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ART BLAKEY AND THE JAZZ MESSENGERS

Just Coolin’BLUE NOTE

7/10

 A stirring 1959 studio session finally reaches our ears. By Richard Williams

THE Blue Note legend is not based on distinctive artwork alone. Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff, the company’s founders, cared enough about quality to pay for rehearsal time as well as putting the musicians in a good studio with a fine engineer. Yes, they presented the results in an attractive package with a coherent label identity. But they also paid scrupulous attention to what they included on their monthly schedule. Albums were selected for release according to how they would benefit the artists’ careers as well as the company. They also recorded more than the label could release, which meant that when they effectively ceased their activities at the end of ’60s, there would be plenty left for archivists to discover.

“By comparison with At The Jazz Corner Of The World, this session seems like a dry run”

Sometimes – as with the vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson’s Oblique – it was hard to work out why a session had not been deemed worthy of release at the time. Occasionally it was easier to understand: Grant Green’s Matador did not match the funkier direction in which the guitarist was heading; the tenor saxophonist Tina Brooks had faded into the shadows of addiction, which is why three of his five albums had to wait until after his death in 1974 to reach his small but devoted following. Someone with Brooks’ needs would have been particularly grateful for the label’s practice of recording so frequently, since Lion and Wolff paid by the session.

The principal reason the session Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers recorded in a single day in March 1959 remained unreleased for more than 60 years is obvious. Five weeks later, the same lineup recorded live at Birdland in New York City. Blakey’s bands always responded well to being taped on stage, as the three 10-inch volumes of A Night at Birdland had proved in 1954. Or perhaps it was Blakey himself whose reaction was key: his backbeats slammed harder and his press-rolls mushroomed more extravagantly in front of an audience, spurring his sidemen to new heights.

By comparison with the two volumes of At The Jazz Corner Of The World, as the Birdland recordings were titled when they were released to great acclaim later in 1959, the session now released as Just Coolin’ seems like a dry run, particularly since it wasn’t given a title or a catalogue number at the time. Of its six compositions, four appeared on the live albums, so direct comparisons are possible.

The Messengers’ lineup changed frequently, for a variety of reasons, butlineup came together, Benny Golson and Bobby Timmons had filled the repertoire with catchy items like the funky “Blues March” and the gospelly “Moanin’”. Immediately after, in would come Wayne Shorter, with more complex and unorthodox pieces like “Lester Left Town” and “Children Of The Night”. But this, in the spring of 1959, was an interim group, with Hank Mobley, a member of an earlier lineup, drafted back in to replace Golson and contributing three of his neat hard-bop tunes.