<<< Hard Bop with the Jazz Messengers >>>

Apesar de ser um grande curtidor de jazz, me enrosco ao tentar transpor para palavras seus encantos. "Escrever sobre música é como dançar sobre arquitetura", dizia Elvis Costello, e neste caso concordo plenamente: que pálidas são as palavras quando se trata de descrever um solo de Coltrane, ou uma piração de Miles Davis, ou uma catarse de Roland Kirk! Os maiores prodígios da música estão muito além dos poderes descritivos do Verbo...

Resta, então, deixar uma entusiasmada recomendação: ouçam Art Blakey (1919-1990) e os Jazz Messengers! Blakey é um dos meus jazz-men prediletos e um dos bateras mais sensacionais que já ouvi batucar. Por sua banda passaram músicos de primeiríssimo quilate: Horace Silver, Wayne Shorter, Wynton Marsalis, Donald Byrd, Keith Jarrett, Lee Morgan, dentre muitos outros; chegou a gravar com Theolonious Monk. Foi um dos pioneiros do estilo hard-bop, nos anos 1960, inovando em relação aos clássicos do be-bop (Gillespie, Parker e cia.).

Passo a palavra para a AMG AllMusic Guide:

"At the time of his death in 1990, the Messenger aesthetic dominated jazz, and Blakey himself had arguably become the most influential jazz musician of the past 20 years. (...) Blakey's influence as a bandleader could not have been nearly so great had he not been such a skilled instrumentalist. No drummer ever drove a band harder; none could generate more sheer momentum in the course of a tune; and probably no drummer had a lower boiling point -- Blakey started every performance full-bore and went from there.

His accompaniment style was relentless, and woe to the young saxophonist who couldn't keep up, for Blakey would run him over like a fullback. Blakey differed from other bop drummers in that his style was almost wholly about the music's physical attributes. Where his contemporary Max Roach dealt extensively with the drummer's relationship to melody and timbre, for example, Blakey showed little interest in such matters. To him, jazz percussion wasn't about tone color; it was about rhythm -- first, last, and in between. Blakey's drum set was the engine that propelled the music. To the extent that he exhibited little conceptual development over the course of his long career, either as a player or as a bandleader, Blakey was limited. He was no visionary by any means. But Blakey did one thing exceedingly well, and he did it with genius, spirit, and generosity until the very end of his life."

Some classics:

Moanin' (1958)

A Night in Tunisia (1960)

Indestructible (1964)

The Freedom Rider (1961)

Caravan (1962)

Ugetsu (1963)

With Thelonious Monk (1958)

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