Black History Month: Blakey in Paris by Art Blakey featuring Bud Powell and Lee Morgan
Paris jam session brings together giants of jazz for a free-wheeling performance
Blakey In Paris
Art Blakey
Epic Records
Released 1961
Art Blakey was born in 1919 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to a single mother who died after his birth. Blakey and his siblings were raised by a couple who were friends with the family. He received some piano lessons but was mostly self-taught. As a youth, he began playing music full-time and earning money for the family. He switched from piano to drums sometime in the 1930s. Blakey worked with Mary Lou Williams and Fletcher Henderson while leading his own band for a short time. During this time, he was attacked by a Georgia police officer without cause. His injuries required a steel plate inserted into his skull. In 1944 he got a gig with Billy Eckstine’s big band that exposed Blakey to bebop jazz and fellow band members Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and others. When Eckstine’s band broke up in 1947, Blakey led a group called “Art Blakey’s Messengers.’ He would use forms of this name throughout his career. He also visited Africa to study religion and philosophy. He converted to Islam for a period of time, taking the name Abdullah Ibn Buhaina. He continued to record and perform in the 1950s, backing Davis, Parker, Gillespie, Bud Powell, and Thelonius Monk while co-leading a band with Horace Silver called “The Jazz Messengers” that became a well-known hard bop group in the 1950s. In December 1959, Art Blakey, the Jazz Messengers, and other jazz musicians living in Paris at the time performed at the Theatre Des Champs-Elysees. The tracks on Blakey in Paris are taken from those jazz sessions. The band includes Blakey on drums, Barney Wilen (alto sax), Wayne Shorter (tenor sax), Walter Davis Jr. (piano), Jimmy Merritt (bass), and Lee Morgan (trumpet). The ad-hoc group really cooks and the musicians have plenty of room to improvise on extended arrangements. Blakey gets to show off his stuff on Gillespie’s “Night in Tunisia.” Blakey’s drum solos find a perfect balance between composition and improvisation, featuring an aggressive polyrhythmic style. Blakey continued to tour and record as a solo artist, sideman, and with the Jazz Messengers name through the 1980s until his death from lung cancer in 1990. Blakey is recognized as one of the originators of bebop drum style. Through the Jazz Messengers, he provided an early platform for a very long list of jazz musicians including many giants of the genre. Blakey was inducted into the Jazz Hall of Fame, Grammy Hall of Fame, and received a posthumous Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.