Customer Reviews

Meet You at the Jazz Corner of the World

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"Jazz shakes off the dust of every-day life."

-Art Blakey

Blakey's Jazz Messengers are heard on this double live set from NYC's Birdland in 1960, recorded by the master Ruby Van Gelder. With a stellar line up including Lee Morgan and Wayne Shorter, the music cooks. And with new remastering by Van Gelder, any questions I had about sound quality were immediately answered.

Blakey is the solid foundation of course, expertly guiding these jams through a mosaic of timbres and textures. The introductions by Pee Wee Marquette are fun to listen to and place the listener right in the jazz club atmosphere. I spent days listening to both discs on shuffle-play, so unfortunately I cannot comment on any specific track-I was never sure which one I was listening to! I just know that the music is great and the live setting is fun and I enjoyed everything I heard.

This lineup of the Jazz Messengers made a bunch of great albums for Blue Note and they're all interchangeable to some degree. This recording from Birdland somehow slips past the radar when discussing the Shorter-Morgan-Timmons lineup. The sound quality leaves a lot to be desired (lots of distortion). It was also out of print for a while and there's another album recorded a year earlier with an almost identical name ("At the Jazz Corner of the World") and lineup (sub Hank Mobley for Shorter).

Nevertheless, it's worth picking up because this is an excellent performance by a terrific group. My favorite performances are "Round About Midnight", "The Breeze and I", and Hank Mobley's mysterious "High Modes". (Despite not playing on the album, Hank contributed 3 of the compositions.) Aside from "The Summit" we don't hear much of Wayne Shorter the composer, but his playing, as on most music from this period, is intense and unpredictable. The album is worth buying just to hear Wayne.

If you like grooving, intense hard bop, then the Jazz Messengers with Shorter, Morgan, and Timmons is an essential listening experience. And after checking them out on studio albums such as "The Big Beat" or "A Night in Tunisia", it's definitely worth meeting them at the Jazz Corner of the World.

The sound quality on this double-disc set is remarkably poor. The mono Birdland sets from 1954 are much better in this regard, as is the similarly titled date from 1959, featuring Hank Mobley. Not only the piano, but also the horns distort and the sound in general has a distinctly 'hard' quality - it's bad enough to make listening difficult to enjoy, especially for long sessions. The music itself is good, but not essential - there are many Art Blakey discs that outshine this one.
*
The aforementioned Birdland dates, with Clifford Brown on trumpet, are a much better place to sample the Messengers prowess. Mosaic, Buhaina's Delight, Free For All, Indestructible, Moanin'...all these discs are terrific. If it's any guide, I have over a dozen Blakey recordings and this is close to the least precious.

It's a good set generally, great Blakey, great band, all that. The Summit, a Wayne Shorter burnout tune on the second disc, is famous among trumpet players. Lee Morgan, especially in this period, just about always gave his all, but on this tune he practically blows the bell off the horn. He builds his solo, reaches his uttermost limit, and just keeps going even when he hasn't got anything left. For those who love Lee Morgan, this is a special solo. I saw him play many times, and wish I could have seen him play this one.

There are three indispensable 2-disc sets recorded at Birdland and released under Art Blakey's name. The first, "A Night at Birdland," deserves the listener's first consideration for several reasons: it's a historic first, the first "live" recording of significance by Blue Note and Van Gelder; it includes the special arranging and accompanying talents of Horace Silver; it's one of the two or three most distinguished recordings by the brilliant trumpeter, Clifford Brown who, despite never seeing his 26 birthday, is ranked by those who should know as "the best of all time." But neither of the two remaining double-disc albums recorded by Art at Birdland should be considered a distant second. Both "A Night at Birdland" and the brilliant Columbia studio album, "Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers," combined the arranging/accompanying genius of Horace Silver with the enabling, inflammatory energies of Blakey to produce albums as noteworthy for their solo work as for their ingeniuous, swinging arrangements. However, when Silver split from Blakey to form the Horace Silver Quintet, the differences between the two groups could not have been clearer. Whereas Horace's groups, especially after the spectacular success of a minor Silver tune ("Song for My Father"), stressed formulaic arrangements with contained solos (even with the prodigious Michael Brecker on board), Art's groups were about individual freedom and maximum self-expression while adhering to the jazz mainstream. The seemingly indefatigable, indestructible leader seemed to share with the American poet Ezra Pound the criteria: "Make it new!" "Make it live!" "Keep it alive." All the while, Art could be heard hollering encouragement ("Play your horn!") and cracking his whip relentlessly to ensure that not so much as a single lifeless, sterile moment would threaten vital, creative stream. "Play every note as if your life depended on it" was his motto, spoken by a drummer who, despite all that might be said about Buddy, Max. Elvin and Tony, was in a league of his own, unequalled in terms of sheer power. He was thunder and lightning personified, a force of nature, and all attempts to emulate him--alumni bands that attempt to perform the Messengers repertory--fall way short because there was only one Bu.

For this reason, Art's on-location albums are his best, the ones that are most likely to return a lifetime of inexhaustible pleasure to their owner. The later two Birdland albums have an undeniable edge in the saxophone department. Some listeners may prefer the pictured album, "Meet You at the Jazz Corner of the World," because of the presence of Wayne Shorter; others may prefer the almost identically worded "At the Jazz Corner of the World" because of the ceaselessly inventive, soulful playing of Hank Mobley. But both sessions are equally valuable; both will reward the listener with new, exciting discoveries with each new listening. Both albums, moreover, serve to do full justice by the skills of trumpeter Lee Morgan, providing him with the kind of platform Clifford Brown enjoyed on the first of the Messengers' live albums from Birdland. And at least one other live Messengers album rises to the same indispensable level: "At the Cafe Bohemia," another "two-fer" that includes not only Horace Silver but the redoubtable Doug Watkins on bass, the profoundly melodic tenor of Hank Mobley, and the trumpeter who replaced Clifford Brown in group he had co-led with drummer Max Roach: Kenny Dorham.

Some collectors, no doubt, will disagree about the distinctive excellence of Mobley who, despite (or because of) being the most-recorded Blue Note tenor player, was all but taken for granted. And when he served as the primary transitional tenor player between Trane and Shorter in Miles' quintet, he was made to look bad on the Columbia recording ("Someday My Price Will Come") on which Miles' decision to include Coltrane on the title tune could only make Hank appear the simpler, markedly inferior player. But to my ears Mobley brings to the music an understated, unfaltering lyricism that simply refuses to wear out its welcome. Perhaps even more than another underrated and understated tenor "giant" of this period, Harold Land, Mobley is a perpetual source of surprise and delight, a player who embodies the African-American tradition that James Baldwin expresses so movingly in what some regard as the best story about jazz, "Sonny's Blues."

The prices I'm seeing for this two-fer are slightly out-of-sight. Consider picking up a used edition of Volume 1 and downloading Volume 2 (though I'd pay the freight for the complete "At the Jazz Corner" as well as "At the Cafe Bohemia" and "At Birdland." (I'm content to go with my analog LP edition of the popular "Moanin'" session, which to my ears runs out of steam more quickly than "Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers" on Columbia, a desert-island disc if there ever was one (which is not to deny the merit of the Golson compositions on the "Moanin'" disc that have since become jazz standards).

[Warning: Since acquiring the Van Gelder remastered CD of "Meet You at the Jazz Corner of the World," I've come to the realization that some of the distortion I formerly blamed on a commercial downloading service is in the original source. The mics and/or mixing are simply overly "hot"--to the point that occasionally the tones break up.] As for the music, Lecuona's "The Breeze and I" may be a lovely melody, but it's highly questionable whether the tune is worthy of this ensemble. When it comes to Blakey and company, you can put aside cool breezes as well as escapist fantasies like "cool jazz," "contemporary jazz," "smooth jazz" or any other musical pleasantries, whether dated or new age. Blakey's music is lighning and thunder, it's bold and in your face, the story of joy born of suffering and pain, its music containing the history of a people yet universal in its appeal to our deepest understandings of what it means to be human.

Blakey's last name is one letter away from the most visionary poet in English literature: William Blake. Blake called his best-known poems "songs," and none of those songs is more admired than the one capturing the power of the Tiger and questioning its source. It's doubtful that any writer--critic, admirer, novelist, poet--has tapped into the creative well-springs of an artist like Art Blakey as persuasively as William Blake does in "The Tiger":

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?
When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

Wayne Shorter once said that playing with Art Blakey made him forget about his worldly problems. You can really here that in this recording. I think his solo on "High Modes" is one of the great performances in the history of jazz.

I have the Japanese import 24 bit remaster by Gelder and I discarded disc 1 but kept disc 2.
I also have the other Jazz Corner double disc which I discarded disc 2 but kept disc 1.
By combining the remaining two discs I have a custom set of performances from both gigs. I rule.