Arthur Blakey (October 11, 1919 – October 16, 1990) was an American jazz drummer and bandleader. He was also known as Abdullah Ibn Buhaina after he converted to Islam for a short time in the late 1940s.
Blakey made a name for himself in the 1940s in the big bands of Fletcher Henderson and Billy Eckstine. He then worked with bebop musicians Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, and Dizzy Gillespie. In the mid-1950s, Horace Silver and Blakey formed The Jazz Messengers, a group which he led for the next 35 years. The group was formed as a collective of contemporaries, but over the years, the band became known as an incubator for young talent, including Freddie Hubbard, Wayne Shorter, Lee Morgan, Benny Golson, Kenny Dorham, Hank Mobley, Donald Byrd, Jackie McLean, Johnny Griffin, Curtis Fuller, Chuck Mangione, Chick Corea, Keith Jarrett, Cedar Walton, Woody Shaw, Terence Blanchard, and Wynton Marsalis. The Biographical Encyclopedia of Jazz calls the Jazz Messengers "the archetypal hard bop group of the late 50s."
Blakey was inducted into the DownBeat Jazz Hall of Fame (in 1981). Posthumously, he was inducted into the Modern Drummer Hall of Fame in 1991 and the Grammy Hall of Fame (in 1998 and 2001). He was awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2005.
Early life and education Blakey was born on October 11, 1919, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States, probably to a single mother who died shortly after his birth; her name is often cited as Marie Roddicker, or Roddericker, although Blakey's own 1937 marriage license shows her maiden name to have been Jackson. His biological father was Bertram Thomas Blakey, originally of Ozark, Alabama, whose family migrated northward to Pittsburgh sometime between 1900 and 1910. Blakey's uncle, Rubi Blakey, was a popular Pittsburgh singer, choral leader, and teacher who attended Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee.
Blakey was raised with his siblings by a family friend who became a surrogate mother. According to Leslie Gourse's biography, the surrogate mother was Annie Parran and her husband Henry Parran Sr. The stories related by family and friends, and by Blakey himself, are contradictory as to how long he spent with the Parran family, but it is clear he spent some time with them growing up.
Blakey received some piano lessons at school but was also self-taught.
Career By the seventh grade, Blakey was playing music full-time and had begun to take on adult responsibilities, playing the piano to earn money and learning to be a bandleader.
He switched from piano to drums at an uncertain date in the early 1930s. An oft-quoted account of the event states that Blakey was forced at gunpoint to move from piano to drums by a club owner, to allow Erroll Garner to take over on piano. The veracity of this story is called into question in the Gourse biography, as Blakey himself gives other accounts in addition to this one. The style Blakey assumed was "the aggressive swing style of Chick Webb, Sid Catlett and Ray Bauduc".
From 1939 to 1944, Blakey played with fellow Pittsburgh native Mary Lou Williams and toured with the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra. While sources differ on the timing, most agree that he traveled to New York with Williams in 1942 before joining Henderson a year later. (Some accounts have him joining Henderson as early as 1939.) While playing in Henderson's band, Blakey was subjected to an unprovoked attack by a white Georgia police officer which necessitated a steel plate being inserted into his head. These injuries caused him to be declared unfit for service in World War II. He led his own band at the Tic Toc Club in Boston for a short time.
From 1944 to 1947, Blakey worked with Billy Eckstine's big band. Through this band, Blakey became associated with the bebop movement, along with his fellow band members Miles Davis, Dexter Gordon, Fats Navarro, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and Sarah Vaughan, among others.
After the Eckstine band broke up, Blakey states that he traveled to Africa for a time: "In 1947, after the Eckstine band broke up, we—took a trip to Africa. I was supposed to stay there three months and I stayed two years because I wanted to live among the people and find out just how they lived and—about the drums especially." He stated in a 1979 interview, discussing the context of the decision at the time:
Blakey is known to have recorded from 1947 to 1949. He studied and converted to Islam during this period, taking the name Abdullah Ibn Buhaina and the nickname "Bu", although he stopped being a practicing Muslim in the 1950s and continued to perform under the name "Art Blakey" throughout his career.
As the 1950s began, Blakey was backing musicians such as Davis, Parker, Gillespie, Bud Powell, and Thelonious Monk; he is often considered to have been Monk's most empathetic drummer, and he played on both Monk's first recording session as a leader (for Blue Note Records in 1947) and his final one (in London in 1971), as well as many in between. Blakey toured with Buddy DeFranco from 1951 to 1953 in a band that also included Kenny Drew.
The Jazz Messengers
On December 17, 1947, Blakey led a group known as "Art Blakey's Messengers" in his first recording session as a leader, for Blue Note Records. The records were released as 78 rpm records at the time, and two of the songs were released on the "New Sounds" 10″ LP compilation (BLP 5010). The octet included Kenny Dorham, Sahib Shihab, Musa Kaleem, and Walter Bishop Jr.
Around the same time (1947 or 1949) he led a big band called Seventeen Messengers. The band proved to be financially unstable and broke up soon after. The use of the Messengers tag finally stuck with the group co-led at first by both Blakey and pianist Horace Silver, though the name was not used on the earliest of their recordings.
The "Jazz Messengers" name was first used for this group on a 1954 recording nominally led by Silver, with Blakey, Hank Mobley, Dorham, and Doug Watkins—the same quintet recorded The Jazz Messengers at the Cafe Bohemia the following year, still functioning as a collective. Donald Byrd replaced Dorham, and the group recorded an album called simply The Jazz Messengers for Columbia Records in 1956. Blakey took over the group name when Silver left after the band's first year (taking Mobley and Watkins with him to form a new quintet), and the band name evolved to include Blakey's name, eventually settling upon "Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers". Blakey led the group for the rest of his life.
It was the archetypal hard bop group of the 1950s, playing a driving, aggressive extension of bop with pronounced blues roots. Towards the end of the 1950s, the saxophonists Johnny Griffin and Benny Golson were in turn briefly members of the group. Golson, as musical director, wrote several jazz standards which began as part of the band book, such as "I Remember Clifford", "Along Came Betty", and "Blues March", and were frequently revived by later editions of the group. "Whisper Not" and "Are You Real" were other Golson compositions for Blakey.
From 1959 to 1961, the group featured tenor saxophonist Wayne Shorter, trumpeter Lee Morgan, pianist Bobby Timmons, and bassist Jymie Merritt. The group recorded several albums for Blue Note Records, including The Big Beat and A Night in Tunisia. From 1961 to 1964, the band was a sextet that added trombonist Curtis Fuller and replaced Morgan, Timmons, and Merritt with Freddie Hubbard, Cedar Walton, and Reggie Workman, respectively. The group evolved into a proving ground for young jazz talent and recorded albums such as Buhaina's Delight, Caravan, and Free for All. While veterans occasionally reappeared in the group, by and large, each iteration of the Messengers included a lineup of new young players. Having the Messengers on one's resume was a rite of passage in the jazz world and conveyed immediate bona fides.
Many Messenger alumni went on to become jazz stars in their own right, such as Lee Morgan, Benny Golson, Wayne Shorter, Freddie Hubbard, Bobby Timmons, Curtis Fuller, Chuck Mangione, Keith Jarrett, Joanne Brackeen, Woody Shaw, Wynton Marsalis, Branford Marsalis, Terence Blanchard, Donald Harrison, and Mulgrew Miller. (For a complete list of Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers alumni, including some who did not actually record with the band, see The Jazz Messengers.)
Later career
Blakey went on to record dozens of albums with a constantly changing group of Jazz Messengers. He had a policy of encouraging young musicians: as he remarked on-mic during the live session which resulted in the A Night at Birdland albums in 1954: "I'm gonna stay with the youngsters. When these get too old I'll get some younger ones. Keeps the mind active." After weathering the fusion era in the 1970s, the popularity of the Jazz Messengers faded away. But Blakey's band continued performing with new jazz men such as Terence Blanchard and Kenny Garrett.
He continued performing and touring with the group through the end of the 1980s. Ralph Peterson Jr. joined in 1983 as a second drummer due to Blakey's failing health. Ron Wynn noted that Blakey had "played with such force and fury that he eventually lost much of his hearing, and at the end of his life, often played strictly by instinct." He stubbornly refused to wear hearing aids, arguing that it threw his timing off, so most of the time he played by sensing vibrations. Javon Jackson, who played in Blakey's final lineup, claimed that he exaggerated the extent of his hearing loss: "In my opinion, his deafness was a little exaggerated, and it was exaggerated by him. He didn't hear well out of one ear, but he could hear just fine out the other one. He could hear you just fine when you played something badly and he was quick to say 'Hey, you missed that there.' But anything like 'I don't think I'll be available for the next gig', he'd say 'Huh? I can't hear you. Another bandmate, Geoffrey Keezer, claimed that "He was selectively deaf. He'd go deaf when you asked him about money, but if it was real quiet and you talked to him one-on-one, then he could hear you just fine."Hard Bop Academy: The Sidemen of Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, Alan Goldsher, pp 81
Blakey's final performances were in July 1990.
Music style Drumming style Blakey assumed an aggressive swing style of contemporaries Chick Webb, Sid Catlett, and Ray Bauduc early in his career, and is known, alongside Kenny Clarke and Max Roach, as one of the inventors of the modern bebop style of drumming. Max Roach described him thus:
His drumming form made continuing use of the traditional grip, though in later appearances he is also seen using a matched grip.See, for instance: "Art Blakey solo", available at YouTube In a 1973 drum battle with Ginger Baker, he can be seen repeatedly changing grip during his performance.Archived at Ghostarchive and the Wayback Machine:
As the supporting materials for Ken Burns's series Jazz notes, "Blakey is a major figure in modern jazz and an important stylist in drums. From his earliest recording sessions with Eckstine, and particularly in his historic sessions with Monk in 1957, he exudes power and originality, creating a dark cymbal sound punctuated by frequent loud snare and bass drum accents in triplets or cross-rhythms." This source continues:
Personal life In addition to his musical interests, Blakey was described by Jerry "Tiger" Pearson as a storyteller, as having a "big appetite for music [...] women [and] food", and an interest in the sport of boxing.John Cohassey (2014), "My Friend Art Blakey: Recollections of a Jazz Fan from Detroit, by Jerry "Tiger" Pearson, as told to John Cohassey" (Supporting material for America's Cultural Rebels: Avant-Garde and Bohemian Artists, Writers and Musicians from the 1850s through the 1960s by Roy Kotynek and John Cohassey (Jefferson, NC:McFarland & Company);