Jazz Articles about Art Blakey

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Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers Return

by Russ Musto
December 14, 2004

Together, these three titles documenting four dates, each featuring a different configuration of the Jazz Messengers, clearly demonstrate Art Blakey's ability to instigate his young charges' creativity while maintaining an identifiable group sound that remained open to change.

Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers Free for All Blue Note 2004 (1964)

The earliest session, Free For All , features what was arguably the most creative edition of the Messengers on its next to last ...

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Art Blakey & the Jazz Messengers: 'S Make It

by David Rickert
September 15, 2004

The Blue Note Jazz Messengers recordings are so highly regarded that the ones the group did for other labels at around the same time tend to fall by the wayside. This shouldn't be the case; Blakey was such a determined taskmaster that he was able to get great performances out of his players on just about every occasion.

1964's 'S Make It features a transitional Messengers lineup, with Morgan returning to the fold and John Gilmore as the ...

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Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers: Blakey's Beat

by John Kelman
July 12, 2004

Art Blakey may never have strayed far from the music that captured his spirit in his youth, namely the more soulful and simple-themed variation on bebop called hard bop, but throughout the course of his fifty-plus year career, he was a constant, most notably with his Jazz Messengers band, starting in '53 and continuing until literally months before his death in '90. Blakey's Beat is part of Concord Jazz's reissue series that releases two like-minded CDs as a budget-priced two-CD ...

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Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers

by Samuel Chell
February 21, 2004

Rare and Rewarding

This concert date by Blakey, filmed during the summer of 1976 in Umbria, Italy, is visually stunning. The setting is a make-shift stage in the street, nestled among stucco houses in a space so confined as to suggest an intimate night club. The crowd is attentive and receptive, though not especially enthusiastic. Some listeners are simply peering out from open casa windows. Sartorially, this edition of the Messengers fits in particularly well. They look less like jazz ...

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Art Blakey: A Night in Tunisia

by Matt Rand
July 17, 2002

Recorded in 1957, Art Blakey's A Night in Tunisia jumps right into powerful rhythms, pounding through a full two-and-a-half minutes before a melody begins. But once begun, the melody, the chord changes, and even the solos, are all just an afterthought to the music's driving force. The force is unrelenting: when the young bassist, Spanky De Brest, cannot keep up, Blakey keeps moving forward. Included on this particular reissue are alternate takes of the first three cuts ...

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Art Blakey: A Night At Birdland, Vols. 1 and 2

by Michael Fortuna
September 1, 2001

We should all stand up right now and applaud Alfred Lion and Rudy Van Gelder of Blue Note Records for rolling the tapes at Birdland on a February night in 1954.Lion and Van Gelder captured drummer Art Blakey's quintet at the New York nightclub on a night when they were really cooking. Because of their efforts, listeners have been able to relive A Night at Birdland whenever they wanted to. Now, Van Gelder has digitally remastered the two-volume ...

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Dinah Washington: Queen of the Juke Box "Live", 1948-1955

by Dave Nathan
January 1, 2001

Ted Ono's Baldwin Street Music has rescued Dinah Washington's live performances from New York's Birdland, Royal Roost and Basin Street. There are also a couple of cuts from the soundtrack of Harlem Variety Review. It was during this period that many of her recordings consistently appeared at the top of the R & B charts. But it wasn't until her classic “What a Difference a Day Made" that she broke through to the pop charts. The first performance on the ...