Album Reviews

It's easy to make a case for buying this double mono LP reissue of a 1956 Columbia release—unless you're not a jazz fan.

Art Blakey spent most of his career as a jazz ambassador and mentor to generations of greats starting with the original Messengers back in the late 1940's and continuing into the 1980s.

It's easy to make a case for buying this double mono LP reissue of a 1956 Columbia release—unless you're not a jazz fan.

Art Blakey spent most of his career as a jazz ambassador and mentor to generations of greats starting with the original Messengers back in the late 1940's and continuing into the 1980s.

This record documents the first of many groups called The Jazz Messengers, a change from "The Messengers  suggestion by pianist Horace Silver. Blakey had performd and recorded with the much larger assemblage since 1947.

With Silver on piano, Hank Mobley on tenor sax, Donald Byrd on trumpter and Doug Watkins on bass, Blakey had assembled a formidable group of musicians who would go on to performing and recorded greatness as solo artists and group leaders, with the exception of Watkins who died in a 1962 car crash, though he too played with many jazz greats of that era and on their records.

The music the group made here swings heavily,  was rhythmically dazzling propeled by Blakey's insistent drumming, and oh so tuneful. There's plenty of razzle-dazzle hard bop ensemble work but also space for individual excellence, though not the kind of wide open solo work these artists were afforded later recording for Blue Note.

The second record consists of bonus tracks not on the original LP, but unlike some bonus track additions, most of these are worthwhile. 

Added value comes from drummer Kenny Washington's astute and historically meticulous liner notes written for the 1997 CD issue. 

Though the recording was produced at Columbia's famed 30th Street Studios—a converted church—don't expect Kind of Blue atmospherics. The 1956 mono production produced a drier, less atmospheric recording, one that values clarity of instrumental line over ambience.

An interesting choice by Pure Pleasure and one hard core jazz fans will dig but one casual hipsters can pass up.