Art Blakey

By 1960 the Morgan-Shorter front line had become one of the defining sounds of hard bop. The two of them had a chemistry that was almost physical, Morgan all heat and urgency, Shorter already probing for something slightly outside the expected, and Blakey behind them providing a rhythmic intensity that left no room for half measures.

Wayne Shorter on this record is in a transitional moment. You can hear the young player who has absorbed the hard bop vocabulary trying to figure out what comes next. The phrases he plays are correct in every technical sense and they swing hard, but there is already something restless in them, a quality of searching that the other players on the date do not quite share. It is fascinating to hear in retrospect, knowing where that restlessness eventually led.

"The Big Beat" is the obvious centerpiece, a feature for Blakey that lets him do what he did best. He builds a groove so deep and wide that the soloists have no choice but to swing. Bobby Timmons contributes "Dat Dere," one of his best tunes, a melody simple enough to hum after one hearing but harmonically interesting enough to sustain serious improvisation.

This is not quite the classic that Moanin' is, but it is an excellent record by a band operating at full strength, and it captures the Morgan-Shorter edition of the Messengers at a peak moment.

This is the Morgan-Shorter-Timmons Messengers captured in the studio at their most unleashed. Wayne Shorter had joined the band the year before, replacing Hank Mobley after the Golson era, bringing a harder, more angular compositional voice, and the effect on the group's identity was immediate. The August 14, 1960 Van Gelder session produced material that would feed both this LP and the Meet You at the Jazz Corner of the World records that followed.

The title track is a Dizzy Gillespie composition that the Messengers had been playing since the Birdland sessions, but this version takes it somewhere new. Morgan's solo builds across multiple choruses with a logic that feels both spontaneous and inevitable, and when Shorter comes in after him there is no letdown, just a different kind of attack on the same material.

Wayne Shorter's "Sincerely Diana" and "Yama" sit alongside Bobby Timmons's "So Tired," and the contrast between Shorter's harmonically restless writing and Timmons's gospel-rooted grounding gives the album its internal balance. Timmons brings the kind of percussive comping that lets even the most adventurous playing from the horn section feel anchored.

The version of "So Tired" is one of the most beautifully played ballads in the Messengers catalog. Morgan could play a ballad with a tenderness that surprised people who only knew his uptempo playing, and here he demonstrates it fully. This is the last great studio document of the Morgan-Timmons Messengers lineup before both men departed.

The Freedom Rider is one of the last records from the Morgan-Shorter-Timmons lineup, recorded across two sessions in February and May 1961. The title track is a seven-and-a-half-minute solo drum composition by Blakey, named in honor of the Freedom Riders, the civil rights activists who were risking their lives on interstate buses that same year. Blakey's political consciousness surfaces here in the most direct way his music ever allowed: not through words but through sheer physical force.

Wayne Shorter's compositions were becoming increasingly important to the Messengers' identity at this point, and his writing here has a directness that matches the urgency of the album's theme. Morgan plays with all the confidence and fire of someone who has been in this chair for three years and knows exactly what the band needs from him. Bobby Timmons contributes his final great performances as a Messenger, his gospel-rooted comping providing the harmonic foundation that would soon pass to other hands.

Kenny Dorham's "Petty Larceny" is a highlight, the kind of swinging hard bop theme that lets the soloists stretch out without losing the thread. Morgan and Shorter were by now a practiced front line, and their contrasting approaches to improvisation, Morgan's melodic directness against Shorter's oblique angles, give the music a constant internal tension.

This is the final chapter of the Morgan-Timmons Messengers, and it is a strong one. Within months, both would be gone, replaced by Freddie Hubbard and Cedar Walton, beginning a new era. But the band documented here is playing at the peak of its collective identity.

Recorded in late 1961 with the new sextet lineup, this session shows how quickly the new lineup had coalesced into something genuinely formidable. The self-assurance on this record is total. There is no searching, no adjustment period, just a band that has found exactly what it is and plays it with complete conviction.

Freddie Hubbard is the dominant personality here, and that is saying something given the quality of the musicians around him. His range on the trumpet was exceptional even by the standards of his generation, and on tracks like "Contemplation" and "Bu's Delight" he uses every part of it, moving from warm singing tones in the lower register to brilliant upper-register cries without any apparent effort.

Wayne Shorter's "Contemplation" may be one of the most perfectly constructed hard bop themes ever committed to record. Long enough to be interesting, concise enough to never overstay its welcome, and with a harmonic movement that opens up exactly the right amount of space for improvisation. Cedar Walton's solo on this track is as good as he ever played on a Messengers date.

Blakey titled the album after his Muslim name, Abdullah Ibn Buhaina, and there is something appropriate about that. This is a personal statement, an album that declares exactly who this band is without apology or qualification. One of the great hard bop records.

Adding Curtis Fuller on trombone gave the Messengers a three-horn front line that could handle musical problems a quintet simply could not. Fuller's trombone added a bottom to the ensemble voicings that made the whole band sound larger than it was, and his solo voice was distinctive enough to hold his own alongside Hubbard and Shorter without either blending into invisibility or standing out awkwardly.

The Duke Ellington and Juan Tizol title track is where this configuration makes its fullest statement. The arrangement builds from a percussion-heavy intro through a long, expansive statement of the theme before the improvisations begin, and by the time Hubbard gets to his solo the band is so deep in the pocket that his phrases practically play themselves.

Cedar Walton's "Off the Top" is a different kind of showcase, a more harmonically complex piece that gives Shorter an opportunity to display the particular intelligence of his thinking in an improvisational setting. His solos on the Riverside records have a density that the Blue Note dates did not always allow.

As a document of the sextet edition of the Messengers, this may be the definitive record. The three-horn sound has a richness that the quintet could not match, and on this session every one of those voices is operating at peak capability. One of the best of the Blakey catalog.

Live at Birdland, and everything that implies. The full title on the original Riverside sleeve was "Ugetsu: Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers at Birdland," and the room sound is essential to what this record is. The Van Gelder studio's controlled clarity traded for the liveness of a New York club: audience reactions, the band responding to the audience responding to them, the kind of feedback loop that pulls performances somewhere studio dates cannot quite reach.

Reggie Workman replaces Jymie Merritt on bass and the shift is noticeable. Workman had a way of pushing the beat slightly differently, more forward-leaning, and it gives the rhythm section a slightly different energy. He and Cedar Walton and Blakey as a rhythm section unit are formidable in a very specific way: they make the soloists feel like they can do anything.

Wayne Shorter's solo on "On the Ginza" is the kind of improvisation people cite when they argue that this period of the Messengers was the equal of anything else happening in jazz at the time. He builds across choruses with a structural logic that feels simultaneously planned and entirely spontaneous, and the rhythm section behind him is locked in with an intensity that could not be sustained much longer.

The title is a reference to a film by Kenji Mizoguchi, which tells you something about the cultural curiosity that characterized this version of the band. The Cedar Walton title track and Shorter's "On the Ginza" were composed as a deliberate nod to the band's recent Japanese tour. This is a record that knows it is great. You can hear it.

By early 1964, the avant-garde was impossible to ignore and the Messengers knew it. Ornette Coleman had released Free Jazz two years earlier. Coltrane was in the middle of his most experimental period. The ground was shifting, and this session is the sound of Art Blakey refusing to get left behind while also refusing to abandon the thing he had built.

The title track is one of the most intense performances in the entire Blakey catalog. It opens with Blakey alone, a long drum introduction that establishes a different kind of time, less metronomic, more like a force of nature, before the band enters and the whole thing lifts off into something that is still recognizably hard bop but pushing against the walls of that category with everything it has.

Wayne Shorter's "Hammer Head" is a perfect composition for this particular band and this particular moment. The theme is angular enough to acknowledge what was happening in the wider jazz world but rhythmically grounded enough that Blakey can play it with his full personality. Hubbard's solo here is possibly the most concentrated display of his abilities that the Messengers ever recorded.

Cedar Walton and Reggie Workman give everything on this date. The rhythm section plays with a freedom that the early Messengers records did not always permit, responding to what the soloists do rather than simply keeping the structure intact. This is the sound of a great band at the edge of what it knew how to do, and deciding to go further anyway.

Lee Morgan came back, and the reunion felt like a statement. Morgan had left the Messengers after Moanin' and had built a considerable solo career in the intervening years. Coming back to the band as a more experienced musician, alongside a more experienced version of the band, produced something different from either the original Morgan era or the Hubbard years that preceded this session.

The presence of both Morgan and Curtis Fuller alongside Wayne Shorter gives this record a three-horn richness that few Messengers dates achieved. The ensemble passages have a weight and complexity that the smaller lineups could not generate, and on the rubato sections in particular the layering of voices does things that are genuinely surprising.

Morgan had grown during his years away from the Messengers. The bravado is still there, that quality of playing at maximum intensity without apparent strain, but it sits alongside a maturity that was not as present on the Moanin' session. He and Shorter generate a genuine creative tension throughout, two completely different approaches to the horn coexisting in the same ensemble without either compromising.

Cedar Walton and Reggie Workman form the kind of rhythm section partnership that takes years to develop. They know how each other moves and they use that knowledge to create a bottom that supports the horns without ever becoming predictable. A worthy close to the classic Blue Note era of the Messengers.

Seventeen years after Indestructible, Art Blakey was still running the Jazz Messengers and still finding young musicians who needed exactly what only he could give them. The 1981 band was built around a twenty-year-old trumpet player from New Orleans named Wynton Marsalis, and if you had any doubt that Blakey's talent for discovering talent had not diminished with age, this record erases it.

Marsalis in 1981 was not yet the fully formed artist he would become. But you can hear the capability already locked in, that pure trumpet tone and the technical facility that was already drawing comparisons to Clifford Brown. He plays with a confidence that seems almost unreasonable for his age, and Blakey, who had heard that same quality in Morgan and Hubbard before him, put him in exactly the right environment to show it.

Bobby Watson on alto is the other revelation. Watson had his own fully realized voice by this point, a lyrical quality that balanced the more aggressive tendencies of the group, and his compositions contributed significantly to what this version of the band sounded like. James Williams on piano brought a sophistication that connected directly to the Cedar Walton tradition without simply imitating it.

Blakey had been doing this for thirty years at this point and had not lost a thing. The intensity is still there, the commitment to making the young musicians around him play better than they thought they could is still there, and most importantly the conviction that hard bop was not nostalgia but a living thing is absolutely present. One of the great late-career recordings in jazz.