Product Description

Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers was one of the most enduring, popular, reliable and vital small bands in modern jazz history. Blakey was not only a distinguished, inventive and powerful drummer, but along with Duke Ellington and Miles Davis, he was one of jazz's foremost talent scouts. The musicians who flowed seamlessly in and out of this constantly evolving collective during its 36-year run were among the most important artists not just of their eras, but of any era. Though their respective innovations were vital to the evolution of bebop, hard bop and neo bop, the recorded work of the Messengers sidemen has never been properly analyzed. Until now. Hard Bop Academy: The Sidemen of Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers critically examines the multitude of gifted artists who populated the many editions of the Jazz Messengers. In addition to dissecting the sidemen's most consequential work with Blakey's band, jazz musician and acclaimed novelist Alan Goldsher offers up engaging profiles of everyone from Wynton Marsalis to Terence Blanchard to Hank Mobley to Wayne Shorter to Horace Silver to Keith Jarrett to Curtis Fuller to Steve Davis. And that's only the beginning. Goldsher conducted over 30 interviews with surviving graduates of Blakey's Hard Bop Academy, many of whom spoke at length of their tenure with the legendary "Buhaina" for the first time.Alan Goldsher is a bassist who has recorded with Janet Jackson, Digable Planets, Cypress Hill and Naughty By Nature. His writing has been published in Bass Player, Tower Pulse, Sport and BasketBull: Chicago Bulls Magazine. Goldsher's debut novel, Jam, was published in 2002 by Permanent Press. He lives in Chicago. Hardcover.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #715177 in Books
• Published on: 2002-09-12
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 216 pages

From Library Journal
To call Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers a "hard bop academy" is no exaggeration. From 1954 to the leader's death in 1990, the Messengers were a staple in an ever-changing jazz universe. Many of the great practitioners of this style cut their teeth in the band, including Lee Morgan, Wayne Shorter, Cedar Walton, and Wynton Marsalis. Drawing on more than 30 interviews, as well as secondary sources, Goldsher, a bassist and writer, presents us with a fan's view of the hard bop sidemen organized chronologically by instrument. While the interviews offer insight into the workings of the band, some eras are not covered in as much detail as they deserve, e.g., the late 1960s through the mid-1970s. And though the writing is fairly lucid and engaging, ultimately, more could have been said. Many of the musicians featured here have been profiled in jazz magazines like Down Beat and Cadence, but this is the first book dedicated to the Messengers. Recommended with some reservation to jazz collections in public and academic libraries.
Ronald S. Russ, Arkansas State Univ. Lib., Beebe
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Art Blakey's band from the fanatic's perspective
I'm a drummer and I love Art Blakey so I've got to encourage people to check this book out. This is written from a fan's perspective and provides brief 2-3 page snapshots of all the major players who have played with Art Blakey's jazz messengers from their inception to his passing. He makes no bones about being biased. The author reveres Blakey and his contribuitions and emphasizes Blakey's sidemen to try to turn people onto the band and the music they made.

Blakey was one of the real warriors of the music and his band gave us so many wonderful musicians. The best recommendation for this book is that so many Messengers came out to support this project with interviews and stories about the band and about their relationship with Blakey. Blakey inspires worship, awe, and fear as a musician and a man and that comes through in this book. You do learn a litte bit about some lesser known figures [I'd forgotten Keith Jarrett, Kenny Garrett, and Joanne Brackeen were Messengers] in the band's history.

Mostly this is a great, fun, readable way to learn about the musicians and the leader behind the most legendary long term small group in the history of jazz. I'd recommend this first to fellow drummers, people with a knowledge and interest in small group jazz, and to those listeners who have heard classic albums like "Moanin'", "A Night at Birdland" [w/Clifford Brown], "Free for All", "Album of the Year" and want to put some flesh and meat on the music they heard.

Great man, fun book

5 stars!

Essential for Blakey-ophiles
I had purchased the best-selling "Moanin'" LP and caught the Shorter-edition of the Messengers in the 60's, but it wasn't until I caught the Messengers in the late 70's, playing the 2nd half of a Newport program that featured Horace Silver on the first half, that I contracted Messengers fever. They were everything that Horace's group was not--thunderous, alive, free and life-affirming--and doing it with unheralded musicians--Dave Schnitter, Bill Hardman, James Williams--who, in effect, put their counterparts to shame.

Goldsher's is the best book-length study on the Messengers that I've seen, devoting as much attention to Schnitter and Hardman as to the more renowned Messengers. The profiles are admittedly short and told from an "outsider's" perspective, but frequently the author nails exactly what's unique about the playing of a Kenny Dorham or Bill Hardman, and in musical terminology that will not exclude the layman.

What remains to be written is a look at the Blakey world from an "insider's" point of view: what it was like to get "up" for each performance, what distinguished, say, an "off" night from an inspired performance, what filled the days while traveling, what personal tensions arose and how they were dealt with, what it was like to feel you had played badly or to anticipate being "terminated."

Although Goldsher's profiles encourage greater appreciation of the hard-edged, professionally "finished" groups of the 60's and 80's, I'm still partial to the richly warm, inventive Mobley ensembles of the 50's and the unsung, exciting "overachievers" of the 70's. Goldsher is one of the few writers to give Walter Davis Jr. his due as a pianist and, especially, composer (though he fails to mention "Backgammon" as well as Mickey Tucker, the gifted pianist who handled Davis' treacherous chordal/rhythmic sequences better than Walter himself).

For the best example of the 70's ensemble along with Davis' extraordinary compositions, there's only one currently available resource: The Jazz Messengers at the Umbria Jazz Festival on DVD. The best examples of the lyrical Mobley Messengers from the 50's is Art Blakey's "The Jazz Messengers" on Columbia (with exceptional ensemble balance and sound that's more spacious and "true" than that of the Blue Note sessions) and Art Blakey and The Jazz Messengers "At the Cafe Bohemia" on Blue Note (the combination of Mobley and Kenny Dorham is simply as good as it gets).

After any of the foregoing, the popular "Moanin'" session (my first Blakey recording--memorized, then discarded) sounds merely formulaic, and all of the early 60s Shorter/Morgan/Fuller sessions begin to sound the same.