BLP 4029

Art Blakey - The Big Beat

Released - May 1960

Recording and Session Information

Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, March 6, 1960
Lee Morgan, trumpet; Wayne Shorter, tenor sax; Bobby Timmons, piano; Jymie Merritt, bass; Art Blakey, drums.

tk.3 It's Only A Paper Moon
tk.7 Dat Dere
tk.10 The Chess Players
tk.13 Lester's Left Town
tk.17 Sakeena's Vision
tk.22 Politely

Session Photos

Photos: Francis Wolff/Mosaic Images / 
https://www.mosaicrecordsimages.com/

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
The Chess Players	Wayne Shorter	06/03/1960
Sakeena's Vision	Wayne Shorter	06/03/1960
Politely	Bill Hardman	06/03/1960
Side Two
Title	Author	Recording Date
Dat Dere	Bobby Timmons	06/03/1960
Lester Left Town	Wayne Shorter	06/03/1960
It's Only a Paper Moon	Harold Arlen, E.Y. Harburg, Billy Rose	06/03/1960

Liner Notes

As is customary in all Art Blakey albums, this one is characterized by driving passion and a whirlpool-like swing. In addition, however, the program - one of the best in Blue Note's Jazz Messenger series - also underlines the growing impact as a player and writer of Wayne Shorter as well as the increasingly incisive individuality of Lee Morgan. With a rhythm section made dependable on all sides of the triangle by Bobby Timmons (who is also becoming the leading jazz neo-gospel writer) and Jymie Merritt, Blakey has his most venturesome and invigorating crew of proselytizers since the original Jazz Messengers with Horace Silver and Kenny Dorham.

It's not often enough realized how useful Blakey has been as an encourager of the young. He has always, for example, urged anyone in his group to write, and has promised to try out any chart any band member brings to rehearsal. Benny Golson was established before he joined Blakey, but Benny gained useful experience and had free play as Art's musical director. Other writers who have used Blakey bands as a laboratory have been Horace Silver, Donald Byrd, Hank Mobley, and Jackie McLean. Being with Blakey can be one of the most valuable apprenticeships in jazz for players and writers. If you have capacity, the constant challenge of Art's own ceaseless force and rhythmic demands will accelerate your awareness of how much you can do. If you don't have it, Art's pace will quickly become too much, too overwhelming for you.

The biographies of Art Blakey and Lee Morgan are too well known to be recapitulated here, and both are represented by a sizable number of Blue Note albums. Wayne Shorter, who was with Maynard Ferguson's band before joining Blakey, was born in Newark, in August, 1933, went to Newark's Arts High School, and while still there, played with Nat Phipps' band which was composed of his contemporaries. Shorter was graduated from New York University with a degree in Music Education while he continued working With Phipps at home and sitting in at New York sessions.

In 1956, Shorter played briefly With Horace Silver before going into the Army. He made the Fort Dix band, played weekend sessions in New York, and was discharged at the end of 1958. He acquired a reputation with Ferguson, and at the time of this recording, had been with Blakey some six months. Describing what having Blakey behind you is like, Shorter says, "If you're low and don't feel like working at the beginning of the night, you will by the next set. He just sparks you. He generates a feeling for playing and makes you forget those things that have nothing do with music."

Bobby Timmons had returned to Blakey at the time of this recording after a few months With Cannonball Adderley. Born in Philadelphia in December, 1935, he started studying organ and piano at six. He become a scholarship student at the Philadelphia Musical Academy. His professional career began in 1955 with Kenny Dorham. Timmons then spent a year with Chet Baker, on to Sonny Stitt and Maynard Ferguson, and had been with Blakey a year and a half until he left temporarily to join Cannonball in the fall of 1959. Jymie Merritt has worked with Todd Dameron, B.B. King and Lester Young, among others.

Wayne Shorter wrote three of the originals on the Date. "The Chess Players" is thus titled because of the stop and go character of the melody, resembling somewhat the moving and then the pondering of a chess game. The progression is built on the principle of fourths. Shorter has the first solo, and while it's true he has clearly listened with concentration to Coltrane and Rollins, Wayne is one of the few of the younger tenors who is already his own man. He plays with striking strength and consistent logic. And, Like Coltrane and Rollins, he has that "cry" at the core of his playing that separates the jazzman who has something to say from the musician who knows his changes but not himself. Note how, as always, Blakey provides not only a pulsation like the waves of the sea but also accents behind the soloist with unerring propulsive timing.

Lee Morgan has not only developed remarkable technical fluency for his age, but he is also becoming one of the wittiest and most rhythmically relaxed of all the younger players. Humor is a blessing in any context and jazz could do with more of it. On that score alone, Lee is a major asset to the current scene; but he is also useful on several other counts - conception, swing, and an increasingly multi-colored tone quality that sounds here somewhat like a cross in impact between Humphrey Bogart and Cannonball Adderley. Timmons' solo is functional, "soulful" and brief; and the chess came ends with all the players - and I don't deserve to ever be forgiven for this pun - soulmates.

The Sakeena of "Sakeena's Vision" is Art Blakey's two-year-old daughter. "I wanted it," explains Shorter, "to be symbolic of a child's thoughts that adults can't understand. Sort of like out of the mouths of babes come innocence and purity. Minorish in feeling, the work was written in G minor concert but can be - and is played here - in the keys of G, F, and Bb, depending on how the soloist feels. The bar structure is not exactly even in that there is a one-bar pivot point at which the last bar of the second ending also becomes the beginning of the bridge. The piece also includes an extended Blakey solo that again demonstrates Art's furious skill at juggling poly-rhythms.

"Politely" was written by Bill Hardman, a former trumpeter with the Messengers. It's a minor blues with what might be described as a finger-snapping rhythmic pattern. I would counsel your noting Merritt's tone and logical conception in his solo. Shorter's solo is an intensely evocative one. Morgan shows how much he's learned about developing a climax, about dynamics, and about letting an idea unfold and build at some length instead of trying to expel it (buck-shot-style) all at once.

"Dat Dere" naturally is Bobby Timmons' sequel to "This Here," which has become one of his best known compositions. Blakey is pleased at the bold introduction of the gospel train to modern jazz, which more or less began with Horace Silver's "The Preacher." (Horace Silver and the Jazz Messengers, Blue Note 1518). "It's a natural thing; that's one of the places jazz started. Those people who didn't often go to church sang the same tunes outside with different lyrics." And, by the way, I never did agree with Big Bill Broonzy's putting down Ray Charles for 'mixing' church music and blues. We all come out of the same thing, and they were both there." Note Lee Morgan's preaching trumpet toward the end of his solo.

Wayne Shorter points out that Bobby Timmons as a boy played organ in a church and also at various Philadelphia funeral homes so that he grew up with the gospel feel. "You'll hear gospel," adds Blakey, " in a lot of the young players. Horace Silver, for example, is Portuguese in background, and when he was a little boy, he lived with a woman who took him to a sanctified church. And that influence stayed with him the rest of his life."

Shorter's "Lester Left Town" is described by him as "a small tribute to Lester. It was meant to show how I felt about his whole musical existence. I've been aware of Lester since I began playing, and this tune took a long time to write. Because of my own style, a lot of people seemed surprised that I'd written a piece for Lester, but listeners don't always realize how many influences help to form a musician. And the song is also meant to show that we younger players do think of those who are gone." The piece is also an indication of Shorter's continuing attempt to gradually work out of the usual method of writing harmony quite close to the melody. "I don;t like that approach because thereby, the listener can just about anticipate what's going to come next. By contrast, in this piece, on first hearing you're likely to hear the melody and harmony almost as separate entities with little to do with each other. Only after several hearings, I think, do you begin to hear how they're intertwined."

The inclusion of "It's Only A Paper Moon" in the Messengers' library came about in November, 1959, when Blakey's unit was playing at the Club St. Germain in Paris. "We were being photographed," explains Shorter, "and we had to do something the audience hadn't heard us play before. Art just pounded out the beat, and at the same time this tune came into Lee Morgan's head. Then, we all picked it up." Note the grace as well as the verve with which Lee, who is now musical director of the Messengers (in charge of the library) states the melody. Wayne comes in next, and as throughout the album, he illustrates Blakey's characterization of him: "He's so full of energy, you don't know what he's going to do next." Timmons' solo recalls Art's statement that Bobby is the best pianist he's had in the Messengers since Horace Silver. Lee takes the tune out, and the program is over; but as in the case of all kinds of music that is played with unrestricted emotion, the echoes remain for a long time pushing back the silence.

--NAT HENTOFF, Co-Editor, The Jazz Review

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

Lee Morgan and Wayne Shorter perform by courtesy of Vee-Jay Records, Bobby Timmons performs by courtesy of Riverside Records.

RVG CD Reissue Liner Notes

A NEW LOOK AT THE BIG BEAT

This classic edition of Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers originally took shape at the Canadian Exposition in the summer of 1959 when Wayne Shorter, then a member of Maynard Ferguson's reed section, was recruited by Lee Morgan to substitute for an absent Hank Mobley. In the six months separating that event and the recording of The Big Beat, much had transpired. Shorter, with Morgan alongside, made his recording debut on Wynton Kelly's first Vee Jay album, which in turn led both horn players to sign contracts with the Chicago-based label. Pianist Bobby Timmons took what proved to be a brief leave of absence from the Messengers to help Cannonball Adderley launch his new quintet. It was the Timmons sanctified composition "This Here" that helped turn Adderley's new unit into an instant sensation. Blakey did bring the Messengers, with Walter Davis, Jr. on piano, into Rudy Van Gelder's studio on November 10 (the same day on which the Vee Jay album Introducing Wayne Shorter was completed); but the resulting Africaine was initially rejected by producer Alfred Lion because it lacked a track with the crossover potential of Timmons's earlier "Moanin'." The Messengers left for Europe immediately after the Africaine date, where they were taped in various performances on their own and with guests such as Bud Powell. Meanwhile, Timmons signed a recording contract with Riverside and cut his composition "Dat Dere" twice — in a trio version for his This Here Is Bobby Timmons date in January, and in his final appearance with Adderley for the Them Dirty Blues album a month later.

Lion must have been overjoyed when Timmons returned to the Messengers with "Dat Dere," for it is both the most impressive composition Timmons ever wrote and one of the greatest works to emerge during the soul-jazz craze. The melody is taken through some sophisticated development without ever losing its funky feeling, and the out-chorus — perhaps a sign of former Jazz Messenger Benny Golson's residual influence — is equally inspired. The lyrics that Oscar Brown, Jr. added several months later had a great deal to do with turning "Dat Dere" into a jazz classic, yet this version by the Messengers played a role as well. It is particularly enlightening to compare the solos by Morgan, whose half-valve effects and could stand as a definition of soul music, and Shorter. who frets like a contemporary, perhaps existential skeptic.

From a compositional standpoint, however, The Big Beat is best remembered for serving notice that Shorter was a master in the making. "The Chess Players," his version of soul music, received a lyric as well (from Jon Hendricks), while "Sakeena's Vision" manages to function as both a structural brain-twister and the kind of percussion-punctuated opus that displayed leader Blakey at his best. "Lester Left Town," Shorter's first masterpiece, had been on the Africaine date, and led to a heated argument between bandleader and producer. "I think my tune was too new," Shorter explained to Conrad Silvert in 1981. "The modernity, all those chromatics were too much for Alfred." No such problems occurred on the present session, which finds Blakey bringing the tempo up from the earlier version. While the opening melodic phrase is extremely Lestor-ian, suggesting Young's solo on the Count Basie recording "Jive at Five," Shorter has again deployed space in a manner that tailors the piece to Blakey's personality.

"Paper Moon," the lone standard, is heard in two takes cut at the beginning of the session, and provides a fine illustration of why producers sometimes insist that a band go back and give a piece one more try. While there is nothing fatally wrong with the alternate, it was the first performance recorded that afternoon and the musicians were taking a relatively cautious approach. Still, the bonus track has its charms, including Shorter's wild quote at the top of his second chorus, Morgan sounding as if he is backing into his trumpet solo, and evidence in the first piano chorus that Timmons absorbed Bud Powell in part through the example of Red Garland. The master take is a much more intense affair, and worth hearing if only for an indication of how Jymie Merritt's strength was so essential to this band.

For more comparative listening, check out composer Bill Hardman playing "Politely" on the Lou Donaldson album Sunny Side Up, recorded for Blue Note a months before the present version; Sheila Jordan's extraordinary reading of "Dat Dere" on her 1962 Blue Note album Portrait of Sheila, and Miles 1951 take on "Paper Moon" for Prestige, which is swung at an impeccable medium tempo by Blakey.

-Bob Blumenthal, 2005