Happy Birthday Arthur “Art” Blakey
🎂Arthur “Art” Blakey, born October 11, 1919 in Pittsburgh, PA. was a Jazz drummer. Rumor has it, Art’s foster father was a devout Seventh Day Adventist. He learned to play the piano along with reading the Bible. However, his early pianist career aspirations abruptly stopped in his early teens when a nightclub owner of the Democratic Club in Pittsburgh ordered him, at gunpoint, off the piano and onto the drums. That episode turned out to be a divinely ordained event that launched 60 years of drumming.
Blakey was initially taught drumming by legendary drummer Chick Webb. In his extensive career, Art Blakey played with Fletcher Henderson, Billy Eckstine, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Sarah Vaughan. In the late 1940s while visiting Africa, Art embraced Islam and briefly changed his name to Abdullah Ibn Buhaina; he also learned African polyrhythmic drumming. Art returned to the United States in 1947 and formed a 17-piece big band called Seventeen Messengers — it was short lived.
In 1954, Art and Horace Silver co-founded a quintet — The Jazz Messengers. Horace Silver left the group in 1956, but Art kept the group’s name and they went on to become a mainstay on the jazz club circuit touring throughout North Africa and Europe. In 1961, they were one of the first American Jazz bands to perform in Japan. During Blakey’s extensive drumming career, he worked with or nurtured the careers of an untold number of the brightest musicians on tour today, including, Wynton Marsalis, Bobby Watson, Terence Blanchard, Mulgrew Miller, Peter Washington, and Lonnie Plaxico. Art, The Messenger, lives on in the music of numerous musicians with whom he worked and mentored. Heinrich Klaffs, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
