Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers - Free For All
Released - July 1966
Recording and Session Information
Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, February 10, 1964
Freddie Hubbard, trumpet; Curtis Fuller, trombone; Wayne Shorter, tenor sax; Cedar Walton, piano; Reggie Workman, bass; Art Blakey, drums.
1296 tk.3 The Core
1295 tk.5 Hammer Head
1298 tk.15 Pensativa
1297 tk.16 Free For All
Session Photos
Photos: © Francis Wolff/Mosaic Images
https://www.mosaicrecordsimages.com/
Track Listing
| Side One | ||
| Title | Author | Recording Date |
| Free for All | Wayne Shorter | 10 February 1964 |
| Hammer Head | Wayne Shorter | 10 February 1964 |
| Side Two | ||
| The Core | Freddie Hubbard | 10 February 1964 |
| Pensativa | Clare Fischer | 10 February 1964 |
Liner Notes
A FEW WEEKS after this session was recorded on February 10, 1964, Art Blakey and his molten Messengers were playing in San Francisco. In his San Francísco Chronicle column, Ralph Gleason distilled the particular force which characterizes Art Blakey as the mesmeric center of his unit. “Blakey,” Gleason reported, “is like a man on fire. When he drums, every inch of his body is involved in it. He can get a greater variety of counter rhythms going at any one time than any drummer I have ever heard. At times he seems able to create a sort of phantom circuit of rhythms by getting them firmly established, leaving them and going on to something else. But they were laid down so solidly in the first place that they continue in your mind while he’s moved ahead to any other pattern.”
Because of Art Blakey’s total emotional commitment to the music he plays, no Blakey album has ever been dull. What makes this set dìstinctive, however, is that on the night of the session, Blakey was in a more galvanic state than he has been on any of his previous Blue Note dates, as memorable as many of them are. It was, in sum, one of those times when everything was fused for unbridled action and emotion. Spurred by Blakey’s firebolts, the other musicians rose to a collective - as well as individual — intensity which makes this a remarkable series of performances.
Wayne Shorter wrote Free For All. Following Cedar Walton’s lead-in, the horns state the grave stately theme with Blakey presaging the fire storms to come. Shorter himself digs in with characteristic forcefulness, His churning solo punctuated by fanfare-like thematic fragments from the other horns until he breaks away into the kind of statement that seems to grasp the listener almost by palpable force. The extended solo indicates Shorter’s often searing potential when he “stretches out.” Curtis Fuller, who on occasion in the past has sounded somewhat too self-contained emotionally to me, is also caught up in the night’s free-for-all spirit; and then Freddie Hubbard plunges in with his customary combination of bold linear conception and cuttingly alive tone.
Hearing Blakey behind Hubbard and the other musicians throughout he session reminded me of what Freddie had once said ‘when I asked him what it was like having Blakey behind him when he took a solo. “After you play with him,” Hubbard observed succinctly, “it feels empty playing with most other drummers. He gives you so much support.”
After Freddie soars through a series of climaxes in Free For All, Biakey raises the temperature even higher with a fiercely complex solo, and the theme returns as the hornmen, having generated so much drive, end on a peak of exultation — a shout at having gotten all that emotion out.
Hammer Head is also by Wayne Shorter. The front line, above Blakey’s crackling rolls, announces the melody with a biting definiteness after which Shorter settles into a smouldering groove. ‘It’s in the medium tempos,” Freddie Hubbard has pointed out, “that you can really separate the extraordinary drummers from the average ones. There’s no one meaner than Art in .this kind of tempo. All T can say in words is that he gets right into the nitty gritty and stays there.” Hubbard’s own solo is both flowingly lyrical while also containing the steel and power to avoid being overwhelmed by the rhythmic tidal wave underneath. Curtis Fuller continues in the speech-like, exhortatory vein he established in Free For Ali. A respite of relative calm comes in Cedar Walton’s firmly organized, penetratingly economical solo. When the horns return, there is again a satisfied and satisfying collective wrapping up of the mood and the theme.
Freddie Hubbard’s The Core has two meanings. Explicitly, the song is dedicated to CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality, and expresses Hubbard’s admiration of that organization’s persistence and resourcefulness in its work for total, meaningful equality. “They’re getting,” Hubbard explains, “at the core, at the center of the kinds of change that have to take place before this society is really open to everyone. And more than any other group, CORE is getting to youth, and that’s where the center of change is.”
The title’s other meaning is musical and emotional. “The way this worked out,” says Hubbard, “I think we got at some of the core of jazz — the basic feelings and rhythms that are at the foundation of the music.”
Reggie Workman opens the piece with an almost ominous, brooding line. Cedar Walton cuts into it incisively; Art joins in; and the horns - led by Hubbard—state what sounds like a call. A call not only a freedom but to the determination and mustering of energy which are needed to make freedom actual. Another comment by Ralph Gleason is applicable when listening to Blakey during the seizing solos by Shorter, Hubbard, Fuller and Walton: “Listen to Blakey first for the basic pulse of the number. Pay attention to his introductions, his endings and to the flourishes with which he introduces the soloists. He plays entire overtures on the drums frequently. Then, while the soloist is playing and setting up his own (the soloist’s) rhythm pattern by phrasing in his own solo, listen to the way in which Blakey plays AGAINST that pattern.”
The overall impact of The Core reinforces, I think, the feeling of those present at this session that it was a notable event in Blakey’s recording career because of the unusual depth of communication between the musicians. The totality of passion gives these tracks an immediacy that results in a degree of sustained excitement which is rare in recording or “Jive” performances.
Freddie Hubbard arranged Clare Fischer’s Pensativa and is responsible for bringing the tune into Blakey’s book. “I was playing a gig on Long Island,” Hubbard recalls, ‘“and the pianist started playing it. The mood got at me, this feeling of a pensive woman. And the melody was so beautiful that after I’d gotten home I couldn’t get it out of my mind.”
After the explosions which precede Pensativa, the tune provides a stimulating change of direction. But even here, though the song’s wistfulness is kept intact, the feeling in the solos is as full-strength as in the more irrepressibly assertive numbers. This is virile lyricism and it indicates that the ardor of Blakey and his colleagues on this night would have ignited anything into a strong flame.
Several years ago, in an interview with British journalist Les Tomkins, Art Blakey emphasized : “No jazz band is any better than its drummer. If the band is better than the drummer, then it’s not a jazz band. He puts everything together there and keeps things rolling. This is what I was taught by Chick Webb and by my predecessors, and I think they’re proven to be right.”
Blakey’s truism is especially proven right in this set. In Pensativa, he sustains a deeply alive rhythm while also making certain that the song’s essential tenderness is not obscured. In the other numbers, Blakey is able simultaneously to propel the band into emotionally liberated flights while also keeping hold of the reins of power at the center so that each piece retains an organic unity and so that the emotions are not scattered.
“There are times,” Freddie Hubbard says, “when Art is so much on fire that he almost drives you off the stand.” But Blakey’s power is essentially centripetal — no matter how volcanic the music gets, he retains command. Blakey’s influence as a drummer-leader resembles that of an exceptionally skillful stump speaker. He can whip up his men into freeing their own emotions to a startling degree, but the basic direction of the music is set and sustained by Blakey. And that is why Blakey has the confidence to give so much scope and encouragement to the younger musicians he seeks out for the Messengers. He welcomes the stimulus they give him, and be also knows that no matter how venturesome they become, he remains fundamentally in charge. The free-for-all of contesting and complementary wills and passions never gets to the point at which anyone in the Messengers forgets who the leader is.
—NAT HENTOFF
RVG CD Reissue Liner Notes
A NEW LOOK AT FREE FOR ALL
One never knows when that magical spirit will visit a musical situation. One knows when one hears the results, however; those rare instances when energy, openness, and focus merge and allow musicians to reach an exceptional place. If the musicians in question are already exceptional, the results can be truly superlative. The spirit was about when Free for All was recorded, as original annotator Nat Hentoff clearly realized, and as the ensuing forty years have only confirmed.
Art Blakey had been fiercely powerful on many other occasions, so to call this his most "galvanic Blue Note performance," as Hentoff does, is saying something indeed. Blakey's drums are orchestral in both dynamic range and rhythmic layering, goading the soloists from a couple of directions at once and eliciting similarly full-throated, muscular responses. Curtis Fuller is the most heavily effected of the sidemen, as he answers Blakey's onslaught with colors and broken rhythms that were rare in his work of the period, but every Messenger is clearly elevated to a magical zone.
This edition of Blakey's band contained four composers who were each very prolific at the time, and it may be only coincidence that Fuller and Cedar Walton are not represented in the present program. The four compositions heard here played a significant role in generating the music's very special spirit, and were contributed in equal parts by Wayne Shorter and Freddie Hubbard. Shorter wrote the title track and "Hammer Head," and through them displays his respective mastery of two Messenger staples — the short, heraldic theme that makes space for drum punctuation ("Free for All") and the deep-pocketed, medium-tempo shuffle ("Hammer Head"). As the first soloist on each track, Shorter is also responsible for sustaining and building on the force of the opening ensemble, and he responds in a voice that is fast and fierce and incantatory in a manner that led many to consider Shorter the leading John Coltrane disciple of the period. Within months, Shorter's own career as a leader on Blue Note and a new working home in the Miles Davis quintet brought the saxophonist to his own more oblique voice. He was already probing and passionate at a personal harmonic remove, and the tenor work here is something of a watershed example of what (pace Count Basie) we might consider "Old Testament" Shorter.
Form and feeling dovetail perfectly on both the tune "Free for All" and Hubbard's "The Core," in another key to the impact of the album. Both compositions, while not built exclusively on scales as are the so-called modal pieces of the era, feature extended stretches where harmony is static and the band and Blakey indulge their tension-building talents. At the same time, both compositions retain clearly delineated structures and (however delayed) harmonic resolutions. As such, they are perfect transitional vehicles for a music in evolution beyond formats crammed tight with changes, yet not as "free" as the music of Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman, that Blue Note would soon add to its definition of "the finest in jazz."
While the writing by Blakey's sidemen is inspired, it was Clare Fischer's "Pensativa" that became the standard on this program. Its performance gains impact as the album's only example of partially-leashed power, although the more modulated intensity allows us to hear Blakey drop some of his inspirational verbal bombs behind Shorter. Hubbard was so fond of this beautiful homage to the Brazilian bossa nova movement (one of the best of early efforts in the style from a U.S. composer), that he reprised it a year later as a trumpet battle with Lee Morgan on the live Night of the Cookers recordings (also available in the RVG Series). Cookers' "Pensativa" is hot, to be sure, but this is still the definitive performance.
Free for All was the first Jazz Messenger recording on Blue Note in over two years, a period during which the band was heard on United Artists and Riverside, and in expanded form on Colpix. It is also almost the penultimate studio appearance by this celebrated Blakey sextet. There was one final Riverside session held ten days later that appeared on the album Kyoto, where some of the same intensity can also be heard. The magic that transpired here was absent on Kyoto, though, which is why Free for All remains the true summation of the Hubbard/Fuller/Shorter/Walton Messengers.
— Bob Blumenthal, 2003
Blue Note Spotlight - August 2013
http://www.bluenote.com/spotlight/art-blakey-the-jazz-messengers-free-for-all/
Studios have a tendency to stifle and muffle creativity while an on-fire live outing oftentimes opens a window onto the true essence of a band. That’s why it’s hard to believe that drummer Art Blakey’s Free for All, arguably his most dynamic album, was recorded in the intimate confines of engineer Rudy Van Gelder’s humble studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. With all the yells and yelps, the whoops and wowing going on in the backdrop, and the leader’s shell-shocking drumming, this radiant 1964 session comes off sounding like an exhilarating late-night show at the Village Vanguard.
The celebrated recording captures a magic: an intense and joyful moment of serendipity for this 1961-64 edition of Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, the band officially co-founded with Horace Silver in 1954. Playing on acoustic instruments with an intense hard bop drive, the sextet conjures electricity with the fertile frontline horn section of tenor saxophonist Wayne Shorter (soon to launch into Miles Davis’s classic ‘60s quintet), trumpeter Freddie Hubbard (ready to take flight on his own solo career) and trombonist Curtis Fuller. Reggie Workman on bass holds down the proceedings that threaten to soar throughout, and pianist Cedar Walton provides the tasteful melodic swing.
Free for All is a transcendent four-track album that gets its name from the raucous Shorter original that energetically opens the show. It’s literally an extended musical free-for-all that takes its visceral cue from the otherworldly, ecstatic Shorter solo that commands almost half of the song’s 11-minute surge. Fuller follows Shorter with fire, with Hubbard grasping the flaming baton and being cheered on to fly toward the blazing sun. Blakey, who throughout bashes with incendiary beauty, goes ballistic on his exclamatory solo that climaxes the outing before the band returns to the horn-fueled theme.
Blakey’s machine gun drumming opens the second track, the swinging “Hammer Head,” another Shorter piece that again features his kaleidoscopic tenor saxing followed by Hubbard’s loose and grooved trumpeting, Fuller’s soulful tromboning and Walton’s graceful dance on the keys. Excited by what he’s hearing, Blakey shouts encouraging commentary in the background throughout that spurs the players on.
Hubbard’s contribution to the album, the hard-driving “The Code.” It’s a forceful and emotive jaunt that certainly displays the improvisational brio and collective alchemy of a group of turned-on artists who dig deep and fly high with Blakey’s thundering support.
And for the finale, something different: a sublime rendering of Clare Fisher’s “Pensativa” that Hubbard discovered while playing a backwater gig on Long Island. His lyricism on the percussion-spiced tune is splendid. Even though the tempo is slowed and swinging, there’s the drumming maestro in the background passionately shouting out to Shorter, “Blow your horn!” With the studio date settling into a sweet sunset, “Pensativa” serves as dessert for a fine dining experience that is indeed rare.
On Free for All, in the midst of his soon-to-be-stars sidemen, Blakey is at once the center of the universe and the gatekeeper to the jazz lifeblood of freedom
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