Certified Classics: Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers - Moanin' (1958)
From the opening moments of Moanin’, you know you’re in for something good. Be it with the incredible opening to the title track on the original issue or the opening dialogue on the cd reissue, the statement holds true. Bluesy, very jazzy, endlessly swingin, and featuring some of the tightest and yet most laid-back grooves ever put to wax, you really can’t say enough about quality of the total package that is Moanin’.
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The first thing to note that is although this album came out in late 1958 (originally as a self-titled album, but it was re-issued to share the name of the Bobby Timmons composition after the immediate [and well deserved] popularity of that tune), it still sounds fresh today. This is in part due to the meticulous recording by Rudy Van Gelder, and the album was recorded in his legendary studios in Hackensack, New Jersey. The album features Lee Morgan on trumpet, Benny Golson on tenor sax, Bobby Timmons on piano, Jymie Merritt on bass, and Art Blakey on drums, and there’s a real synergy to the performances on this album. Everyone is given ample room to show their chops and relish in some good old Hard Bop.
This album is often cited as one of the quintessential Hard Bop albums, and with good reason - if you wanted to show someone what Hard Bop was, you could simply play this album and they would get a pretty good idea. You can hear the deep gospel and bluesy influences in most if not all of the tunes, and it does a really good job of showcasing what made that period special and why it’s still looked at all these years later as a high point in recorded jazz. Frankly it’s just a super cool style - you’ve got people taking what was the “new music” 10 years prior of Charlie Parker, Bebop, then chilling it out just a bit and infusing it with blues, gospel, and soul influences, creating a whole new type of jazz that seamlessly blends so many wonderful styles together right before 1959 really hits and we get Ornette Coleman and Coltrane’s Giant Steps to further widen the scope of what jazz, and even music itself, can dare to be.
Moanin’ truly is a timeless album. “Are You Real?” just has a classic jazz sound to it with lovely harmonic inventiveness that still sounds vibrant, daring, and playful. “Along Came Betty” is a bit of a slower, slinky number that also seems to just perfectly capture a feeling, hinted at by the visceral reality in the performances, and you get additional glimpses of it in many of the searing, searching solos peppered throughout this tune and others - like one of those complex emotions there’s only a word for in German. The title track, “Moanin’,” is a bluesy tour-de-force and an amazingly fun song to play on just about any instrument if you’re a musician. “The Drum Thunder Suite” is Blakey’s feature in three movements (“Drum Thunder,” “Cry A Blue Tear,” and “Harlem’s Disciples,” respectively), giving Blakey’s explosive and incredible dynamism ample chance to impress. “Blues March” is, as the name suggests, a bluesy version of a march (or a march-like version of the blues?), and the album concludes with a brisk reading of a standard, “Come Rain or Come Shine.” Every track is different enough to stand out and yet forms a very cohesive whole when listened to front-to-back. There are no jarring inclusions on the cd reissues - they only included one alternate take of the title track and put it at the end, so it doesn’t mess up the song order if you just put the album on.
To compliment these stellar performances, you’ve also got a classic Blue Note cover of the era. This photo was, according to the album credits, taken by Buck Hoeffler, so not a Frank Wolff joint unfortunately. The re-issue takes the album title and lays it all across the top, which is far less interesting if significantly more readable. In both cases though, Blakey looks out with a serious, perhaps determined look. While people are certainly having fun playing it, jazz, with its deep history, is inherently serious. Jazz is inherently political, rebellious, and daring. It challenges norms and carries within its very nature the capacity for death and rebirth, for change. The reissued LP release contains a write-up on the back by jazz critic Leonard Feather that provides some additional context:
“Blakey, though he sometimes coats his verbal messages with a surface of sardonic humor, is in deadly earnest about selling his audiences on the importance of the music he represents. To one audience he pleaded: ‘Jazz is worth more to this country in foreign aid than all the billions of dollars the government can spend. It’s American through and through. [...] We play modern jazz, and to understand it you must listen. We study, we rehearse. The Jazz Messengers are very serious about getting the music across to you.’”
Indeed, if one looks at the sheer number of American jazz musicians who have fled to live in Europe or the myriad of accounts regarding the differences in how musicians are treated on both sides of the ocean, Blakey may have had a point here. His frustration is certainly understandable, even laudable, though Jazz certainly had an American audience that, as Feather later notes, grew more appreciative of the music as the decade wore on.
Yet jazz never stays the same for too long, and this is by design. Similarly, the line-up of the Messengers often changed, with Blakey serving as the de-facto bandleader, mentor, teacher, etc. The number of big names that have passed under Blakey and through the Messengers is frankly amazing to look back on: Lee Morgan and Benny Golson as already mentioned, Wayne Shorter, Wynton and Branford Marsalis, Keith Jarrett, Chuck Mangione, Horace Silver, Kenny Drew, Jackie McLean, Spanky DeBrest, Curtis Fuller, Freddie Hubbard… the list goes on. For our purposes and Moanin’ more specifically though, we should be grateful that these wonderful performances were recorded as they were and that we can still listen to and enjoy them today. And you certainly still can even here in the year 2024, which again speaks to their timeless quality and the sheer musicianship on display. When Blakey says they study and rehearse, the results speak for themselves. Jazz is not an easy music to play and very difficult to play well, but you’d have a hard time figuring that out just by listening to these guys. Incredible stuff all around.