Billboard : 01/19/1959
Four Stars

There’s a flock of fine, virile blowing on these sides by the Messengers. Particularly the trumpet work of Lee Morgan is clean, crisp and pure. B. Golson is on tenor with B. Timmons on piano, J. Merritt on bass and Blakey himself contributing the constant excitement on drums. This is powerful stuff that’s well-paced with different tempos of driving material. It all swings and it can move.

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Audio
Charles A. Robertson : March, 1959

A rejuvenated Jazz Messengers, under the musical direction of Benny Golson and with Lee Morgan taking over on trumpet, produce their best record since Horace Silver left the group and set out on his own. By way of celebration, Art Blakey has a new showpiece, Drum Thunder Suite, born of his desire to play a set making exclusive use of mallets. Written by Golson in three parts, it combines several revealing facets of drumming in a more attractive setting than is usually provided for such forays. Another aspect of this talent emerges in Blues March, where a New Orleans street beat underlines the bugle-call theme.

Addition contributions from Golson are a bouncy Along Came Betty, and Are You Real. Also a fine tenor sax solo on Come Rain or Come Shine, and his steadying influence on Morgan whose choruses, in consequence, are less flashy and more simple and melodic. The change in personnel involves a clean sweep and Blakey has the support of Bobby Timmons, a pianist who demonstrates his strength on an original blues, and bassist Jymie Merritt. That the Messengers are back in form is a major jazz event and this recording is its landmark.

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New York Age
Chollie Herndon : 04/18/1959

Art Blakey, the drummer, is back with his Messengers on Blue Note 4003. Essentially the same quintet Blakey took into Birdland little more than a week ago, it’s the best he’s had since the early days at Club Bohemia.

Showing the influence of tenor saxist-arranger Benny Golson, a much in evidence member of the group, the Messengers make it on this album, with something to spare.

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San Francisco Examiner
C.H. Garrigues : 04/19/1959

Again Blue Note does not distinguish, except by record number, between this and earlier Blakey albums. This is, however, the best Blakey record I have heard – which means it is at least one of the best modern jazz records of the year.

On it, Blakey is able for the first time to submerge himself thoroughly in the group sound (even on his Drum Thunder Suite which would seem to have been planned as a showplace for his virtuosity). The result is that trumpeter Lee Morgan and tenor Benny Golson get a chance to stretch out and display their unusual talents, as does Bobby Timmons on piano. The album also reveals a new bass, Jymie Merritt, who seems a new star of first magnitude.

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Down Beat : 03/19/1959
Martin Williams : 4 stars

After Horace Silver transferred his conception to his own groups, the versions of the Blakey Messengers that followed seemed always on the verge of falling into chaos, and sometimes they did. Now that Benny Golson has taken over as musical director, order has been restored, and a rather different order it is. It is easily a tribute to Blakey’s often overlooked range and resourcefulness that his drummer fits as well here as it did with the sometimes studied shouts and cooking wails of Silver.

There is nothing on this record that is really poor, except the Suite; the showboat arrives at the very beginning, takes a strange detour through a third-rate Latin dancehall on the second theme, and finally arrives at a phony revival meeting where the music is almost too cutie-pie to be music at all. Why a man with Blakey’s abilities should find himself perpetrating this kind of put-on, I don’t know.

As a music director, Golson does have an individual conception. Its chief virtue is that it generally avoids excess, understanding that passion in art does not necessarily result from screaming. However, I find it curious that he could use five instruments so interestingly as five instruments on Come Rain and then try to make them imitate a big band on Are You Real. His best composing here is, I think, the complementary line that enters after Timmons‘ solo on Betty and March growing out of Lucky Thompson.

Bobby Timmons has done an excellent job of making a really fine blues line out of a sympathetic use of gospel devices on Moanin’ and one that incidentally contrasts strongly with the third theme of the Suite. His solo there (along with Golson’s and Merritt‘s) fits and develops the mood of that piece well. He even manages to use some Garner-ish block chords without clashing, but I don’t think his blocks fit on March and the more Jamal-ish ones on Rain seem to me affected and empty.

It has been obvious that Lee Morgan is an almost astonishing instrumentalist and it is possibly just that fact that has moved some to have strong doubts about his potential as a soloist. On Moanin’ he seems very out of context, almost flippantly tossing off runs. On Betty, he begins a fine improvisation, but later falls into mere phrase-stringing. I heard him play a solo on March in concert a couple of months ago that was superb – a developing, disciplined, but passionate, two-chorus unit. I knew then that he could become an outstanding, story-telling improvisor. This March is not that good, but all the indications are there.

For what Golson has done for the group, for Timmons Moanin’, for Morgan on March and his opening on Betty, for Blakey (except for the Suite) four stars.

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Liner Notes by Leonard Feather

Not for nothing did Art Blakey select the term Messengers to denote his musical and personal purpose at the onset of his bandleading career. Manifestly all meaningful music carries its own built-in message, and to this extent the term could reasonably be applied to any combination of performers (even the coolest horn man has a message, no matter how diffidently stated). What is more important in Blakey’s case is that his message is transmitted not merely in his music but in his words and speeches, his actions and personality.

This characteristic of Blakey has been increasingly evident during the eventful years since he gave up his last job as a sideman (with the Buddy DeFranco quartet, of which he was a member from 1951-53). He has made it clear that his musical message is correctly constructed, its rhythmic syntax and melodic grammar unimpeachable. This is merely the starting point for Blakey; once equipped to deliver his message he is determined to find an audience for it, and for all of jazz. He is not merely a spokesman for Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, but a pleader for the whole cause of modern music.

Once, in a conversation reported in Down Beat by John Tynan, he expressed the view that Americans have not had the chance to appreciate their own music. “They haven’t been sold on it; and there is a great deal of selling to be done… Why don’t these high-powered salesmen go to work on jazz? Let’s sell jazz a bit. It’s more American than a lot of other things.”

Blakey, though he sometimes coats his verbal messages with a surface of sardonic humor, is in deadly earnest about selling his audiences on the importance of the music he represents. To one audience he pleaded: “Jazz is worth more to this country in foreign aid than all the billions of dollars the government can spend. It’s American through and through. I beg of you support jazz. I’m not proud, I’m begging you on my knees to support your own music.” And in St. Louis, explaining one night to a noisy crowd that he couldn’t rise above them by playing louder, because he didn’t have a rock and roll band, he added, “We play modern jazz, and to understand it you must listen. We study, we rehearse. The Jazz Messengers are very serious about getting the music across to you. If you don’t want to listen, maybe the person sitting next to you does.”

Fortunately, in the year or two that have elapsed since Art gave vent to these outbursts, the musical climate has warmed perceptibly to jazz in general. During the recent past Art’s message has been transmitted by a succession of new and well-equipped solo talents; the group has retained its leader’s personality, no matter who may be standing in the front line or flanking Art in the rhythm section.

Of the personnel heard on these sides, the horns of Lee Morgan and Benny Golson are too familiar to Blue Note fans to need any introduction, as is Bobby Timmons‘s piano. There is, however, one newcomer in the house, an artist talented and promising enough to deserve a momentary spotlight and a biographical bow. He is bassist Jymie Merritt.

Born in 1926 in Philadelphia, Jymie was still in school when he first heard Jimmy Blanton on the classic Ellington records and was inspired to study bass. The opportunity to follow the Blanton tradition was delayed by a period in the service, but soon after his resumption of civilian life in 1946 he began to study concert bass with a member of the Philadelphia Symphony, as well as spending three years at the local Orenstein School. After gigging with Tadd Dameron, Benny Golson and Philly Joe Jones in 1949, he went on the road with Bull Moose Jackson. This was the first of a series of rhythm and blues jobs – he was with Chris Powell just after Clifford Brown had left the group, and from 1955-57 spent much of his time touring the south with B.B. King. But there were opportunities to play jazz between these jobs. Commuting from New York to Philadelphia he played with Sonny Stitt, Lester Young and Roy Eldridge. Merritt, who joined Blakey in the fall of 1958, names Ray Brown, Charlie Mingus, Oscar Pettiford, Al McKibbon and Paul Chambers as his favorites (after Blanton, that is).

The session racks up a self-challenging achievement by starting right out with a climax, for it would be difficult to improve on the groove established by Bobby Timmons’ composition Moanin’. The first chorus is the quintessence of funk, based on the classic call-and-response pattern, with Bobby’s simple phrases (focused on the tonic) answered by the punctuations on straight, churchy pairs of chords (B Flat and F). Notice how simple Lee’s solo opens, fanning out slowly in impact and intensity until by the first release he is swing in a more complex fashion. Two choruses each by trumpet, tenor and piano are followed by one on bass.

Are You Real? is the kind of straightforward melody that could as easily have been a pop song designed by one of the better commercial tunesmiths. (It came as no surprise to me to learn that when it was written, four years ago, by Benny Golson, he equipped it with lyrics.) Structurally it is a 32-bar chorus plus a four-bar tag. After Benny’s busy but well-organized chorus, Lee takes a solo that reminds one again how impressively this youngster has been developing: his solo here, as throughout the present album, shows more attention to form and content, less to technical display, than much of the early work in his days as an 18-year-old sideman with Dizzy‘s big band. Timmons, too, has a chorus that moves smoothly from phrase to phrase, with discreet help from the horns’ backing on the release. A typical chorus of fours (ending with eight from Art to account for the tag) precedes the closing chorus.

Along Came Betty, a wistful theme played by the horns in unison, was inspired not by the personality but, curiously, by the walk of the young lady for whom it was named. An attempt was made in the composition to capture “the musical effort of her grace and femininity.” If the music reflects her gait accurately Betty walks at a modern pace with evenly placed, legato steps. Notice in Lee’s chorus the wry simplicity of the first few measures in his last eight bars. Benny, too, tends to underplay in his solo, while Art’s subterranean swells at bars 8 and 16 are the only changes of pattern in an otherwise unbroken and unflaggingly efficient rhythmic support. The Bobby Timmons chorus, which at this tempo could have been a clutter of sixteenths, bases itself more on a triplet feel in its single-note lines. The gentle mood is retained as the horns resume for the final chorus, ending lightly and politely as they began.

The second side opens dramatically with Golson’s Drum Thunder Suite, which was born of a desire on Art’s part to play a composition making exclusive and dramatic use of mallets. Since mallets automatically tend to suggest thunder, the title was selected, says Golson, before a note was written.

The work is in three movements; the first, Drum Thunder, is self-explanatory, with contributing thunderclaps by soloists Morgan, Golson and Timmons serving as bridges between the Blakey statements. The second movement (subtitled Cry a Blue Tear) is designed in sharp contrast, with a Latin feeling (“so that Art could show how subtly and effectively he can shade”). The third theme, Harlem’s Disciples, is a funky melody in which the only strict rhythm girders are Art’s sock cymbals. A brilliant moment of tension is created by the piano solo, with horn backing, before the front line takes over to lead into the concluding drum solo.

The implications of Blues March are clear from the first measure. An attempt is made here (with considerable success, it seems to me) to fuse some of the spirit of the old New Orleans marching bands with the completely modern approach of improvisation as it is felt by the present-day soloists feature here; at the same time the theme, with its slight bugle-call orientation, has a period quality that ties the work together in a unique and compelling manner. It is rewarding to study the way in which Art supports the solos by trumpet, tenor and piano with a heavy four-four rhythm that escapes any suggestion of thudding monotony, yet retains the marching mood established by the introduction. Timmons’ solo is quite striking in its gradual build from a simple one-note line into an exciting chordal chorus.

Come Rain or Come Shine is a reminder that Blakey has found the secret of reconciling the hard-bop temperament of his band with the melodic character of a typical standard tune. The melody is slightly rephrased through the use of syncopation, the horns introduce it in unison and the soloists take over for a quartet of choruses – Timmons, Golson, Morgan, Merritt – that are no less a reflection of the Messengers’ essential qualities than anything else in the set. The magnificent pulsation of yet another superbly integrated Blakey rhythm section is heard to maximum effect on this track, it seems to me; indeed, one is reminded again how much of this quintet’s real identity, regardless of who happens to be playing with it or writing for it at any given time, is in essence a mirror of the personality of its leader. Merritt’s chorus here is remarkably melodic, never just a bass chorus, but a solo that could have been played no less valuably on a trumpet, saxophone or piano.

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Shortly after these sides were recorded, Blakey and his mailmen took off on a special delivery tour that brought them to France and other Continental points where their message had been picked up for years, with unwavering enthusiasm, through records. The opportunity to communicate in person, in an area he knew to be completely sympathetic with his musical aims, was welcomed by Art; however, as he told Tynan a year or so ago, “The only ting I haven’t figured out yet is how I’m going to preach to those people over there when we don’t all speak the same language.”

Then Art provided his own eloquent and appropriate answer as he grinned and added “But who needs words, man – they’ll get the message!”