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jazz musician; drummer
Personal Information
Born Arthur Blakey October 11, 1919, in Pittsburgh, PA; (later chose the name Abdullah Ibn Buhaina); died of lung cancer, October 16, 1990, in New York City; married four times; 12 children (five adopted), including Art Blakey, Jr. (deceased).
Career
Jazz drummer. Worked in steel mills and played piano in nightclubs; switched to drums; became full-time bandleader, c. 1934; member of Fletcher Henderson Orchestra, 1939; joined Mary Lou Williams's band, 1942; member of Henderson Orchestra, 1943-44; led band in Boston; member of Billy Eckstine's Orchestra, 1944-47; recorded with pianist Thelonious Monk, 1947; performed with saxophonist Charlie Parker, trumpeters Miles Davis and Clifford Brown, and pianist Horace Silver, early 1950s; Blakey and Silver formed Jazz Messengers with trumpeter Kenny Dorham, saxophonist Hank Mobley, and bassist Doug Watkins, 1955; leader of Jazz Messengers, 1956-90; toured world with Giants of Jazz, 1971-72.
Life's Work
Legendary bebop jazz drummer Art Blakey was known for his "frenetic snare drum patterns, fiery cymbals, and eccentric rhythms in a band that many credit with reshaping the face of modern jazz," according to the Los Angeles Times. He played on over 470 recordings by such jazz greats as Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis. Bebop great Dizzy Gillespie called him "the volcano" of bebop drummers, according to the Washington Post. As the leader of his ever-changing group, the Jazz Messengers, Blakey nurtured the talents and careers of numerous jazz musicians, including some stars and a few legends. Trumpeters Freddie Hubbard, Clifford Brown, Chuck Mangione, Kenny Dorham, Donald Byrd, and Wynton Marsalis, saxophonists Wayne Shorter, Johnny Griffin, Jackie McClean, Hank Mobley, trombonist Curtis Fuller, and pianists Horace Silver and JoAnne Brackeen are among the many musicians who were schooled and launched from Blakey's group. The Washington Post called Blakey's Messengers "the most valued and valuable apprenticeship in jazz." His pioneering style on the drums rivaled his accomplishments as a mentor. "He was undoubtedly one of the most original drummers of all time ... ," percussionist Max Roach told Billboard. "He heralded a new day for the instrument. His was an unmistakable sound."
Blakey was born October 11, 1919, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Marie Roddicker, who died when Blakey was just six months old. His father left before Blakey was born, and Blakey has said that his father's light-skinned, mulatto family shunned Roddicker for her dark complexion. A friend of his mother's, a woman he came to call his mother, raised Blakey with his two brothers. Blakey's formal education was troubled and erratic; he was constantly in conflict with school authorities and teachers. Pennsylvania had an integrated school system at the time, "but in our schools, especially in the junior high school, most of the teachers were white, and most of them were bigots, and I couldn't learn anything," Blakey said in an interview reprinted in Reading Jazz. He took some piano lessons in school, but was mainly self-taught on the piano in the house he grew up in. He formed a band in school, but Blakey's schooling soon took a back seat to a more grown-up life; he had a girlfriend, was bringing home a paycheck from his steel-mill job, and was playing piano in clubs at night by age 13. He married his girlfriend at age 14, and was leading his own professional dance band and had become a father by age 15.
Replaced In His Own Band
Blakey's band played for two years at a Pittsburgh club called the Ritz before Blakey replaced himself on piano with Erroll Garner and took a seat at the drums. He played with numerous local bands before landing in pianist Mary Lou Williams's band at the club Kelly's Stable in New York City in 1942. He began playing in Fletcher Henderson's band the next year. He toured the South, where he found himself in trouble with the police and was severely beaten. "At that time the South was very rough," he is quoted as saying in Reading Jazz. He recovered in Boston, and was leading his own group there, when he met singer Billy Eckstine. In 1944, in St. Louis, he joined Eckstine's pioneering new bebop band, where he found the freedom to develop his own style. In bands like Duke Ellington's or Count Basie's, Blakey recalled in Reading Jazz, the drummer is "the timekeeper.... it's like 15 musicians and a drummer. In Billy Eckstine's band, there were 16 musicians, and everybody got to play, and that made a difference.... I knew I had to identify myself, and I had to play different." Blakey's band mates in the Eckstine group included saxophonists Charlie Parker and Dexter Gordon, Dizzy Gillespie, trumpet player Miles Davis, singer Sarah Vaughn, and pianist Thelonious Monk.
Blakey cited drummers Chick Webb, Kenny Clarke, Ray Bauduc, Gene Krupa, and Big Sid Catlett among his influences. Webb took a young Blakey under his wing, and forced him to perform hours of "rolling" drills on a snare drum, building his talents. Drummers Clarke and Max Roach are featured predominantly on the bebop recordings of the era, but Blakey "soon became the pre-eminent leader of the hard-bop movement," which "combined bebop's instrumental freedoms with a surging gospel backbeat," according to the Encyclopedia of Popular Music.
Blakey stayed with Eckstine until the band's demise in 1947, then led his own group for a short time. The 17 Messengers, as his group was called, recorded for the Blue Note record label in 1947. Blue Note Records owner Alfred Lion first saw Blakey play with Eckstine, and made him the label's house drummer. The 17 Messengers--which included saxophonist Sonny Rollins and pianist Bud Powell--played around New York for a while, but didn't earn enough money and soon disbanded. Blakey escaped to Africa to study the culture and Islamic religion from 1948 to 1949. "I didn't go to Africa to study drums ... I went to Africa because there wasn't anything else for me to do," Blakey said in a 1979 interview reprinted in Down Beat. "I couldn't get any gigs, and I had to work my way over on the boat. I went over there to study religion and philosophy." For a while after his conversion to Islam, Blakey was known as Abdullah ibn Buhaina, which earned him the nickname "Bu."
Tired Of Jam Sessions
Blakey worked with Lucky Millender's band upon his return to the States in 1949, and recorded and performed with various artists, including Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Horace Silver, and Buddy DeFranco. A couple of years after his 17 Messengers dissolved, Blakey recorded an impromptu live record at New York's Birdland jazz club with Clifford Brown, Horace Silver, Curley Russell, and Lou Donaldson. A Night of Birdland was released on Blue Note. But Blakey wanted a more permanent group. "We were tired of the jam-session thing," he told Down Beat, "where you'd get some guys together, go out, and trust to luck." After a 1954 recording session with Silver, the two formed a quintet and dubbed themselves the Jazz Messengers. The group included Blakey, Silver, trumpeter Kenny Dorham, saxophonist Hank Mobley, and bassist Doug Watkins.
Silver passed sole leadership to Blakey when he left the group in 1956. "He's one of the greatest drummers of our time," Silver is quoted as saying in USA Today. "He was a definite stylist. Nobody could out-swing Art Blakey." The group's signature became its ever-changing lineup, while the name remained the same. When one musician would set off on his own, he usually would help Blakey find a replacement, an unproven newcomer. When someone would leave the group, "Then the kids bring in another musician, and if he works out spiritually with the cats, then straight ahead he gets the music going," Blakey told Down Beat. That ever-changing lineup defined the band's personality, but not its sound. "Every band that he grabbed, even though it had a different set of musicians, always sounded like Art Blakey," former Messenger Javon Jackson told Down Beat writer Robin Tolleson.
Blakey "forced his musicians to dig into themselves and play to their capacity, play hard and smart, make their notes and ideas count," wrote Harrington in the Washington Post. Often times, he would pull a musician aside and tell him it was time for him to move on. "When you got to a certain point, he kicked you out, he knew you were ready," former Messengers saxophonist and musical director Bobby Watson told Robin Tolleson in Down Beat. "He used to say: 'You've been around the world with me, made records, seen what I do. Now it's time for you to go out and give it a try.'" Trumpeter Freddie Hubbard agreed. "Everybody that comes out of his group is a leader," he was quoted as saying in USA Today. "You had to be a leader. There was nowhere else to go when you got through with the messengers." Though he always denied the role of teacher, Blakey "understood the responsibilities that come with mature artistry, chief of which is the development of an informed progeny," Wynton Marsalis told Billboard. "His life was given to educating younger musicians and entertaining his adoring public. He himself was a messenger of the highest human ideologies, of love, and of joy, and he brought an accurate musical portrait of America to the world."
Had No Room For Stars
"A Jazz Messenger performance was never a jam session, but a succession of succinct solos," Richard Harrington wrote in a Washington Post obituary. Blakey encouraged all members to write music, which the group would play, but the spotlight shone on no one member. "On this tune we feature ... no one in particular!" was a favorite stage line of Blakey's. "I've got no room for no stars," he said in the Down Beat interview. "The Jazz Messengers is the star--all of us together. The leader of the band is Art Blakey, and the star is the group. We do it together. I don't believe in throwing a soloist out there; you are not supposed to be in competition with him.... By making him sound better, I help myself sound better."
After forming the Jazz Messengers, Blakey continued to record on his own with such artists as Sonny Rollins, Milt Jackson, Cannonball Adderley, and Hank Mobley. He also worked with Thelonious Monk's historic 1957 group, which included Coleman Hawkins and John Coltrane, but rarely performed live without the Jazz Messengers. He recorded Something in Blue and The Man I Love, with Monk's trio in London in 1971. Those recordings are "perhaps his most impressive achievements as a player," according to the Encyclopedia of Popular Music. Blakey temporarily left the Messengers in 1971 and 1972 to play on the Giants of Jazz tour with Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, and others.
Blakey faced the resentment of some blacks for welcoming whites and Asians into the Messengers. A fierce defender of racial equality, Blakey knew "a lot of blacks ... would talk about it behind my back," according to the Los Angeles Times. His audience was more white than black, and for this Blakey blamed black radio stations for not playing jazz. Though he toured extensively throughout the world, he preferred Brazil, Germany, and Japan for "the way you are treated as a human being," he said, according to the Los Angeles Times. Blakey has played at special Messengers reunions, most notably at the 1981 Kool Festival, in Japan in 1983, and at the 1985 Blue Note relaunch concert. One night of the 1981 Newport Jazz Festival was dedicated to "The Blakey Legacy," and Messengers from the previous 25 years joined the drummer onstage. Tolleson wrote that discussing the many lineups of the Jazz Messengers "is like comparing different classic New York Yankee teams." The original quintet became more frequently a sextet in 1961, and played on a 1980 tour as a ten-piece.
"Just Having Fun"
Blakey remained a champion of acoustic jazz through the synthesized-jazz trends of the 1970s. "Jazz is an art form, and you have to choose," Blakey once said, according to the Boston Globe. "The record company executives with an eye on trends said to me, 'Well Blakey, if you update your music and change it, put a little rock in there, you'll come along.' I will not prostitute my art for that. It's not worth it. Gain the world and lose your soul? It's no good." Former Jazz Messengers Wynton Marsalis and Terence Blanchard led the hard-bop movement of the 1980s. Blakey's influence spread to England, and the emergence of such hard-bop Britains as Courtney Pine and Steve Williamson.
To Blakey, jazz was not a complicated science. "You know what's happening when we are on the bandstand?" he said in Down Beat. "We are having fun.... just enjoy yourself. Who knows, maybe the next set you won't be here." Anyone who saw him play saw him with his mouth and eyes wide open in a combination of excitement and concentration, his feet pumping and his arms flailing. He was "perhaps the most emotionally unbridled drummer in jazz, and there are times when his backgrounds resemble a brush fire," critic Nat Hentoff once said, according to the Los Angeles Times. Blakey kept up his performance schedule with the Messengers literally until he was hospitalized for lung cancer. He returned from one of many tours of Japan with what he thought was pneumonia. He died five days after his 71st birthday, on May 16, 1990, at St. Vincent's hospital in New York.
Awards
Down Beat New Star Award, 1953; Grammy Award (with Jazz Messengers) for Best Jazz Instrumental Performance (Group), 1984, for New York Scene; honorary doctorate, Berklee College of Music, 1987; Northsea Festival Charlie Parker Award, 1989.
Works
Selected discography
Further Reading
Books
— Brenna Sanchez
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| Art Blakey | |
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Blakey in 1985
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| Background information | |
| Birth name | Arthur Blakey |
| Also known as | Abdullah Ibn Buhaina |
| Born | October 11, 1919 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S. |
| Died | October 16, 1990 (aged 71) New York City, New York, U.S. |
| Genres | Hard bop Bebop |
| Occupations | Drummer, bandleader |
| Instruments | Drums, percussion |
| Years active | 1942–1990 |
| Labels | Blue Note Records |
| Associated acts | Art Blakey & the Jazz Messengers Art Blakey Quartet Art Blakey Quintet Art Blakey & the Afrocuban Boys |
| Website | http://www.artblakey.com/ |
Arthur "Art" Blakey (October 11, 1919 – October 16, 1990),[1] also known as Abdullah Ibn Buhaina, was an American jazz drummer and bandleader.
Along with Kenny Clarke and Max Roach, he was one of the inventors of the modern bebop style of drumming. He is known as a powerful musician and a vital groover; his brand of bluesy, funky hard bop was (and remains) profoundly influential on mainstream jazz. For more than 30 years his band the Jazz Messengers included many young musicians who went on to become prominent names in jazz. The band's legacy is thus not only known for the often exceptionally fine music it produced, but as a proving ground for several generations of jazz musicians;[2] Blakey's groups are matched only by those of Miles Davis in this regard.[3] He was a member of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community.
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Blakey was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. By the time he was a teenager he was playing the piano full-time, leading a commercial band. Shortly afterwards, he taught himself to play the drums in the aggressive swing style of Chick Webb, Sid Catlett and Ray Bauduc. He joined Mary Lou Williams as a drummer for an engagement in New York in autumn 1942. He then toured with the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra (1943–4). During his years with Billy Eckstine’s big band (1944–7) Blakey became associated with the modern-jazz movement, along with his fellow band members Miles Davis, Dexter Gordon, Fats Navarro and others.[4]
In 1947 Blakey organized the Seventeen Messengers, a rehearsal band, and recorded with an octet called the Jazz Messengers. He claimed that he then travelled to Africa. Unfortunately, no documentation has been uncovered that supports this claim. In the early 1950s he performed and broadcast with such musicians as Charlie Parker, Miles Davis and Clifford Brown, and particularly with Horace Silver, his kindred musical spirit of this time. Blakey and Silver recorded together on several occasions, including the album A Night at Birdland (1954, BN), having formed in 1953 a cooperative group with Hank Mobley and Kenny Dorham, retaining the name Jazz Messengers. By 1956 Silver had left and the leadership of this important band passed to Blakey, and he remained associated with it until his death. It was the archetypal hard-bop group of the late 1950s, playing a driving, aggressive extension of bop with pronounced blues roots. Over the years the Jazz Messengers served as a springboard for young jazz musicians such as Donald Byrd, Johnny Griffin, Lee Morgan, Wayne Shorter, Freddie Hubbard, Keith Jarrett, Chuck Mangione, Woody Shaw, JoAnne Brackeen and Wynton Marsalis. Blakey also made a world tour in 1971–2 with the Giants of Jazz (with Dizzy Gillespie, Kai Winding, Sonny Stitt, Thelonious Monk and Al McKibbon). [4]
From his earliest recording sessions with Eckstine, and particularly in his historic sessions with Monk in 1947, Blakey exuded power and originality, creating a dark cymbal sound punctuated by frequent loud snare- and bass-drum accents in triplets or cross-rhythms. Although Blakey discouraged comparison of his own music with African drumming, he adopted several African devices after his visit in 1948–9, including rapping on the side of the drum and using his elbow on the tom-tom to alter the pitch. His much-imitated trademark, the forceful closing of the hi-hat on every second and fourth beat, was part of his style from 1950 to '51. A loud and domineering drummer, Blakey also listened and responded to his soloists. His contribution to jazz as a discoverer and molder of young talent over three decades was no less significant than his very considerable innovations on his instrument. [4]
In the 1940s, Blakey was a member of bands led by Mary Lou Williams, Fletcher Henderson, and Billy Eckstine.[1] He converted to Islam during a visit to West Africa in the late 1940s and took the name Abdullah Ibn Buhaina (which led to the nickname "Bu"). By the late forties and early fifties, Blakey was backing musicians such as Miles Davis, Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk — he is often considered to have been Monk's most empathetic drummer,[5] and he played on both Monk's first recording session as a leader (for Blue Note Records in 1947) and his final one (in London in 1971), as well as many in between.
Up to the 1960s Blakey also recorded as a sideman with many other musicians: Jimmy Smith, Herbie Nichols, Cannonball Adderley, Grant Green, and Jazz Messengers graduates Lee Morgan and Hank Mobley, amongst many others. However, after the mid-1960s he mostly concentrated on his own work as a leader.[1]
The origins of the Messengers are in a series of groups led or co-led by Blakey and pianist Horace Silver, though the name was not used on the earliest of their recordings. The most celebrated of these early records (credited to "The Art Blakey Quintet"), is A Night at Birdland from February 1954,[citation needed] one of the earliest commercially released "live" jazz records. This featured Silver, Blakey, the young trumpeter Clifford Brown, alto saxophonist Lou Donaldson and bassist Curly Russell. The "Jazz Messengers" name was first used on a 1954 recording nominally led by Silver, with Blakey, Hank Mobley, Kenny Dorham and Doug Watkins — the same quintet would record The Jazz Messengers at the Cafe Bohemia the following year, still as a collective. Donald Byrd replaced Dorham, and the group recorded an album called simply The Jazz Messengers for Columbia Records in 1956. Blakey took over the group name when Silver left after the band's first year (taking Mobley, Byrd and Watkins with him to form a new quintet with a variety of drummers), and the band was known as "Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers" from then onwards.
From 1959 to 1961 the group featured Wayne Shorter on tenor saxophone, Jymie Merritt, Lee Morgan, and Bobby Timmons.[1] The second line-up (1961–1964) was a sextet that added trombonist Curtis Fuller and replaced Morgan and Timmons with Freddie Hubbard and Cedar Walton, respectively.[1] Shorter was the musical director of the group, and many of his original compositions such as "Lester Left Town" remained staples of Blakey's repertoire even after Shorter's departure. (Other players over the years made permanent marks on Blakey's repertoire — Timmons, composer of "Dat Dere" and "Moanin'", Benny Golson, composer of "Along Came Betty" and "Are You Real", and, later, Bobby Watson.) Shorter's more experimental inclinations pushed the band at the time into an engagement with the 1960s "New Thing", as it was called: the influence of Coltrane's contemporary records on Impulse! is evident on Free For All (1964), often cited as the greatest document of the Shorter-era Messengers (and certainly one of the most fearsomely powerful examples of hard bop on record).[citation needed]
Blakey went on to record dozens of albums with a constantly changing group of Jazz Messengers — he had a policy of encouraging young musicians: as he remarked on-mike on A Night at Birdland (1954): "I'm gonna stay with the youngsters. When these get too old I'll get some younger ones. Keeps the mind active."[1] After weathering the fusion era in the 1970s with some difficulty (recordings from this period are less plentiful and include attempts to incorporate instruments like electric piano), Blakey's band got revitalized in the early 1980s with the advent of neotraditionalist jazz. Wynton Marsalis was for a time the band's trumpeter and musical director, and even after Marsalis's departure Blakey's band continued as a proving ground for many "Young Lions" like Terence Blanchard, Donald Harrison and Kenny Garrett. Blakey continued performing and touring with the group into the late 1980s, and he died in 1990 of lung cancer in New York City, leaving behind a vast legacy and approach to jazz which is still the model for countless hard-bop players.[1]
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Joanne Brackeen, Donald Brown, Walter Davis, Jr., Sam Dockery, Kenny Drew, Benny Green, John Hicks, Keith Jarrett, Geoffrey Keezer, Mulgrew Miller, Johnny O'Neal, Horace Silver, Bobby Timmons, Cedar Walton, James Williams
Dale Barlow, Gary Bartz, Kenny Garrett, Lou Donaldson, John Gilmore, Benny Golson, Johnny Griffin, Billy Harper, Donald Harrison, Javon Jackson, Branford Marsalis, Jackie McLean, Hank Mobley, Bill Pierce, David Schnitter, Wayne Shorter, Ira Sullivan, Jean Toussaint, Bobby Watson
Terence Blanchard, Clifford Brown, Donald Byrd, Kenny Dorham, Bill Hardman, Philip Harper, Freddie Hubbard, Brian Lynch, Chuck Mangione, Wynton Marsalis, Lee Morgan, Woody Shaw, Valery Ponomarev, Charles Tolliver
Steve Davis, Robin Eubanks, Curtis Fuller, Frank Lacy
Spanky DeBrest, Charles Fambrough, Dennis Irwin, Jymie Merritt, Curly Russell, Victor Sproles, Doug Watkins, Wilbur Ware, Reggie Workman
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