About this episode
Sid Gribetz features Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers “From Moanin’ To Kyoto”. Art Blakey is the dynamic drummer and band leader who nurtured many young jazz stars and inculcated the “hard bop” sound in the groups he organized over the many decades of his career until his death in 1990. Even in a five hour program, we will have time to focus only on a limited aspect of Blakey’s prolific career. Thus, we’ve chosen to explore a period of golden flowering of the ensemble, starting with the arrival in 1958 of Benny Golson. Golson organized matters and brought fellow Philadelphians Lee Morgan, Bobby Timmons and Jymie Merritt into the fold; instilled their repertoire with his sophisticated compositions (and Timmons’s, too); and thereby took the Messengers to the “next level”. In the fall of 1958, the group recorded its seminal Blue Note album “Moanin’” and then embarked on an extended European tour which put it on a broader map. Golson would soon leave, eventually to be replaced in the tenor saxophone chair by Wayne Shorter. Shorter and Morgan, with their crackling and crisp virtuosity as soloists, and lyrical song writing and ensemble playing, set another high bar for the Jazz Messengers style. Morgan would depart in 1961 to be replaced by Freddie Hubbard; trombonist Curtis Fuller would be added to make the group a sextet; and Cedar Walton would come on board to take the piano bench. All would contribute their original compositions to the band’s “book”, songs that are now part of the established modern jazz repertory. Additionally, the Jazz Messenger sound turned on their innovative arrangements and creative solos that infused popular standards with fresh, new meaning. Blakey toured Japan to an ecstatic response in January 1961, and returned frequently thereafter. From these trips, he assimilated a Japanese flavor into songs such as Ugetsu, On The Ginza, and Kyoto adding to the scope of the presentation. Thus, I’m entitling the show “From Moanin’ to Kyoto”, as the program will feature classic recordings of Blakey’s Jazz Messengers in this fertile period – late 1958 through 1964 (when “Kyoto”, the last of their Riverside albums, was made). originally broadcast February 18, 2018