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CD |
| 7.545 Ft
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| 1. | Ping Pong
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| 2. | Roots and Herbs
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| 3. | The Back Sliders
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| 4. | United
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| 5. | Look at the Birdie
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| 6. | Master Mind
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| 7. | The Back Sliders
Alternate Take, bonus track
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| 8. | Ping Pong
Alternate Take, bonus track
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| 9. | United
Alternate Take, bonus track
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Jazz
Recorded at the Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey on February 12 & 18 and May 27, 1961
Art Blakey - Drums, Drums (Snare)
Art Blakey & the Jazz Messengers
Bobby Timmons - Piano
Jymie Merritt - Bass
Lee Morgan - Trumpet
Walter Davis, Jr. - Piano
Wayne Shorter - Sax (Tenor)
Originally released on Blue Note (84347).
Digitally remastered using 24-bit technology by Ron McMaster.
During the early '60s, Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers were the leading practitioners of hard bop and set a new standard for hard-swinging blues-inflected jazz. This rare Blue Note disc from 1961 showcases the composing talents of Wayne Shorter, who was the Messengers' music director throughout his tenure with the group. This is certainly the prime era of the Messengers with Lee Morgan and Curtis Fuller filling out the front line with Shorter and Bobby Timmons or Walter Davis Jr. on piano alongside Blakey and Jymie Merritt in the rhythm section.
Although ROOTS AND HERBS was not actually released until 1970, it is every bit as powerful a statement as THE BIG BEAT or MOANIN'. Shorter's uncanny sense of melodic invention plays out in stellar cuts like "Ping Pong" and the exciting "Look at the Birdie." In contrast, the bluesy swinger "The Back Sliders" features a very traditional form and plenty of room for the horn line to stretch out. Blakey takes a dramatic solo turn on the rhythmic "United" with percussion support from the other Messengers. As a bonus, the included alternate takes only increase this disc's value as a must-have for serious Blakey fans.
* Alfred Lion - Producer
* Jack Tracy - Liner Notes
* Michael Cuscuna - Producer
* Patrick Roques - Reissue Design
* Ron McMaster - Mastering, Transfers
* Rudy Van Gelder - Engineer
Originally recorded in 1961, Art Blakey & the Jazz Messengers' Roots & Herbs was first released in 1970 and then reissued on CD in 1999. Like many titles in the Blue Note catalog, this fine Blakey outing was initially shelved by Alfred Lion for unknown reasons; thankfully, considering Blakey's large array of available Blue Note albums, this wasn't necessarily a crisis. But now that it's out once again with a 24-bit digital makeover, Roots & Herbs is definitely a welcome addition to the drum master's CD catalog. Having already been a magnet for such talented hard bop players and writers as Hank Mobley, Benny Golson, Clifford Brown, Horace Silver (who helped form the original group), and Kenny Dorham, the Messengers' lineup of 1961 featured one of Blakey's best rosters: In addition to trumpeter Lee Morgan, who would alternate in the early '60s with Freddie Hubbard, the band featured tenor saxophonist Wayne Shorter, pianists Walter Davis, Jr. and Bobby Timmons, and bassist Jymie Merritt. Feeding off six early compositions by Shorter (the CD also includes three alternate takes), all the players reel off topnotch solos atop Blakey's fluidly galvanizing swing beat. Highlights include "Ping Pong," "Look at Birdie," and "Master Mind," compositions that, in their fetchingly askew way, nicely foreshadow the wealth of ideas to come from Shorter's pen throughout the '60s. ~ Stephen Cook, All Music Guide
Art Blakey
Active Decades: '40s, '50s, '60s, '70s, '80s and '90s
Born: Oct 11, 1919 in Pittsburgh, PA
Died: Oct 16, 1990 in New York, NY
Genre: Jazz
Styles: Bop, Hard Bop
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 |
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