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ART
BLAKEY
drums
LIFELINE
1919-1990
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1919
Art Blakey is born in Pittsburgh. A self-taught
pianist and, even in his teenage years, a band leader, Blakey
reverted to drums when he is replaced in his own band by the
young Erroll Garner.
1947
Blakey has a seventeen piece rehearsal
band, and a smaller group, Art Blakey's Messengers. In the late-1940s
he freelances around New York, playing with Tadd
Dameron and Fats Navarro,
Thelonious Monk, Charlie
Parker and Miles Davis.
1960s
Blakey keeps the Jazz Messengers flame
burning, apart from his stint with the Giants of Jazz tour in
1971-72, for the rest of his career.
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1940s
1942 finds Blakey in New York, working in
the Mary Lou Williams band. He joins Fletcher
Henderson's band in 1943-44, and is a founder member of the
Billy Eckstine big band, with its strong leanings towards the new
bebop sound.
1954-90
After brief stints with Lucky Millinder and
Buddy De Franco, Blakey with pianist Horace
Silver forms a cooperative band called the Jazz Messengers.
Silver leaves in 1955, and Blakey assumes sole leadership. The Messengers
have changing personnel, but an auspicious alumni passes
through the ranks: in the 1950s Kenny Dorham and Donald Byrd, Lee
Morgan, Hank Mobley and Jackie McLean, Benny Golson, Johnny Griffin,
Wayne Shorter, Bobby Timmons, and,
later, Freddie Hubbard, Curtis Fuller, Cedar Walton, Bobby Watson,
Wynton Marsalis, and a host of other names. |
| Blakey
was a busy drummer with prominent use of the snare drum, and, however
discrete, he made sure that he was at the core of his band's performance.
He was a product of the swing era, yet rhythmically he belonged
to the bebop era with his use of cross-rhythms. There was throughout
his career little development in his playing, although after an
extended visit to Africa in the early 1950s he added African techniques
to his performance.
His greatest contribution to the history
of jazz, however, was his ability to select strong sidemen, most
of whom would go on to achieve glory themselves as bandleaders,
and many of whom, Benny Golson and Wayne
Shorter in particular, had great writing skills. |
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