Art Blakey & the Jazz Messengers - art blakey!!!!!! jazz messengers!!!!!

Art Blakey & the Jazz Messengers
Art Blakey!!!!! Jazz Messengers!!!!!
Art Blakey - drums
Freddie Hubbard - trumpet
Wayne Shorter - tenor sax
Curtis Fuller - trombone
Cedar Walton - piano
Jymie Merritt - bass

This album is quite good. The musicians are exceptional (as should be expected, Art Blakey's standards are quite rigorous, you can safely purchase almost any of his albums sound unheard without having to worry about being dissappointed.) and the tunes nicely balanced.

My modus operandi for the first month and a half of this project has been to pick apart the music, either song-by-song or musician-by-musician. I don't see too much that would be interesting following that pattern for this album, it doesn't have those surprises, good or bad, of the other recordings I have reviewed so far. The question that occurs to me to ask is: What makes this a really good hard bop record?

Because of energy. The one thing that defines hard bop at its simplest level is an intense energy that is conveyed through all parts of the music: tempo, tone, chording, bass lines, the list goes on and on.(As an aside, tempo is the least important of these things. Listen to "Gee Baby, Ain't I Good to You" from this record. It is played at a relatively slow tempo, but it still bristles - Wayne Shorter's tone and phrasing on that tune can only be described as energetic.)

Another way to put it might be to say that the music never relaxes. Listen to something like "Take Five" by Dave Brubeck, a tune from the cool jazz catalogue - it has a lot of things that might create tension and therefore energy (uptempo, active rhythm section, odd time signature) but the way Brubeck and Paul Desmond and the rest of the quartet play that song makes it practically a lullaby - it is boring, but in the best possible way.

It is close to midnight as I write this, I have been up since about 6:00 a.m., I have taken a couple of allergy pills that normally put me to sleep like a baby in a car seat, and I am wide awake. Because I'm not listening to Brubeck, I have art blakey!!!!! jazz messengers!!!!! playing. Right now "Invitation" is playing, not a tune that can be called uptempo. Freddie Hubbard's tone on the solo he just played was piercing, and Wayne Shorter just started on a short couple of bars and is going to turn it over to Curtis Fuller on trombone.

And here is where my point is proven. Curtis Fuller. On trombone. On a slower tune. And the energy is still there. And here is the beautiful part - you get that energy without the caffeine-induced edginess of some of that frenetic, Charlie Parker-inspired bebop that can sometimes feel like a crack addict that sprinkles crystal meth on your cornflakes. Alright, I exaggerate, but, you get my point.

So the real question is, where does that energy come from? There are several ways I think they do it, without resorting to cheap musical tricks that would only serve to cheapen the hard bop art form.

Art Blakey can simply play the drums. For example, when Shorter begins his solo in the third minute of "You Don't Know What Love Is", Blakey knows that Shorter's sax is going to provide a jolt of electricity - so he adjusts his playing - he uses less, most notably less of the ride cymbal. Then, Curtis Fuller takes over with a trombone solo. Trombones might need a bit more help in the energy department, so, after a small bridge section with Hubbard on trumpet, Blakey picks up the lost energy with more ride cymbal. Simple, yes, but that little thing helps maintain the consistency of the song without relying on Buddy Rich-style pryotechnics.

Also on "You Don't Know What Love Is" you can hear how Blakey manipulates tempo to create tension, and therefore energy. This is a mainly a slow tune (100 bpm? I am not good at estimating that kind of stuff) but every once in a while, they jump it up to time and a half (? again, not good at estimating that stuff). That expectation is always there, leaving the listener with anticipation, that anticipation is tension, and that creates energy. 

That energy also comes from the tones that the musicians pull from their instruments. Shorter on "Alamode" might be the best example. The sound he gets out of the sax is focused, efficient, clean; it isn't loose, or curved. The sound is sharp without being out of tune. It grabs attention, conveying a sense of energy through tone.

I keep using the word energy, and I feel that I am getting a bit cliched. I think it is important to explain what I mean. From my standpoint, as a listener (and I do know both sides of the musical transaction having ever so briefly been in the minor leagues, to use a sports metaphor) energy in a piece of music commands my attention. It sharpens my focus on listening. When I have been listening to the albums for this blog, I typically listen to it five or six times just listening to the music, the individual musicians, the solos, et cetera. All of my other listening to the album is done while I putter around the kitchen or do laundry or read. I have not gotten a lot of that done this week, especially reading because this album dictates my attention. (I have only managed a paltry 100 pages in a lengthy history of the Korean War.) So I suppose that is what I mean when I say energy - there is something about the music that forces me to pay attention to it, it simply will not be ignored, it will not be relegated to background music.

That, I think, is what makes this an excellent hard bop album.