{"id":46497,"date":"2022-12-06T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-12-06T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/reviews\/moanin-2\/"},"modified":"2022-12-06T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2022-12-06T00:00:00","slug":"moanin-2","status":"publish","type":"review","link":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/reviews\/moanin-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Moanin’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Welcome to the latest edition of A Clueless Rock Writer\u2019s Guide to Jazz<\/i>. Today our subject\u2014representing the next class in my perpetual jazz education\u2014is Mr. Art Blakey.<\/p>\n

In 1944, at the age of 25, hard-hitting drummer Blakey joined Billy Eckstine’s big band, considered the first bebop big band and the launching pad for future jazz icons including Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Dexter Gordon, Lena Horne, Charlie Parker and Sarah Vaughan. After the Eckstine band broke up in 1947, Blakey traveled to Africa with the intention of visiting for three months, but \u201cI stayed two years<\/a> because I wanted to live among the people and find out just how they lived and\u2014about the drums especially.\u201d<\/p>\n

After returning to the US, in the early \u201950s Blakey at various times backed Davis, Parker, Gillespie, and Thelonious Monk, whose very first recording session he had played on in 1947, the same year he recorded his own first session as a bandleader, under the name Art Blakey\u2019s Messengers. In 1954 Blakey and pianist Horace Silver formed a group they co-led under the name The Messengers, before Silver left and the remaining group became known as Art Blakey And The Jazz Messengers. The name would stick for the three-decades-plus remainder of Blakey\u2019s recording and performing career.<\/p>\n

Wikipedia calls Blakey And The Jazz Messengers \u201cthe archetypal hard bop group of the 1950s, playing a driving, aggressive extension of bop with pronounced blues roots<\/a>,\u201d which sounds impressive even if I\u2019m not advanced enough in my jazz studies to parse out exactly what that means. To me the music on this album sounds like classic nightclub jazz, music you should be listening to while sitting on a richly scented leather banquette holding an ice-cold cocktail, with a small round table in front of you, the house lights down low, and the spotlights on the nattily dressed quintet on stage. <\/p>\n

Said quintet consisted at the time of this recording in October 1958 of drummer\/bandleader Blakey (age 39), sax player Benny Golson (29), Jymie Merritt on bass (32), and a pair of stellar young talents in Lee Morgan on trumpet (20) and Bobby Timmons on piano (22), with Golson doubling as musical director and chief composer. (Blakey had several years before declared his preference for working with younger players: \u201cI’m gonna stay with the youngsters. When these get too old I’ll get some younger ones. Keeps the mind active<\/a>.\u201d)<\/p>\n

The nine and a half minute title track, the sole track contributed by the precociously talented Timmons, is a gentle bop that opens with a nice back and forth, push and pull between his piano and Golson\u2019s tenor sax, quickly moving to an unhurried but deeply expressive trumpet solo from Morgan. Golson takes the baton for his own extended, lyrical solo on the fourth and fifth minutes, climaxing with Timmon\u2019s rhythmic, somewhat flashy response, and falling back with Merritt\u2019s offbeat but intriguing solo. At 7:58 the band rolls back around to the opening theme and restates it, this time with an extra helping of swing in the delivery that carries the group to a strong finish.<\/p>\n

\u201cAre You Real?\u201d opens upbeat and bouncy, with Blakey and Merritt pushing the beat until Golson comes in with a rippling sax solo, followed by an emphatic blast from Morgan. After that they each take turns, one after another after another, with instinctive, finger-snapping interplay between the five men the rest of the way on this 4:47 jam. \u201cAlong Came Betty,\u201d a Golson track inspired by a memorable passer-by, features a sultry sophistication, smoky with a gentle swing. Golson\u2019s sax melody takes the lead early before Morgan busts in with an assertive trumpet solo; then it\u2019s Golson out front again before Timmons takes an extended piano solo in the fifth minute, and they wrap up with a full-band run at the opening melody.<\/p>\n

Side two of the original vinyl LP opens with \u201cThe Drum Thunder Suite,\u201d a piece Golson composed specifically to show off Blakey\u2019s mallet work. It opens appropriately with a genuinely thunderous drum roll. The horns answer briefly and then it\u2019s more thunder and they\u2019re off to the races with a more vigorous response form the horns. Trading off between Blakey\u2019s rollicking runs and aggressive blasts from the horn section, it feels at times like an old-school big band jazz orchestra on a powerhouse number of some kind; they\u2019re showing some flash, getting brassy even when the brass isn\u2019t playing. Over the course of three fairly distinct segments, each player gets a chance to dialogue with Blakey.<\/p>\n

The Golson-penned \u201cBlues March\u201d opens with exactly the cadence implied by its title before dropping straight into a lively melody line played in unison by the horns before Morgan and then Golson take a pair of terrific solos, quick and fluid and nimble and pretty much everything you\u2019re looking for from a horn solo on a bop tune. Then Blakey returns to the marching theme to introduce fresh solos from Golson and then Timmons, and the whole band returns for a unison run at the opening theme.<\/p>\n

The one cover here, of Arlen and Mercer\u2019s finger-snapping \u201cCome Rain Or Shine,\u201d is similarly egalitarian in the way it spreads around the solos, moving from a bright opening theme to Timmons, Golson, Morgan, and Merritt in turn for energetic runs.<\/p>\n

The Blue Note Records RVG edition issued on CD in 1999 adds two bonus tracks to the original 1958 LP. The opening track features in-studio chatter and warm-up, including a snippet of conversation between Lee Morgan and recording engineer Rudy Van Gelder; it\u2019s a fun theater-of-the-mind introduction that puts you in the room with the players. The second bonus track, placed last, is an alternate take of \u201cMoanin\u2019\u201d that\u2019s quite similar but feels like it lacks just a little in terms of the snap and precision of the released version in both the melodic foundation of the song and the solos. Still, it\u2019s interesting to hear alternative takes of iconic tunes like this one that offer clues as to why the familiar version works as well as it does.<\/p>\n

The world of jazz was always one of shifting alliances and lineups, and Golson soon left the Messengers, replaced by no less a name than Wayne Shorter as the group continued a run of success that would last through decades to come. \u201cMoanin\u2019\u201d and \u201cBlues March\u201d in particular remain standards today\u2014not that I\u2019d ever heard either of them before picking up this album, but you knew that already. Until next time, class dismissed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":25079,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"artist":[6140],"rating":[5613],"class_list":["post-46497","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-art-blakey-and-the-jazz-messengers","rating-rating-a-minus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/46497","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46497"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/46497\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25079"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46497"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=46497"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=46497"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}