Art Blakey

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

• A Night at Birdland, Vols. 1-3 (live), Blue Note, 1954.
• Blakey with the Jazz Messengers, EmArcy, 1954.
• At the Cafe Bohemia, Vols. 1-3 (live), Blue Note, 1955.
• The Jazz Messengers, Columbia/Legacy, 1956.
• Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers, Columbia, 1956.
• Orgy in Rhythm, Vols. 1-2, Blue Note, 1957.
• Holiday for Skins, Vols. 1-2, Blue Note, 1958.
• Des Femmes Disparaissent, Fontana, 1958.
• The Freedom Rider, Blue Note, 1961.
• Free for All, Blue Note, 1964.
• Buttercorn Lady, Limelight, 1966.
• Moanin'; (live), LaserLight, 1968.
• Anthenagin, Prestige, 1973.
• A Night in Tunisia, Polygram, 1979.
• Live at Montreux and Northsea, Timeless, 1980.
• Album of the Year, Timeless, 1981.
• Straight Ahead, Concord Jazz, 1981.
• Keystone 3, Concord Jazz, 1982.
• Art Blakey & The All Star Messengers, RCA, 1982.
• New York Scene, Concord Jazz, 1984.
• Dr. Jeckyl: Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers (live), Evidence, 1985.
• Cafe Bohemia, Vols. 1-2: 1955 (live), Giants of Jazz, 1999.
• Southern Devils: Paris Jazz Concert--May ...; (live), Malaco, 2000.
• Live in Europe: 1959, Tokuma Japan, 2000.
• Live at Ronnie Scott's, BBC Legends, 2000
• Night in Tunisia, RCA/Bluebird, 2002.

Further Reading

Books

• Carr, Ian, Fairweather, Digby, Priestley, Brian, Jazz: The Essential Companion, Prentice Hall Press, 1987.
• Chilton, John, Who's Who of Jazz, Da Capo, 1985.
• Claghorn, Charles Eugene, Biographical Dictionary of Jazz, Prentice-Hall, 1982.
• Gottlieb, Robert, editor, Reading Jazz: A Gathering of Autobiography, Reporting, and Criticism from 1919 to Now, Pantheon Books, 1996.
• Kernfeld, Barry, editor, New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, St. Martin's Press, 1994.
• Larkin, Colin, editor, Encyclopedia of Popular Music, Muze UK, Ltd., 1998.

Periodicals

• Billboard, October 27, 1990, p. 6.
• Boston Globe, October 21, 1990, p. A22.
• Down Beat, June 1994, p. 34; July 1999, p. 56.
• Los Angeles Times, October 17, 1990, p. A20.
• USA Today, October 17, 1990, p. 4D.
• Washington Post, October 17, 1990, p. D8; October 21, 1990, p. G1.

Online

• All Music Guide Online, http://www.allmusic.com (August 20, 2002).

— Brenna Sanchez

For more information on Art Blakey, visit Britannica.com.

• Born: October 11, 1919, Pittsburgh, PA
• Died: October 16, 1990, New York, NY
• Active: '40s, '50s, '60s, '70s, '80s, '90s
• Genres: Jazz
• Instrument: Drums, Leader
• Representative Albums: "Moanin'," "The Complete Blue Note Recordings of Art Blakey's 1960 Jazz Messengers," "A Night at Birdland, Vols. 1-3"
• Representative Songs: "Moanin'," "A Night in Tunisia," "Free for All"

Biography

In the '60s, when John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman were defining the concept of a jazz avant-garde, few knowledgeable observers would have guessed that in another 30 years the music's mainstream would virtually bypass their innovations, in favor of the hard bop style that free jazz had apparently supplanted. As it turned out, many listeners who had come to love jazz as a sophisticated manifestation of popular music were unable to accept the extreme esotericism of the avant-garde; their tastes were rooted in the core elements of "swing" and "blues," characteristics found in abundance in the music of the Jazz Messengers, the quintessential hard bop ensemble led by drummer Art Blakey. In the '60s, '70s, and '80s, when artists on the cutting edge were attempting to transform the music, Blakey continued to play in more or less the same bag he had since the '40s, when his cohorts included the likes of Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and Fats Navarro. By the '80s, the evolving mainstream consensus had reached a point of overwhelming approval in regard to hard bop: this is what jazz is, and Art Blakey -- as its longest-lived and most eloquent exponent -- was its master.

The Jazz Messengers had always been an incubator for young talent. A list of the band's alumni is a who's who of straight-ahead jazz from the '50s on -- Lee Morgan, Wayne Shorter, Freddie Hubbard, Johnny Griffin, Jackie McLean, Donald Byrd, Bobby Timmons, Cedar Walton, Benny Golson, Joanne Brackeen, Billy Harper, Valery Ponomarev, Bill Pierce, Branford Marsalis, James Williams, Keith Jarrett, and Chuck Mangione, to name several of the most well-known. In the '80s, precocious graduates of Blakey's School for Swing would continue to number among jazz's movers and shakers, foremost among them being trumpeter Wynton Marsalis. Marsalis became the most visible symbol of the '80s jazz mainstream; through him, Blakey's conservative ideals came to dominate the public's perception of the music. At the time of his death in 1990, the Messenger aesthetic dominated jazz, and Blakey himself had arguably become the most influential jazz musician of the past 20 years.

Blakey's first musical education came in the form of piano lessons; he was playing professionally as a seventh grader, leading his own commercial band. He switched to drums shortly thereafter, learning to play in the hard-swinging style of Chick Webb and Sid Catlett. In 1942, he played with pianist Mary Lou Williams in New York. He toured the South with Fletcher Henderson's band in 1943-1944. From there, he briefly led a Boston-based big band before joining Billy Eckstine's new group, with which he would remain from 1944-1947. Eckstine's big band was the famous "cradle of modern jazz," and included (at different times) such major figures of the forthcoming bebop revolution as Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, and Charlie Parker. When Eckstine's group disbanded, Blakey started a rehearsal ensemble called the Seventeen Messengers. He also recorded with an octet, the first of his bands to be called the Jazz Messengers. In the early '50s, Blakey began an association with Horace Silver, a particularly likeminded pianist with whom he recorded several times. In 1955, they formed a group with Hank Mobley and Kenny Dorham, calling themselves "Horace Silver and the Jazz Messengers." The Messengers typified the growing hard bop movement -- hard, funky, and bluesy, the band emphasized the music's primal rhythmic and harmonic essence. A year later, Silver left the band, and Blakey became its leader. From that point, the Messengers were Blakey's primary vehicle, though he would continue to freelance in various contexts. Notable was a 1963 Impulse record date with McCoy Tyner, Sonny Stitt, and Art Davis; a 1971-1972 world tour with "the Giants of Jazz," an all-star venture with Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Sonny Stitt, and Al McKibbon; and an epochal drum battle with Max Roach, Elvin Jones, and Buddy Rich at the 1964 Newport Jazz Festival. Blakey also frequently recorded as a sideman under the leadership of ex-Messengers.

Blakey's influence as a bandleader could not have been nearly so great had he not been such a skilled instrumentalist. No drummer ever drove a band harder; none could generate more sheer momentum in the course of a tune; and probably no drummer had a lower boiling point -- Blakey started every performance full-bore and went from there. His accompaniment style was relentless, and woe to the young saxophonist who couldn't keep up, for Blakey would run him over like a fullback. Blakey differed from other bop drummers in that his style was almost wholly about the music's physical attributes. Where his contemporary Max Roach dealt extensively with the drummer's relationship to melody and timbre, for example, Blakey showed little interest in such matters. To him, jazz percussion wasn't about tone color; it was about rhythm -- first, last, and in between. Blakey's drum set was the engine that propelled the music. To the extent that he exhibited little conceptual development over the course of his long career, either as a player or as a bandleader, Blakey was limited. He was no visionary by any means. But Blakey did one thing exceedingly well, and he did it with genius, spirit, and generosity until the very end of his life. ~ Chris Kelsey, All Music Guide

Moanin' [Japan] Buy this CD	Moanin' [Japan] Buy this CD	Milestones in Jazz Buy this CD	Meet You at the Jazz Corner of the World, Vol. 2 Buy this CD	Meet You at the Jazz Corner of the World [Complete] Buy this CD
Paris 1959 Buy this CD	Moanin' Buy this CD	Moanin' Buy this CD	Moanin' [Blue Note Bonus Track] Buy this CD	Moanin' [Blue Note Bonus Track] Buy this CD

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