Hard Bop: How Art Blakey and Horace Silver Taught a Generation

Blakey was 34 that night, and everyone on the bandstand was younger: Clifford Brown on trumpet, Lou Donaldson on alto saxophone, Horace Silver at the piano and Curly Russell on bass. Alfred Lion of Blue Note produced the recording, and Rudy Van Gelder engineered it. The volumes of A Night at Birdland that came out of it are counted among the earliest hard bop records.^[1][2][3]

He kept that promise for more than 35 years. By late 1954 he and Silver were running a cooperative band, and between November 1954 and February 1955 they took Kenny Dorham, Hank Mobley and Doug Watkins to Van Gelder's studio in Hackensack, New Jersey. Lion nearly dropped one tune from the sessions: he found Silver's The Preacher "too old-timey," and Silver and Blakey threatened to cancel the date unless it went in. Silver said the tune proved the band could reach back for an old barroom feeling with a touch of backbeat.^[1][2]

The Preacher became Silver's first hit, and it shows what hard bop added to bebop. The harmonic sophistication stayed, but the blues, gospel feeling and a danceable pulse moved back to the front. The sessions first appeared on two 10-inch records before Blue Note gathered them on the 1956 LP Horace Silver and the Jazz Messengers.^[1][2][3]

That lineup did not last. In 1956 Silver left, partly because of heroin use in the band, and formed his own quintet, while Blakey kept the Jazz Messengers name. From then on hard bop had two schools, and players such as Hank Mobley and Woody Shaw passed through both.^[1][2][3]

Benny Golson, another Philadelphia saxophonist, was playing at the Apollo in Harlem when he heard that Brown had died, and he wrote I Remember Clifford for his friend. In March 1957 Lee Morgan recorded it for Blue Note on Lee Morgan Vol. 3, an album whose tunes and arrangements were all Golson's.^[1][2]

Golson joined the Jazz Messengers in 1958, and on his advice Blakey rebuilt the band around Philadelphia players: Morgan on trumpet, Bobby Timmons on piano and Jymie Merritt on bass. Golson became music director and brought in Along Came Betty, Blues March and Are You Real. On October 30, 1958, the quintet went into Van Gelder's studio and recorded the album that came to be known as Moanin'.^[1][2][3]

The title track shows the school at work. Timmons had only the opening eight bars, a figure he liked to play between tunes, and finished the piece after Golson urged him to write a bridge. Its call-and-response melody made Moanin' the band's biggest hit. Golson stayed about a year, leaving in 1959 after a European tour to start the Jazztet with trumpeter Art Farmer.^[1][2][3]

Golson's chair went to Wayne Shorter, a saxophonist from Newark who had met Lee Morgan at a jazz festival in Canada. Shorter joined in 1959, became music director and held the job until 1964, writing much of the band's repertoire.^[1][2][3]

Drug problems forced Morgan and Timmons out in 1961. Freddie Hubbard took the trumpet chair, Cedar Walton took over the piano, and trombonist Curtis Fuller turned the front line into three horns. Mosaic, recorded on October 2, 1961, shows how the school worked: all five tunes came from members of the sextet, two by Hubbard and one each by Shorter, Walton and Fuller.^[1][2][3]

The students were soon leading their own dates. Late in 1963 Lee Morgan recorded The Sidewinder, whose title track reached the pop chart in 1964. That same year Shorter recorded Night Dreamer, JuJu and Speak No Evil for Blue Note, and in September he left the Messengers to join Miles Davis's quintet.^[1][2][3]

Early in 1964 Silver spent three weeks in Brazil, a trip he said deepened his interest in his family's heritage. He credited it with the Brazilian rhythm of Song for My Father, a bossa nova feel played in straight eighth notes, and traced the melody to old Cape Verdean folk music. The album's cover shows his father, John Tavares Silver, who was born on the island of Maio. The title track was recorded on October 26, 1964, with Carmell Jones on trumpet and Joe Henderson on tenor.^[1][2][3]

A year later, with Woody Shaw and Joe Henderson, Silver recorded The Cape Verdean Blues, another album inspired by his father. Song for My Father traveled well beyond jazz: in 1974 Steely Dan borrowed its opening bass figure for Rikki Don't Lose That Number.^[1][2]

By the late 1960s Blue Note had been sold, soul-jazz and fusion were drawing listeners away, and hard bop was no longer the dominant style in jazz. Blakey kept hiring young players anyway; Keith Jarrett and Woody Shaw were among those who came through after Shorter.^[1][2]

In 1980 an 18-year-old trumpeter from New Orleans, Wynton Marsalis, joined the Messengers on a European tour and stayed until 1982. His older brother, saxophonist Branford Marsalis, played in the band in 1981 and 1982. Trumpeter Terence Blanchard and saxophonist Donald Harrison followed from 1982 to 1986, pianist Mulgrew Miller from 1984, and saxophonist Kenny Garrett in 1986. Branford later said Blakey "taught in the Socratic manner," making his players think for themselves.^[1][2][3]

Blakey died in New York on October 16, 1990, and the Jazz Messengers ended with him after more than 35 years. One for All, released that year, was their last album. By then Wynton Marsalis was leading his own band and had become the best-known figure in a hard bop revival that, by the 1990s, was treated as the foundation of modern acoustic jazz.^[1][2][3]

You can follow the lineage record by record, in the order the bands formed, from the Birdland stage to Silver's Brazilian rhythm. All six came out on Blue Note, which, together with Prestige and Riverside, accounts for most of the hard bop in the Garimpa catalog.^{[1][2][3][4][5][6]}

Each title exists in many pressings, from early issues to recent reissues on vinyl and CD, and prices vary widely between them. Open a record to compare its editions and current offers.