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The FlipSide 07/27/2015

7/27/2015

6 Comments

 

Art Blakey & the Jazz Messengers
(Note . . . This week's FlipSide is presented by Jerry Leyendecker)

Art Blakey (Arthur Blakey; October 11, 1919 – October 16, 1990) was an American jazz drummer and bandleader. 

Blakey made a name for himself in the 1940s in the big bands of Fletcher Henderson and Billy Eckstine. He worked with bebop musicians Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker  and Dizzy Gillespie. In the mid-1950s Horace Silver and Blakey formed "The Jazz Messengers", a group that the drummer was associated with for the next 35 years. "The Jazz Messengers" were formed as a collective of contemporaries, but over the years the band became known as an incubator for young talent, including Freddie Hubbard, Wayne Shorter and Wynton Marsalis. The Biographical Encyclopedia of Jazz calls The Jazz Messengers "the archetypal hard-bop group of the late 50s".
Drumming style
Blakey assumed an aggressive swing style of contemporaries Chick Webb, Sid Catlett and Ray Bauduc early in his career, and is known, alongside Kenny Clarke  and Max Roach as one of the inventors of the modern bebop style of drumming. Max Roach described him thus:

"Art was an original… He's the only drummer whose time I recognize immediately. And his signature style was amazing; we used to call him 'Thunder.' When I first met him on 52d Street in 1944, he already had the polyrhythmic thing down. Art was perhaps the best at maintaining independence with all four limbs. He was doing it before anybody was."
Legacy
The legacy of Blakey and his bands is not only the music they produced, but also the opportunities they provided for several generations of jazz musicians.The Jazz Messengers nurtured and influenced many of the key figures of the Hard Bop movement of the late 1950s to early 1960s, and of the Neo traditionalist movement of the 1980s and 1990s. Both were return to roots movements for jazz: Hard Bop in counterpoint to the 1950s

Blakey was inducted into the Down Beat Jazz Hall of Fame  (in 1981), the Grammy Hall of Fame (in 1998 and 2001), and was awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2005.
(Material source wiki)
That's the FlipSide!

JL
6 Comments
Harv
7/27/2015 02:57:33 am

Great Presentation Jerry!!! I hope Pete watched and listened to this release! Amazing stuff . . . I might just become a Jazz Fan after all!

Reply
JL
7/27/2015 04:49:19 am

Great job with the album cover "liner notes", Harv! We think you are a bona fide jazz fan after all...thanks!

Reply
Pete
7/29/2015 02:56:43 am

The Art Blakey tunes are both great. Tunisia is one of my favorites. I'm sure you noticed that Art's drum set is a 1958 set of Gretsch Drums exactly like mine!!. I'm grateful to the gods of percussion that I held on to mine!. This will inspire me to practice!!! Pete

Reply
JL
7/29/2015 02:58:48 am

Peter, yes, I noticed Blakey's Gretch drum set and I thought of you, of course, the only other great drummer of the period that I knew who had them. Glad you liked the clip... Blakey was an inspiration to a lot of 'up and coming' drummers, of which you were one.

Reply
Pete
7/30/2015 03:39:07 am

JL , other drummers with my 58 set included Max Roach, Mel Lewis, Don Lamond, Louie Bellson (double bass set),Chico Hamilton, and Philly Joe Jones . I have a 33 record - Rich vs. Roach. It sounds great and has a great cover!

Reply
JL
7/30/2015 07:50:41 am

Well, Peter, you were in great company with your Gretch drums, no wonder you were the 'go to drummer' back in the day! I am certainly glad that you managed to hang on to them, and, remembered how to play them for the 45th LHS Class Reunion in '05. With your own fan club, you were one of the stars of the show! Keep up those 'chops' ol' Buddy, you never know when you will be called for and 'encore performance'.

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