October 11, 2019
Art Blakey’s claim to fame with his Jazz Messengers throughout the group’s 30+ year history lay in finding the most creative young players and tunesmiths to inspire him and rev up the bandstand. The drummer plucked out of the ranks the most imaginative young players for his Jazz Messengers groups, mentored them in the college of hard bop, afforded them creative freedom, and once they were hewn into shape watched them fly from the nest into the jazz life as mature leaders in their own right.
“I always try to develop band leaders in my group,” Blakey said in the album’s original liner notes. “Let them grow and get out there and form more good jazz groups.”
That was certainly the case with the sublime 1960 vintage Jazz Messengers line-up featuring the dynamic frontline of trumpeter Lee Morgan and tenor saxophonist Wayne Shorter, along with pianist Bobby Timmons and bassist Jymie Merritt. The band had recorded in March of that year when they laid down The Big Beat, and they regrouped in Rudy Van Gelder’s Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey studio on two days in August that yielded two more hard bop masterpieces: A Night In Tunisia and Like Someone In Love.
A Night In Tunisia was the first of the two to be released coming out the following year. Though the Messengers were renown for introducing distinctly original material thanks to the drummer’s taste in enlisting rising-star composers, the centerpiece lead title track here is the well-worn bebop anthem “A Night in Tunisia.” Recorded often before it entered into Blakey’s repertoire, the piece was composed in 1942 by Dizzy Gillespie. Gillespie recorded it in a sextet setting in 1946 for Victor, and it later became a signature piece of his bebop big band.
The fact that Blakey would choose to record the piece again is interesting, especially since he had recorded it at least twice before the 1960 Blue Note session, including on his seminal early hard bop manifesto A Night At Birdland in 1954. (In his song intro on that live recording Blakey’s states “I feel rather close to this tune because I was right there when he composed it in Texas on the bottom of a garbage can. Seriously.”)
But another version of “A Night in Tunisia”? Weren’t there already enough?
Blakey explained why in the liner notes: “The wonderful thing about it is that we never play it the exact way twice. We may play it every night for five years but no two times will be alike.”
Blakey knew what he wanted to do with the tune this time, turning the lyrical beauty into an 11-minute slamming, power-packed drum showcase. The drummer leads the muscular rendition with a volcanic opening—smoking, sparking, rumbling—before the band plays the head, after which Shorter roars, Morgan unleashes high peals, Timmons zips across the keys and Merritt solos while Blakey flicks beats and Timmons flashes notes in support. But Blakey’s not done. He continues with rambunctious conviction winding up with a series of exclamatory statements. As the tune finally begins to come in for a landing, Morgan and Shorter both take final cadenza solos—the former with a clarion call met by Blakey’s howling and shouting—before the loud and celebratory end.
It’s a remarkable opening to the album, but there’s still plenty more in store with the rest of the 5-song program consisting of newly-penned original compositions by the band members. The brightly swinging “Sincerely Diana” that Shorter wrote for Blakey’s wife breezes along while Timmons’ tune “So Tired” belies its title with playfully shifting rhythms that bubble underneath standout solos by Shorter and Morgan before Timmons brings it home.
The final two tunes on the album were both composed by Morgan and inpired by important figures in his life. First the gentle low-lights slow-dance “Yama,” a dedication to his wife at the time Kiko Yamamoto (“yama” is also the Japanese word for mountain), which is a breath of fresh air before the album concludes with another up-tempo bravado performance by Blakey & Co. on the playful “Kozo’s Waltz,” which was named in honor of the Morgan’s pet poodle Kozo.
