Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers: Moanin'

 

(same band as featured on the album)

Fully half of my ATJ posts to date have featured musicians associated with the hard bop style of jazz.  As I explained in ATJ #6 (Jimmy Smith's The Sermon), "Speaking very generally, hard bop retained the rhythms, harmonies and technical virtuosity of bebop, but leavened it by moderating tempos (bop tunes were often played extremely fast or extremely slow...to discourage dancing and encourage listening) and adding an obvious blues/funk/gospel feel.  Hard bop is most closely associated with the recordings of the Blue Note label in the 50's and 60's..."

Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers (in all its iterations from the late 1940's through the 1980's) is the band most associated with the hard bop movement, and this week's album, Moanin', is the archetypal hard bop album.  A history of the Messengers would fill an entire post, but just listing its trumpet players over the years gives a sense of the incredible talent that Blakey incubated: Kenny Dorham, Clifford Brown, Lee Morgan, Donald Byrd, Freddie Hubbard, Woody Shaw and Wynton Marsalis...or, to put it another way, pretty much all of the greatest jazz trumpeters who came of age in the second half of the 20th century.   And the list of sax players and pianists who are Messengers alumni is almost as impressive.  The one constant throughout was Blakey's muscular drum work, characterized by his distinctive (and much copied) forceful clsoing of the high hat cymbals on the second and fourth beats (providing a strict underpinning to the group's overall sense of time) and his rolls and fills on the snare drum and tom toms that sound like he is shaking thunder down from the heavens.

While the band here is fantastic, with Morgan on trumpet, Benny Golson (the MacGuffin in the Tom Hanks movie, The Terminal) on tenor and Bobby Timmons on piano, what elevates this above the many other great Jazz Messenger recordings is the quality of the tunes.  Golson's "Blues March," "Along Came Betty" and "Are You Real" and Timmons's "Moanin'" each capture different proportions of the blues-and-gospel flavor that is the signature of hard bop. These tunes all became staples of the Blakey book, to be played by Byrd and Hubbard and Shaw and Wayne Shorter and Curtis Fuller and Cedar Walton and Branford Marsalis and all the stars that followed.  My favorite here is "Along Came Betty," featuring a shuffling, sinuous melody, which is at once somehow simpler and more complex than it seems, and a great bluesy set of changes for the blowing which follows.