BLP 1521

 Art Blakey Quintet - A Night At Birdland, Volume 1

Released - July 1956

Recording and Session Information

"Birdland", NYC, 2nd set, February 21, 1954
Clifford Brown, trumpet; Lou Donaldson, alto sax #2; Horace Silver, piano; Curly Russell, bass; Art Blakey, drums; Pee Wee Marquette, announcer.

tk.5 Once In A While
tk.6 Mayreh

"Birdland", NYC, 3rd set, February 21, 1954

tk.9 Split Kick

"Birdland", NYC, 4th set, February 21, 1954
Clifford Brown, trumpet; Lou Donaldson, alto sax; Horace Silver, piano; Curly Russell, bass; Art Blakey, drums; Pee Wee Marquette, announcer.

tk.12 A Night In Tunisia

"Birdland", NYC, 5th set, February 21, 1954
Clifford Brown, trumpet; Lou Donaldson, alto sax; Horace Silver, piano; Curly Russell, bass; Art Blakey, drums; Pee Wee Marquette, announcer.

tk.18 Quicksilver

Session Photos

Photos: Francis Wolff

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
Announcement by Pee Wee Marquette	Pee Wee Marquette	21/02/1954
Split Kick	Horace Silver	21/02/1954
Once in a While	Bud Green, Michael Edwards	21/02/1954
Quicksilver	Horace Silver	21/02/1954
Side Two
A Night in Tunisia	Dizzy Gillespie, Frank Paparelli	21/02/1954
Mayreh	Horace Silver	21/02/1954

Credits

Cover Photo:	FRANCIS WOLFF
Cover Design:	REID K. MILES
Engineer:	RUDY VAN GELDER
Producer:	ALFRED LION
Liner Notes:	LEONARD FEATHER

Liner Notes

“WOW! First time I enjoyed a record session!"

With these significant words, in a comment you will hear on one of these sides, Art Blakey offers an eloquent tribute to the motive that produced this unique series of recordings.

Because Art had organized this constellation of jazz names a while before taking it into Birdland, and had worked up a library of both old and new material, he was able to produce results that transcended the capabilities of a disorganized jam session.

Because this material was by now familiar enough to the musicians, they were able to express themselves fully and freely. While they could avail themselves of the lack of any time limitation on the performances, they still took no undue advantage, never distorted liberty into license; as a result, there are no 20-minute voyages into tautophony.

And because Birdland attracts the kind of audiences who come to listen to the music rather than to incite violence or tear up chairs, the musicians felt that their offerings were falling on appreciative ears.

Thus A Night At Birdland combines the three elements essential to an enjoyable evening of modern jazz; preparation, improvisation and inspiration. And the greatest of these three is inspiration.

THE MEN . . . Art Blakey’s extraordinary talent antedated his recent public recognition by far too many years. Born in Pittsburgh in Oct. 1919, he played in Fletcher Henderson’s band in 1939, worked for Mary Lou Williams when she formed her own combo, drifted to Boston and had his own band there, and acquired a limited measure of fan acceptance when he played in the fondly-remembered, star-rich Billy Eckstine band of 1944-7.

He has been heard in night clubs and on records with most of the familiar names of the bop era (he traveled the Blue Note circuit with Monk, Milt Jackson, Miles Davis, Horace Silver, Clifford Brown, Kenny Drew) and worked briefly with Duke Ellington, Lucky Millinder and other big bands.

Although largely ignored by the jazz historians, Blakey deserves a place along with Max Roach and Kenny Clarke in the annals of modern drumming. As diligently as either Max or Klook, he helped to effectuate the metamorphosis from bass-and-snares rhythmic and tonal monotony to the full use of all the percussion accouterments so essential to modern drumming. Before forming his own group he put in a year with Buddy De Franco, during which his ability to swing a small group to phenomenal heights was dramatically illustrated.

Art’s teammates on A Night At Birdland are all members of what might be called the Blue Note family. Lou Donaldson’s place in the scene was firmly etched with his great work on three BN LPs; Horace Silver’s two sets of solos, now on 12” BLP1520, won wide acclaim. Clifford Brown, after co-starring with Lou and Joy Joy Johnson, made his first LP as a leader for Blue Note, and Curly Russell has been such a frequent visitor that we won’t even attempt to list all of his performances.

THE TIME . . . too many records are mode under the inexorable pressure of daytime studio working conditions, with half the musicians trying to stay awake after a rough night’s work. This session was made between the hours of 11 p.m. and 3 a.m. on Washington’s Birthday eve, February 21, 1954, before a large and obviously receptive audience.

THE PLACE . . . More than any other club since 52nd Street days, Birdland hos earned a global reputation through its effort to promote the best in jazz. Situated below street level on Broadway, near 52nd, it was opened in December 1949 and has played host to virtually every major name in the field.

The ebullient voice that starts the session is that of Pee-Wee Marquette, the club’s emcee-mascot, who atones in vocal fortitude for all that he locks in physical stature.

Special thanks are due to Oscar Goodstein, the club’s manager, whose genial cooperation mode this novel venture possible.

Recorded by Rudy van Gelder, on engineer who understands jazz and knows how to balance it, the session truly captured the spirit of the occasion and the atmosphere of the world’s most rhythmic aviary.

THE MUSIC . . . BLP 1521 brings a new version of Split Kick, which Horace Silver first wrote and recorded when he was with Stan Getz, as well as a combo version of his Quicksilver, which he made as a piano solo on BLP 1520. Once In A While features a lyrical flight of fancy by Brownie, who at this tempo engages in everything from long, flowing phrases to a flurry of 32nd notes. Listen for the unusual triplet-accent effects in one passage of the accompaniment. Night in Tunisia is preceded by Art’s oral revelation that he was present when Dizzy wrote the tune— “in Texas, on the bottom of a garbage can.” The sanitation department can take a low bow. Horace’s Mayreh is based on the chords of a well known song in which all God’s children had rhythm.

BLP 1522 features a 12-bar blues theme, Wee-Dot, penned some years ago by trombonist Jay Jay Johnson, in which Brownie delivers a tremendous solo. This LP also offers Lou in ballad mood with a fine solo on the old British standard If I Had You, plus two familiar themes by Charlie Parker: Now’s The Time and Confirmation. The former, a 12-bar blues, was written some time before the highly successful Hucklebuck.

To quote Art Blakey again, we’d like to close by echoing his opinion that he has surrounded himself with “some of the greatest jazz musicians in the country today.” As you’ll hear him say on the record — "Yes, Sir, I’m going to stay with the youngsters — It keeps the mind active.” We might add that at 34, Art is still young in years, in mind and in music, and must surely have many years of success and still greater recognition ahead of him.

—LEONARD FEATHER
These notes were written before the tragic death of Clifford Brown in an automobile accident on June 27, 1956.

Photo by FRANCIS WOLFF
Cover Design by REID K. MILES
Recording by RUDY VAN GELDER

RVG CD Reissue Liner Notes

ART BLAKEY A NIGHT AT BIRDLAND VOLUME ONE

These performances, taped at Birdland in February 1954, are historically significant for a variety of reasons. They were the first at the famous New York nightclub to be recorded for the specific purpose of release on record, early examples of the benefits of both live recording and the new long-playing record, harbingers of an influential trend in album design, indicators oft the dominant direction jazz modernists would pursue for the remainder of the 1950s, and the seed of an ensemble that would remain consistently important and frequently dominant on the jazz scene throughout the remaining 36 years of drummer/bandleader Art Blakey's career.

Blakey was 34 years old at the time. Given his already sizeable contribution via work with Billy Eckstine's band, Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis, he was a surprisingly unheralded drummer until he won the first Down Beat Critics' Poll as a "new star" in 1953. Alfred Lion of Blue Note Records had long been aware of Blakey's talents, however. Lion had recorded a Blakey Octet in 1947 known as the Messengers due to its heavy representation of Islamic musicians, and had featured the drummer on several sessions with Monk and with James Moody around the same time. In 1952, Blakey's career received a dual boost when he began touring with clarinetist Buddy DeFranco's quartet and assuming the role of Blue Note house drummer. Horace Silver, Miles Davis, Clifford Brown, and fellow DeFranco sideman Kenny Drew had featured the drummer on their sessions for the label during '52-3, and a pair of Blakey/Sabu Martinez duets included on Silver's second LP presaged subsequent percussion-ensemble dates.

The time had come for Blakey to begin leading his own group, a task he pursued immediately upon leaving DeFranco. Given the depressed nature of the jazz business at the time, overnight success was not an option. The better part of two years would pass before the cooperative quintet that looked back to Blakey's first Blue Note recordings and called itself the Jazz Messengers captured the public's imagination. In the interim, the drummer took what jobs he could find with a core group of compatible players, many of whom had also recorded for Blue Note as leaders. That was the case with everyone on this album except bassist Curly Russell, who, in any event, had made frequent appearances on the label with Bud Powell, Howard McGhee, Fats Navarro, Silver and Drew.

Birdland became a preferred venue for these flexible early Blakey units. One, with Donaldson and Silver as well as Kenny Dorham and Gene Ramey, had been captured on an aircheck three months before the present recordings. Bootleg records made from the club's radio remotes were already becoming common; Birdland had installed a radio wire shortly after its opening in December 1949 and broadcast nationally over the NBC network for a time. Performances specifically intended for release on commercial recordings were another matter, at Birdland and throughout the world of jazz nightclubs, since it was assumed that a combination of crowd noise and the impracticality of making repeated takes in front of an audience would lead to inferior material. As it turned out, the crowd added atmosphere, and the greater relaxation musicians felt when creating outside the recording studio produced music with a level of inspiration that made any momentary lapses in execution incidental.

These live sounds were waiting to be captured by the rapidly improving recording technology and a new generation of recording engineers, the most jazz-savvy of whom was Rudy Van Gelder. Concert recordings had been gaining popularity since the first Jazz at the Philharmonic releases nearly a decade earlier, but prior to these Birdland tracks there were few examples of actual nightclub sets. Marian McPartland's Hickory House session for Savoy in 1953 may have been first, but these performances really started the club recording ball rolling.

Original annotator Leonard Feather noted that Blakey had assembled both this specific quintet and its music "a while" before the recording, a situation that Feather felt allowed the band to take positive advantage of the extended performance time allowed on LP. These were the first truly long-playing performances Lion produced, as he had filled previous Blue Note albums with takes that could simultaneously be issued as singles. The additional playing time proved crucial, allowing as it did for the sustained intensity of the emerging hard bop approach to be accurately documented for the first time.

From the moment that nine of these tracks first appeared on a series of three 10' albums, they were hailed as classics. The alternate take of "Quicksilver" was added less than two years later when the music was initially reissued in the expanded l2" LP format. Both editions used color-coded versions of the identical photomontage as covers, a look that would define other Blue Note multi-volume sets and was of a piece with trends in contemporary painting.

Three additional titles and the alternate take of "Wee Dot" were discovered in 1975 and subsequently released. The programming on each volume of this edition of A Night At Birdland presents the material in a sequence matching the initial 12" releases, followed in each instance by two of the subsequently issued tracks.

The proceedings are introduced by Pee Wee Marquette, Birdland's infamous — and extremely short — master of ceremonies who Lester Young once famously dubbed "half a motherfucker." Marquette brings the band on as "Art Blakey and his wonderful group," as the Jazz Messengers name would not be adopted until a Horace Silver studio session in December. The quintet comes wailing right in with "Split Kick," a Silver composition (based on the chord changes of "There Will Never Be Another You") introduced by Stan Getz three years earlier on the pianist's second recording session. This version has a new introduction and a brisker tempo, and it quickly defines the take-no-prisoners approach of this band. Lou Donaldson, clearly of the Charlie Parker school but with a distinctive sound and a penchant for quotation that matches Silver's, is extroverted, fluent and not phased a bit by the assertiveness of the rhythm section. Clifford Brown, already a rising star thanks in large measure to his early appearances on Blue Note, is even more exciting as the ideas burst from his trumpet, his glisses parrying the press rolls from Blakey's tom-toms. Silver, percussive and super-soulful, was made to play in a rhythm section with Blakey, as he demonstrates here to an even greater extent than on his earlier studio albums. Alto and trumpet trade eighths for a chorus, then Blakey plays one that is peppered with his signature Afro-Latin patterns.

Blakey announces Brown's ballad feature "Once In A While," which is as moving as anything the tragically short-lived trumpeter ever recorded. He embraces the melody in the opening chorus, moves over his entire horn with ease, and sustains the lyricism after the rhythm section moves into double time and Blakey exhorts him to "blow your horn!" The three-against-four feeling behind Brown on the second chorus bridge was a favorite Silver device, and Brown's final half-chorus and coda are spectacular.

The introduction heard on the original 1952 trio recording of "Quicksilver" by this same rhythm section is omitted, and the tempo is faster here; but Silver's take on the changes of "Lover Come Back To Me" still feature hilarious inserts of "Oh, You Beautiful Doll" and "Donkey Serenade" in the theme choruses. Brown, whose quotes are less frequent and more esoteric than those of his fellow soloists, gives us a bit of Gigi Gryce's "Salute To The Band Box" on his second bridge, and Blakey adds particularly inspired commentary behind Silver.

"A Night In Tunisia" may or may not have been written "in Texas, on the bottom of a garbage can," as Blakey announces. Composer Dizzy Gillespie said that he came up with the piece and performed it during a 1941-2 engagement with Benny Carter at Kelly's Stables in New York, where it was initially called "Interlude." There is no dispute, however, about the tune's status as a modern jazz classic, thanks to Charlie Parker's Dial recording with its astounding alto break and such subsequent versions as Bud Powell's for Blue Note. Donaldson plays a jaw-dropping break of his own to launch the solos, then sustains the heated atmosphere. Brown begins more carefully, displaying his elevated melodic imagination and sense of structure amidst the hard swinging of the rhythm section. This tempo is ideal for appreciating the charge Silver creates during his solos with those stabbing left-hand accents, like a finger poked in the music's side. Blakey also solos, minus the miscellaneous percussion accompaniment that would become de rigeur in later versions by the Jazz Messengers.

This is the debut recording of "Mayreh," which Blakey would reprise with a totally different quintet three month later in a studio session for EmArcy. Silver based the composition on the changes of "All God's Children Got Rhythm," and the title on the way North Carolinian Donaldson pronounced the name Mary. Ideas simply pour out of Brown's horn, in a solo where the virtuosity is obvious yet never obliterates the musical content. Donaldson, Silver and Blakey also swing hard in what was a set-closer, to judge by the segue into the club's theme, "Lullabye Of Birdland."

"Wee-Dot," the first of two bonus tracks, is an alternate take. The master take of this blues is heard on A Night At Birdland Volume 2. Donaldson wails at length in the opening solo, which features one of his patented string of quotes in the center; then Brown plays an equally heated solo. The churning, relentless force of the rhythm section behind the horn soloists must have sounded startling at the time, but would quickly become central to the hard bop approach. After Silver's choruses, Curly Russell gets a rare solo spot.

Silver begins the next track with a hint that the band may be headed into the blues ballad "Please Send Me Someone To Love," though the more traditional twelve-bar form is revealed once Donaldson begins to blow. The saxophonist shows himself to be the most soulful of Bird's disciples in his choruses, after which Brown also plays some serious blues in which his use of the trumpet's upper register is quite distinct from that of Gillespie and Fats Navarro. Silver completes the sequence with spots of assistance from the horns that grow into a full-blown conversation on the final chorus.

— Bob Blumenthal, 2001