Art Blakey

The night Blakey, who had been backing other people's records to make a living, stood up as leader of his own band. Alfred Lion's faith left behind the first record of a new current called hard bop.

• The record opens with an introduction by Birdland's emcee Pee Wee Marquette and a brief greeting from Blakey. Rudy Van Gelder recorded it live in the club, and the sense of presence is vivid, down to the clink of glasses.
• “Once in a While” is a ballad for Clifford Brown. It is considered the passage that best shows his strengths: a thick, warm tone, and melodic lines that never fray even when he lets fast notes pour out.
• “Split Kick” and “Quicksilver” are tunes Silver made by setting new melodies over the chord progressions of existing standards. Listen for Silver's blues-drenched right-hand phrases over familiar harmonies.
• At each point where the solo changes hands, Blakey rolls the snare in a sweeping rush (a press roll) to push the next player in. This signal became an emblem of hard-bop drumming.

The friendship forged on Monk's first recording in 1947 bore fruit ten years later in a single album. Monk's tunes meet the Messengers' fiery energy.

• Monk does not lay down dense chords; he comps sparsely, in jabs. Listen for the moments when Blakey's bass drum and cymbals fill those gaps and the two trade phrases as if in conversation.
• “Evidence” is a tune whose melody is built from short, clipped notes and rests. The melody deliberately slips in between the beats, catching the listener off guard.
• Tenor saxophonist Johnny Griffin was famous for his blazing fingers. The fun of this album lies in the contrast as he pours out notes over Monk's unhurried, quirky harmonies.
• In Griffin's blues “Purple Shades,” you can compare how each player brings out their own color over the blues form, in which one cycle is 12 bars.

The album with which the Messengers, joined by the young Philadelphians Golson had gathered, scored their first big success. The sound of the Black church walked right into the middle of the jazz club.

• The title track opens with call and response: the piano asks a brief question and the horns answer as if saying amen. Written by Bobby Timmons, the tune is said to have reached its 32-bar AABA form when Golson urged him to write a separate middle section (the bridge).
• Twenty-year-old Lee Morgan's trumpet solo begins with a wail-like sound, twisting notes and bending them upward. It is the most often discussed solo on the album.
• Blakey plants beats two·four firmly on the hi-hat, lending them weight. This backbeat accent, which sounds like church handclaps, gives the tune its groove.
• In Golson's “Blues March,” Blakey's drumming, rolling the snare like a military marching band, mingles with the blues. It was recorded in October 1958 at Rudy Van Gelder's Hackensack studio.

A tune by Dizzy Gillespie, his colleague from the Eckstine band days, reworked at its most ferocious by the Messengers with Wayne Shorter and Lee Morgan.

• The tune opens with Blakey's drums laying down the rhythm alone. Feel the tension as the rolling, Latin-style rhythm builds until the moment the horns come in.
• The A section of the theme is in a Latin rhythm, while the middle section shifts to swing, with four beats flowing evenly. The two rhythms alternate, giving the tune its contours.
• When the theme ends, the accompaniment stops completely and a break follows, in which the soloist alone fills a few bars. The passage where Lee Morgan crams this gap with rapid-fire notes is famous.
• In the long drum solo near the end, Blakey rolls the toms and cymbals like thunder. You can also hear his specialty of pressing an elbow into the drumhead to change its pitch.

This is the record on which the three-horn sextet burned at its wildest. Just before Shorter left the band, he and Blakey pushed each other to the very limit.

• Shorter's title track storms ahead at a blistering tempo. From first bar to last, Blakey drives the band with cymbals and snare without a pause, so that the drums sound less like accompaniment than like one more soloist.
• Shorter's tenor solo tosses out a short motif and builds on it, twisting it little by little. As it collides with Blakey's drums and grows ever fiercer, it is counted as the album's high point.
• Listen to the head, where trumpet · tenor saxophone · trombone split the harmony among them. With three horns instead of two, the layers of sound are far thicker.
• Hubbard's “The Core” and the gentle, Latin-tinged “Pensativa” show other faces of the same band.

A live recording made at Keystone Korner, a jazz club in San Francisco. It documents the last golden age of the Messengers, when Blakey, past sixty, led the Marsalis brothers, barely twenty.

• Wynton Marsalis's trumpet, Branford Marsalis's alto and Bill Pierce's tenor stand in the front line. The nimble solos of the young players contrast with the veteran's drums holding them up from behind.
• Monk's “In Walked Bud” is included. A bond formed at Monk's first recording session in 1947 was, in effect, handed down decades later to the next generation of Messengers.
• Blakey's press roll and hi-hat lift the soloists just as they did in the 1950s. His drive is undiminished — enough that it sounds as if the veteran is the one pushing the young players.
• Because it is a live club recording, the audience's response and the musicians' heat come through intact. Blakey was famous for introducing his band members himself from the stage.