LT-1088

Art Blakey And The Jazz Messengers - Africaine

Released - 1981

Recording and Session Information

Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, November 10, 1959
Lee Morgan, trumpet; Wayne Shorter, tenor sax; Walter Davis Jr., piano; Jymie Merritt, bass; Art Blakey, drums; Dizzy Reece, congas #5,6.

tk.3 The Midget
tk.4 Lester Left Town
tk.8 Celine
tk.10 Splendid
tk.12 Haina
tk.14 Africaine

Session Photos

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

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
Africaine	Wayne Shorter	November 10 1959
Lester Left Town	Wayne Shorter	November 10 1959
Splendid	Walter Davis, Jr.	November 10 1959
Side Two
Haina	Lee Morgan	November 10 1959
The Midget	Lee Morgan	November 10 1959
Celine	Lee Morgan	November 10 1959

Liner Notes

Remarkably, Wayne Shorter's first record date with Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers is being issued for the first time more than twenty years after the session. It was an important occasion. Shorter made his debut not only as a young voice on the tenor saxophone who would quickly blossom with Blakey and, later, with Miles Davis, but also as a composer who would become known as a major innovator in contemporary music, an artist who would expand the boundaries of the jazz spectrum.

Lee Morgan, Blakey’s young star on the trumpet, had been excited about Shorter and was the catalyst who brought Wayne to the band. He was immediately accepted by the band — Shorter is the kind of man who elicits both respect and affection from his associates — but all didn’t go smoothly in the studio on this first date.

Rudy Van Gelder was the engineer, and, of course, Alfred Lion was the producer. The band was working overtime to obtain a "take” of Shorter’s “Lester Left Town:’ a crisp and clever piece that is typical of Wayne’s uncannily forward-looking sensibility. Apparently, the tune wasn’t exactly what Mr. Lion was envisioning the Blakey sound to be. For whatever reason, the tapes were put on the shelf, and the Messengers re-recorded “Lester” several months later as part of The Big Beat.

“I think my tune was too new:" Wayne now says with two decades of hindsight. “The modernity, all those chromatics were too much for Alfred. Art said, ‘We play progressive jazz. We wanted to stretch out and really work on it. And Alfred was nervous because we needed to work overtime to get it right. Art exploded, picked up his sticks and got up from the drums. That was the first time we ever saw him really get mad, and we respected him for it."

“I think Alfred was looking for another Moanin.’ Maybe he was on the hit trail, thinking Bu (Blakey’s nickname, short for Buhaina) would become another Jimmy Smith, keep in that groove. But Art would say, all those records sound alike. We want to do our own thing.“

At that first session, Blakey barked at Lion, “It’s my band, and I’m gonna run it." And run it he did, beautifully. The story has a happy ending. By the next session, Blakey and Lion were hugging one another, according to Shorter. Lion laughed and said, “Art, you make me so damn mad!:" to which Blakey, not the kind of man to hold a grudge, smiled sweetly and said, “Alfred, you’re all right with me".

Shorter began writing music rather prolifically while still in high school in Newark, New Jersey. The summer after his graduation, he was given a piano, and accelerated his pace, writing, among other things, “Africaines".

“When I wrote it, it was like a soundtrack to what I felt was an African mood. I kept it for years, and after I got out of the Army I put it in Horace Silver’s publishing company.’

In the studio, Blakey imbued the song with an authentically African feeling, helped by the presence of Dizzy Reece’s congas. Dizzy Gillespie had employed Cuban drummer Chano Pozo years earlier, but Blakey went even further toward the source.

“Dizzy’s thing was Afro-Cuban:" says Shorter. “Then Art Blakey took off the ‘Cuban’ and said, "African!"

The sharply descending phrase that begins “Lester Left Town” has a softly ironic edge to it. Shorter never knew Prez personally, but he dug him, and Wayne is one of the few current jazz giants (Sonny Rollins is another) who possesses a wit comparable to that of Lester Young.

"I wrote the tune shortly after Lester died. I saw him when I was fifteen or sixteen. He came to New York with Jazz at the Philharmonic. Everybody had arrived except for him, and there he was, walking into the theater lobby just as slow as he liked, with his long black coat on and his porkpie hat, and his horn. He was one of the few musicians who carried his horn in one of those contour bags. And he had a black umbrella ¡n the bag at all times, just in case it rained.

“Lester had a whole musical lifestyle, not just his music. With him, you could hardly differentiate between when he was playing and when he wasn’t. He had a universal style that permeated everything he did".

Another great tenor player who was probably influenced by Young even more than Shorter was, Stan Getz, includes “Lester Left Town” as part of his active repertoire. Several months ago, Getz and Shorter found themselves together in Rio de Janeiro (another great love they share is Brazilian music). Getz had an engagement there that stretched five nights, and at the end of each evening, Stan invited Wayne onstage to play "Lester Leaps In” together. Jamming is something Shorter rarely does these days.

Lee Morgan knew Wayne Shorter from Newark. "After I left the Army,” Wayne says, “I used to sit and watch jam sessions. One night there was a feature of Coltrane and Lee, right after they did Blue Train together. I was there, sitting in the audience with my horn, arid they were playing a long session on ‘Night in Tunisia Lee had heard me somewhere, so he asked me to join in with him and Trane. That was my first time playing with Trane, and it was a hot night. That’s when we started to go outside on the chord changes, and outside the normal range of the saxophone, too".

Shorter spent a brief month with Maynard Ferguson in 1959 (as did Josef Zawinul), but left to join Blakey during a weekend in Canada.

“We were at the Canadian Exposition. Everybody was there - Count Basie, Sarah Vaughan, Jimmy Rushing, Ahmad Jamal. Blakey was playing ‘Evidence’ and Round About Midnight: Hank Mobley didn’t make the gig, and during the break Lee walked across the racetrack to where I was with Maynard’s band, and asked if I’d like to be in the Messengers. So I walked back with him, and Art asked me, ‘Do you have eyes?’”

“Later on, Lee told me that he had always had the idea of me standing next to him on the bandstand. And since Art was always talking about ‘young blood Lee said, ‘Here’s the guy". Soon, Lee would be looking over at me on stage and saying, "Front line, baby!”

All three tunes on the second side of this album were written by Morgan. ‘Haina’ is short for Blakey’s African name, adopted more than thirty years ago, Buhaina. “The Midget” refers to Pee Wee Marquette, longtime doorman at the Birdland club. And “Celine," Shorter says, "must have been the name of a girl Lee knew. He said she looked like a cat".

Morgan’s unfortunate early demise deprived the jazz world of yet another great trumpet star in his prime (Fats Navarro and Clifford Brown are two other such young geniuses who come to mind). Morgan had the wit and style to match an extraordinary technical facility. His solos bristle with surprises. “Lee was different:" says Wayne. “A lot of his licks came from Clifford or Fats or Dizzy—and so many others, like the pianists —but he was original, so adaptable. Miles dug him.

“Lee’s approach to writing was fundamental. He was much more at home playing than writing, but he would never ask for help. That’s one thing I dug about Lee — he would struggle through on his own. And then his innocence, his natural ability to communicate, really came through on ‘Sidewinder’. He knew that if he was too deliberate, that if he was too tutored as a writer, that he would sound contrived. So he kept his shortcomings and learned to communicate in spite of them. Like Miles, he had the sound to overcome anything. And Lee knew how to get hot quick. He knew how to ‘write a letter'. That’s what we would say.

“Lee would write a letter, and I’d take a while to get past the salutation. I’d be greeting everybody all night. Art used to say that at a jam session you could be long-winded, but at a concert you should get to the point — the number of people there dictated that you condense what you say.”

It was John Coltrane who recommended Wayne Shorter to Miles Davis. Miles tried to “steal” Wayne away as early as 1961 and 1962, but he stayed with Blakey until 1964.

“A lot of musicians wanted to run off and play in different bands, but when I first joined Art, I told myself that it was cool to stay with a band for five years before making a move. And then Blakey started introducing me as the musical director and the band featured my tunes...especially after we had three horns. And then everybody else started writing for three horns."

Shorter’s writing for three horns made the Messengers into a kind of streamlined big band. Sleek. “Now Art wants me to assemble all the music I wrote for the band. He wants to re-record that stuff, all my songs, all the things of Monk that he likes, Gigi Gryce or whoever. He says he wants to ‘keep the seeds of jazz and bebop blossoming He wants to keep it alive in the public eye’

Art Blakey, one of the hardest working bandleaders in the history of jazz, one of the great incubators of talent ever to grace American music, has come up with a brilliant idea to carry his message to future generations.

—Conrad Silvert