In 1953 Drummer Art Blakey and Pianist Horace Silver Started a Group Known as

As any well-read jazz fan will know, Art Blakey was and so much more than a powerhouse drummer armed with a swashbuckling, polyrhythmic manner. He was also a charismatic bandleader who co-founded The Jazz Messengers and led the legendary group from 1956 until his decease in 1990. During that fourth dimension, the band – which became known as "The Hard Bop Academy" – saw 167 immature musicians come through its ranks, many of whom would later rise to become stars in their own correct.

Like Miles Davis, Fine art Blakey found inspiration and revitalizing new energy from working with musicians much younger than himself. When he was introducing his band onstage at New York's Birdland venue in 1954, he uttered these famous words: "Yes, sir, I'1000 going to stay with the youngsters – when these go as well former, I'm going to go some younger ones. It keeps the mind active." Equally every jazz fan knows, Blakey stayed truthful to those words throughout his long career.

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A born leader

Arthur William Blakey was built-in on October eleven, 1919, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, but never knew his parents. According to the drummer, who grew up in the Hill District of the city, as a child he was raised by a series of stepmothers – including his maternal grandmother – following the death of his own mother when he was 21 months erstwhile. By the time his mother died, his begetter had already left the scene.

Life was tough for young Art Blakey. As a teenager, he was expelled from school and began working in a steel mill but aspired to become a piano player. Self-taught, Blakey wasn't, by all accounts, a very good pianist (he played by ear and could but play in one key). Legend has it that he was forced to switch from piano to drums after a gangster in a club where Blakey was playing threatened to shoot him if he didn't go backside a drum kit. From that bespeak onwards, Art Blakey devoted himself to being a drummer.

Blakey was a born leader and started fronting his own groups as early equally 1933, when he was 14. On his musical travels he encountered noted drummers Chick Webb and "Big" Sid Catlett, who gave him invaluable advice about playing his musical instrument. By 1944, Blakey'due south stature in the jazz earth had grown considerably, and so much so that the popular singer Baton Eckstine asked him to join his proto-bebop band, which at that fourth dimension included Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. When Eckstine broke up the group, Blakey began freelancing in New York and played on Thelonious Monk sessions for Blueish Note Records in 1947 (later the same year, he would release his first recordings for the label in the shape of two 78s attributed to Art Blakey's Messengers).

Birth of The Jazz Messengers

After a trip to Africa in 1948, where he converted to Islam (and took the name Abdullah Ibn Buhaina), Blakey put together a curt-lived large band called The Seventeen Messengers. Five years later, in 1953, the drummer joined forces with pianist Horace Silver to form a quintet that pioneered a new kind of energized, bebop-based small-group jazz that drew inspiration from gospel music and dejection. Its practitioners called it "difficult bop" and, on a live 1954 album recorded for Blue Note called A Night At Birdland, Blakey and Silver's quintet established the pattern for that particular new audio and style. Shortly afterwards, they adopted the name The Jazz Messengers, though Silvery departed in 1956, leaving Blakey at the helm. For the next 34 years, Blakey would guide the grouping, which stayed true to its difficult bop roots despite its ever-irresolute personnel.

A prolific recording deed, The Jazz Messengers released a multitude of albums for myriad record labels, ranging from majors such every bit Columbia and Impulse! to jazz indies Bethlehem and Riverside. They are chiefly remembered, though, for their productive association with Alfred Lion'south Blue Note label, where they enjoyed two split stints betwixt 1958-61 and 1964-65. Arguably the peak of their work for Blue Note is the anthology Moanin', recorded in 1958, when Blakey was 39, and featuring the archetype title tune that epitomized The Jazz Messengers' difficult bop artful.

The 50s and early on 60s was a particularly fertile time for The Jazz Messengers. Those that graduated from the band during that menstruation included trumpeters Donald Byrd, Lee Morgan, and Freddie Hubbard; saxophonists Hank Mobley, Johnny Griffin, Jackie McLean, Benny Golson, and Wayne Shorter; and pianists Horace Silver, Bobby Timmons, and Cedar Walton.

Later years and death

As the 60s progressed, hard bop cruel out of favor and was deemed passé in comparing with free jazz, a more revolutionary approach to the music as favored by the likes of trailblazers Ornette Coleman, Eric Dolphy, and Albert Ayler. Even and then, Blakey persisted with hard bop and, every bit always, brought fresh claret into his band equally the decade progressed; among the new recruits were Keith Jarrett and horn players such as Gary Bartz and Chuck Mangione.

The late 60s witnessed a three-year period where Blakey was without a record bargain, but in the following decade there was something of a Jazz Messengers renaissance, with Blakey putting together several new incarnations of the band and recording for a number of different labels. The musicians that appeared with the group during this time included trumpeter Woody Shaw, pianist Joanne Brackeen (the first female member of the ring), and bassist Stanley Clarke.

In 1981, the Jazz Messengers boasted an exciting young horn god in its ranks, the rising New Orleans trumpet star Wynton Marsalis, who would go on to carve out a stellar solo career for himself. By 1990, Blakey's long-running band were back with a major characterization, A&M, and released an anthology called I For All. It turned out to exist the Messengers' swan song, as Blakey succumbed to lung cancer five days after his 71st birthday, on October 16 of that year.

Fine art Blakey'due south legacy

Fine art Blakey was a lot of things during his 71 years: ladies' man, gourmet, philosopher, teacher, mentor, bigamist, drug addict, and a father of ten children. Only, to a higher place all else, he was a consummate musician whose raison d'être was spreading the jazz gospel. He played the drums with verve and a propulsive sense of swing combined with unremitting power, and led his band with an avuncular say-so, inspiring those playing with him to up their game and play harder, louder, and with more creative fire. Too his many recordings with The Jazz Messengers, Blakey left behind many fine solo albums.

His, then, is a rich and storied musical legacy that continues to inspire new generations of listeners and musicians. For the road-hardened Blakey, jazz was more than just music, it was a fashion of life. And it possessed the power to cleanse, heal and uplift. Or, every bit he once famously said: "Jazz washes abroad the grit of everyday life."

Looking for more? Discover the best jazz drummers of all time.

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Source: https://www.udiscovermusic.com/stories/art-blakey-jazz-messenger-hard-bop-drummer/

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