spirit and openhandedness until the close of his life.