Cashbox : 06/25/1960

The drum giant’s present group can be compared very favorably with the days when Horace Silver was in it. Lee Morgan is a younger, relaxed, more humorous Donald Byrd, Bobby Timmons has all the “funk” and soul of Silver, and Wayne Shorter is cut of the same mold as Hank Mobley. Timmons’ Dat Dere, Shorter’s Lester Left Town and The Chess Players and It’s Only A Paper Moon are the outstanding tracks in the set. Good sales prospects.

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HiFi / Stereo Review
Ralph J. Gleason : February, 1961

Interest: Furious modern jazz
Performance: Loose and swinging
Recording: Good

The Blakey group is the originator of that pounding, driving, bubbling, and boiling jazz that has become known as “hard bop.” When it is working well, as on this album, it is a good deal more interesting to hear than the derivative splinter groups such as the Horace Silver Quintet. For one thing, the dynamic are broader, and the contrasts in tempo and feeling between tracks are more effective. It’s not a question at all of individual soloists, though Blakey himself is generally fascinating, with a great fair for rhythmic complexity. It’s the over-all impact.

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High Fidelity
John S. Wilson : November, 1960

Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, at their peak during Benny Golson’s brief incumbency as musical director, have slid down hill since Golson’s departure. Although the group retains some vestiges of the quality that Golson drilled into it, its material has deteriorated badly. Trumpeter Lee Morgan and tenor saxophonist Wayne Shorter do reasonably well as soloists, and Blakey propels the rhythm section with his usual muscularity, but the tunes are routine. The only variation from the endless, anonymous chomp-chomp of almost all the pieces is an odd and urgent It’s Only a Paper Moon.

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Pittsburgh Courier (Pittsburgh, PA)
Harold L. Keith : 07/23/1960
Five Stars

Art Blakey is an exponent of the “big beat.” Perhaps that is why the latest effort of the Jazz Messengers on the Blue Note label has been monikered as such.

It any rate, the ex-Pittsburgher’s combo has another terriflc album on the market for Al Lion’s jazz factory. This one presents the extremely Interesting tenor work of Wayne Shorter plus the awesome technique of Lee Morgan, who though already great, shows promise of becoming, in time, Jazzdom’s number one trumpeter.

Politely and The Chess Players plus Sakeena’s Vision are prosecuted with all of the now time-honored Blakey fervor. It’s five-star listening.

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San Bernardino County Sun (San Bernardino, CA)
Jim Angelo : 07/30/1960

The Big Beat refers to the powerful rhythmic propulsion of drummer Art Blakey, leader of the Jazz Messengers (Lee Morgan, trumpet; Wayne Shorter, tenor sax; Bobby Timmons, piano; and Jymie Merritt, bass). Though Blakey’s potent drumming underscores each track, his solo wares are displayed but occasionally. Basically this is an excellent example of East Coast hard bop style with standout solo contributions by Morgan, Shorter, and Timmons. With but 6 originals programmed, there’s abundant room for solo statements. Best tracks are Lester Left Town, It’s Only A Paper Moon, Dat Dere, and Sakeena’s Vision.

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St. Louis Argus (St. Louis, MO)
Chuck Finney : 10/28/1960

This week’s personality honors with a “big beat” go to maestro Art Blakey, one of the nation’s most dynamic drummers, musicians and cogenial bandleaders. For more than seven years, he’s been conducting one of the most fascinating, swingiest and entertaining jazz groups in the business. They are welcome and saluted as the “JAZZ MESSENGERS”, because from their unique exploitation of “jazz” and you’ll get the message.

Art, who was born and reared in the Eastern parts of these United States, has had his share of tough struggling on the way to the top. From earlier training and experience, he has attained a striking percussion talent, and his accompany ability on the drums with a small group or large jazz band is superb. Not to mention his timing, coloring with unusual speed and accuracy. The “Big Beat” and terrific drive accent behind the soloists has won him numbers of citations and awards.

Never a dull moment in the “Jazz Messengers” showing… the drum bandleader opens and closes all engagements with the “GO, GO, GO” method, the “Notes” learned. “if you’re low and don’t feel like working at the beginning of the night, the spirit will sparkle you daddy. The short-built, fast talking drummer generates a feeling for playing and makes you forget all those things that have nothing to do with music.”

Many outstanding jazz artists that have arrived via Jazz Messenger and Art Blakey, have dubbed his company as the greatest for its institutional aspects. If you don’t know much about the jazz professions, just play with Art. and you’ll be rewarded with a wealth of knowledge and experience. He works very closely with newcomers that are interested in writing compositions and soulful stylings. Naming a few former sidemen that are topnotchers within their own right are as follows: Benny Golson, Horace Silver. Donald Byrd, Hank Mobley, Lee Morgan Wayne Shorter, Bill Hardman. Jymie Merritt and Bobby Timmons.

In listening to one of Art Blakey and the jazz messengers latest albums called The Big Beat on the Blue Note label, this corner agrees with the many music lovers, dance fans and critics who claim the celebrated drummer group as one of the greatest in the field of modern jazz.

The leader holds the spotlight with his drum solo on Sakeena’s Vision, an original tune of Wayne Shorter, penned in honor of Blakeys two-year-old daughter. Other numbers that will keep you emotionally are “Politely” and “It’s Only A Paper Moon.” etc.

St. Louisans are awaiting to witness the Art Blakey and his Jazz Messengers in person: and from all sources it may be the Regal Sports’ next big attraction.

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Down Beat : 10/13/1960
John S. Wilson : 2 stars

Except for the opening ensemble on Paper Moon, this is merely a repetition of material that has been gone over time and time again by the Jazz Messengers and other groups.

The general atmosphere is typified by Dat Dere, which is Bobby Timmons’ successor to This Here—a mechanical repeat of something that was better the first time around.

Morgan, Shorter, and Blakey live up to average expectations.

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Liner Notes by Nat Hentoff

As is customary in all Art Blakey albums, this one is characterized by driving passion and a whirlpool-like swing. In addition, however, the program—one of the best in Blue Note’s Jazz Messenger series—also underlines the growing impact as a player and writer of Wayne Shorter as well as the increasingly incisive individuality of Lee Morgan. With a rhythm section made dependable on all sides of the triangle by Bobby Timmons (who is also becoming the leading jazz neo-gospel writer) and Jymie Merritt, Blakey has his most venturesome and invigorating crew of proselytizers since the original Jazz Messengers with Horace Silver and Kenny Dorham.

It’s not often enough realized how useful Blakey has been as an encourager of the young. He has always, for example, urged anyone in his group to write, and has promised to try out any chart any band member brings to rehearsal. Benny Golson was established before he joined Blakey, but Benny gained useful experience and had free play as Art’s musical director. Other writers who have used Blakey bands as a laboratory have been Horace Silver, Donald Byrd, Hank Mobley, and Jackie McLean. Being with Blakey can be one of the most valuable apprenticeships in jazz for players and writers. If you have capacity, the constant challenge of Art’s own ceaseless force and rhythmic demands will accelerate your awareness of how much you can do. If you don’t have it, Art’s pace will quickly become too much, too overwhelming for you.

The biographies of Art Blakey and Lee Morgan are too well known to be recapitulated here, and both are represented by a sizable number of Blue Note albums. Wayne Shorter, who was with Maynard Ferguson’s band before joining Blakey, was born in Newark, in August, 1933, went to Newark’s Arts High School, and while still there, played with Nat Phipps’ band which was composed of his contemporaries. Shorter was graduated from New York University with a degree in Music Education while he continued working with Phipps at home and sitting in at New York sessions.

In 1956, Shorter played briefly with Horace Silver before going into the Army. He made the Fort Dix band, played weekend sessions in New York, and was discharged at the end of 1958. He acquired a reputation with Ferguson, and at the time of this recording, had been with Blakey some six months. Describing what having Blakey behind you is like, Shorter says, “If you’re low and don’t feel like working at the beginning of the night, you will by the next set. He just sparks you. He generates a feeling for playing and makes you forget all those things that have nothing to do with music.”

Bobby Timmons had returned to Blakey at the time of this recording after a few months with Cannonball Adderley. Born in Philadelphia in December, 1935, he started studying organ and piano at six. He became a scholarship student at the Philadelphia Musical Academy. His professional career began in 1955 with Kenny Dorham. Timmons then spent a year with Chet Baker, went on to Sonny Stift and Maynard Ferguson, and ad
been with Blakey a year and a half until he left temporarily to join Cannonball in the fall of 1959. Jymie Merritt has worked with Tadd Dameron, B. B. King and Lester Young, among others. He’s been with BLakey about three years. He has a soft touch and plays with unusual speed and accuracy.

Wayne Shorter wrote three of the originals on the Date. The Chess Players is thus titled because of the stop and go character of the melody, resembling somewhat the moving and then the pondering of a chess game. The progression is built on the principle of fourths. Shorter has the first solo, and while it’s true he has clearly listened with concentration to Coltrane and Rollins, Wayne is one of the few of the younger tenors who is already his own man. He plays with striking strength and consistent logic. And, like Coltrane and Rollins, he has that “cry” at the core of his playing that separates the jazzman who has something to say from the musician who knows his changes but not himself. Note how, as always, Blakey provides not only a pulsation like the waves of the sea but also accents behind the soloist with unerring propulsive timing.

Lee Morgan has not only developed remarkable technical fluency for his age, but he is also becoming one of the wittiest and most rhythmically relaxed of all the younger players. Humor is a blessing in any context and jazz could do with more of it. On that score alone, Lee is a major asset to the current scene; but he is also useful on several other counts—-conception, swing, and an increasingly multi-colored tone quality that sounds here somewhat like a cross in impact between Humphrey Bogart and Cannonball Adderley. Timmons’ solo is functional, “soulful” and brief; and the chess game ends with all the players—and I don’t deserve to ever be forgiven for this pun—soulmates.

The Sakeena of Sakeena’s Vision is Art Blakey’s two-year-old daughter. “I wanted it,” explains Shorter, “to be symbolic of a child’s thoughts that adults can’t understand. Sort of like out of the mouths of babes come innocence and purity.” Minorish in feeling, the work was written in G minor concert but can be—and is played here—in the keys of G, F, and Bb, depending on how the soloist feels. The bar structure is not exactly even in that there is a one-bar pivot point at which the last bar of the second ending also becomes the beginning of the bridge. “Like an eclipse,” says Shorter. The piece also includes an extended Blakey solo that again demonstrates Art’s furious skill at juggling polyrhythms.

Politely was written by Bill Hardman, a former trumpeter with the Messengers. It’s a minor blues with what might be described as a finger-snapping rhythmic pattern. I would counsel your noting Merrit’s tone and logical conception in his solo. Shorter’s solo is an intensely evocative one (the best of this younger generation of jazzmen is in blistering contact with its feelings, apparently even without psychoanalysis). Morgan shows how much he’s learned about developing a climax, about dynamics, and about letting an idea unfold and build at some length instead of trying to expel it (buck-shot-style) all at once.

Dat Dere naturally is Bobby Timmons’ sequel to This Here, which has become one of his best known compositions. Blakey is pleased at the bold introduction of the gospel train to modern jazz, which more or less began with Horace Silver’s The Preacher (Horace Silver and the Jazz Messengers, Blue Note 1518). “It’s a natural thing, that’s one of the places jazz started. Those people who didn’t often go to church sang the same tunes outside with different lyrics. And, by the way, I never did agree with Big Bill Broonzy’s putting down Ray Charles for ‘mixing’ church music and blues. We all came out of the same thing, and they were both there.” Note Lee Morgan’s preaching trumpet toward the end of his solo.

Wayne Shorter points out that Bobby Timmons as a boy played organ in a church and also at various Philadelphia funeral homes so that he grew up with the gospel feel. “You’ll hear gospel,” adds Blakey, “in a lot of the young players. Horace Silver, for example, is Portugese in background, and when he was a little boy, he lived with a woman who took him to a sanctified church. And that influence stayed with him the rest of his life.”

Shorter’s Lester Left Town is described by him as “a small tribute to Lester. It was meant to show how I felt about his whole musical existence. I’ve been aware of Lester since I began playing, and this tune took a long time to write. Because of my own style, a lot of people seemed surprised that I’d written a piece for Lester, but listeners don’t always realize how many influences help to form a musician. And the song also is meant to show that we younger players do think of those who are gone.” The piece is also an indication of Shorter’s continuing attempt to gradually work out of the usual method of writing harmony quite close to the melody. “I don’t like that approach because thereby, the listener can just about anticipate what’s going to come next. By contrast, in this piece, on first hearing you’re likely to hear the melody and the harmony almost as separate entities with little to do with each other. Only after several hearings, I think, do you begin to hear how they’re intertwined.”

The inclusion of It’s Only A Paper Moon in the Messengers’ library came about in November, 1959, when Blakey’s unit was playing at the Club St. Germain in Paris. “We were being photographed,” explains Shorter, “and we had to do something the audience hadn’t heard us play before. Art just pounded out the beat, and at the same time this tune came into Lee Morgan’s head. Then, we all picked it up.” Note the grace as well as the verve with which Lee, who is now musical director of the Messengers (in charge of the library) states the melody. Wayne comes in next, and as throughout the album, he illustrates Blakey’s characterization of him: “He’s so full of energy, you don’t know what he’s going to do next.” Timmons’ solo recalls Art’s statement that Bobby is the best pianist he’s had in the Messengers since Horace Silver. Lee takes the tune out, and the program is over; but as in the case of all kinds of music that are played with unrestricted emotion, the echoes remain for a long time pushing back the silence.