Billboard : 04/14/1956

This is one of several sessions cut by this outstanding new jazz group on location at the Café Bohemia. The Messengers have since signed with Columbia. Blakey and Dorham are the comparative veterans here, and Silver has been building a good disk following. The solo and ensemble are bop-derived, but happy, outgoing and swinging. This set will become more and more salable as months go by, and it won’t hurt to introduce jazz buyers to the Messengers now.

—–

Down Beat : 04/18/1956
Nat Hentoff : 4 stars

This is the Messengers’ first LP under their own name, their first 12″ set, and their first recording in a club. The room was New York’s Café Bohemia, and a second volume recorded the same night will also be released. Personnel of this co-op unit is Kenny Dorham (since replaced by Donald Byrd), tenor Hank Mobley, Art Blakey, Horace Silver, and bassist Doug Watkins. This LP while generally stimulating, is not as satisfying as the same unit’s recent 10″ set under Horace Silver’s name (BLP 5062).

One chief reason for this not making the full five is too much Mobley. On Winds, he plays too long for what he has to say and his work on his ballad vehicle, Alone Together, is competent but undistinguished. He lacks the imaginativeness and individuality of conception of Kenny Dorham, the other and much better hornman on the date.

Dorham, far too unrecognized for too long a time, is in drivingly incisive and something dazzling form (Minor’s Holiday). The rhythm section has the strength of 10, and Horace Silver’s solos are about as “down” as is possible, short of actual excavation. Also somewhat lacking here, however, as contrasted with the previous 10″er is a degree of cohesiveness in programming. Winds is too long in any case and the LP would have been further strengthened had a more collection number been substituted for Alone. But it’s still a session worth hearing. The Messengers continue to have more explosive vitality than most other modern small combos.

—–

San Francisco Chronicle
Ralph J. Gleason : 06/07/1956

The best small groups in modern jazz have been keeping busy recently recording and the result is a particularly good set of LPs showing what they have been up to.

—

A New York jazz group featuring Horace Silver, Art Blakey, Kenny Dorham and Hank Mobley and calling itself the The Jazz Messengers has two LPs on Blue Note, Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 in a series. It’s a hard-swinging group with Blakey’s incisive, rattling percussion a solid foundation for the solos. The most impressive man in the group to me is pianist Horace Silver, who is far and away the best pianist since Bud Powell. Hank Mobley, the tenor, is a straight-ahead swinger and Dorham’s trumpet seems inspired these days.

—–

Liner Notes by Leonard Feather

This cheerful, animated album starts out with two important precedents to guide it. First, it revives the “Messengers” name that was originated (many of us may have overlooked this fact or never have known it) on the Blue Note label when Art Blakey led a somewhat larger band for a session as far back as 1947. Second, it repeats the night club locus operandi idea initiated so fruitfully when the Art Blakey – A Night At Birdland series was offered on Blue Note BLP 5037, BLP 5038 and BLP 5039.

The present Messengers unit came into being as a result of the record sessions under Horace‘s name that produced Blue Note LP BLP 5058 and BLP 5062. A cooperative unit from the start, they have shared the belief that jazzmen must retain firm roots in the jazz tradition, and that advancement must never lose touch with this principle. As Art Blakey told Nat Hentoff in a Down Beat interview, “In jazz you get the message when you hear the music. And when we’re on the stand and we see that there are people in the audience who aren’t patting their feet and who aren’t nodding their heads to our music, we know we’re doing something wrong.” As Horace Silver added, “We don’t want to go too far out. We want people to understand what we’re doing.”

The Messengers played their first official date together in February 1955 at the Blue Note in Philadelphia. They are still playing clubs around the east and middle west.

At the time of the Birdland recording, Café Bohemia was just an obscure Greenwich Village club dedicated apparently forever to the education at the visiting fire-eaters who sought the girliest at girlie shows. In the spring of 1955 a big change came over the club and over the thinking of Jimmy Garofolo, its owner. Jimmy had no previous knowledge of jazz, but when a couple of musicians wandered in off the street (possibly mistaking the place for Café Society, or maybe just hungry for cheesecake) and sat in for a stimulating jam session, Jimmy was impressed. He was better than impressed when Charlie Parker fell by one night. Even to the point of deciding on a jazz policy, and on Bird himself for the opening attraction. Alas, the sign advertising Charlie Parker’s initiation of Jazz at the Bohemia still lies unused in Jimmy’s cellar.

The Bohemia, a somewhat long and narrow room with a bar at one end and a small bandstand at the other, is on street level, just a few doors from Café Society on Sheridan Square. Musicians have embraced it as one of New York’s Three B’s of the jazz club circuit, along with Birdland and Basin Street. The members of the Messengers, singly and collectively, have enjoyed many pleasant weeks among the hip crowd the club now attracts.

On these records you will hear Art Blakey introducing the other members of the cooperative team. None of them will be strangers to you: Kenny Dorham, the trumpet man from Fairfield, Texas, has his own Afro-Cuban LP on [Album507063,BLP 5065. On tenor Hank Mobley who has been heard in the Gillespie, Roach and Silver combos and who was also featured on the Dorham set as well as on sessions with Jay Jay Johnson and Julius Watkins. Horace Ward Morton Tavares Silver (you will note that he is a quintet in himself) has become virtually one of the Blue Note family; his own LPs include BLP 5018 and BLP 5034 with his trio, BLP 5021 with Lou Donaldson, BLP 5024 with Howard McGhee, BLP 5040 with Miles Davis, BLP 5058 and BLP 5062 with the Jazz Messengers, BLP 5070 with Jay Jay Johnson, and the three Night at Birdland discs on BLP 5037-9. Doug Watkins, from Detroit, is one of the youngest and most promising of this year’s bass crop. Art, as you know, is all through the Blue Note catalogue with Horace, Miles, Monk and others.

BLP 1507

On the first record you will hear the old Goodman Sextet’s Soft Winds, delightfully stretched into an easy’ going, rocking affair with intermittent doubling of the tempo, which basically is a slow and insinuating one. Then comes the band’s swinging theme, affording excellent solo opportunities to all. Next in line are Minor‘s Holiday, faster and longer and, it seems to me, even more exciting than the version on Kenny’s own LP; Alone Together, announced by Art as one of his favorite ballads, and showing Hank Mobley off effectively; and Prince Albert, which Kenny and Max Roach devised and recorded way back around 1947, but which, if we may say so, is far better recorded and played in this new version.

BLP 1508

On the second record Hank Mobley’s fast blues riff Sportin’ Crowd launches a series of leaping solos by Kenny, Hank, Horace and Art; the Burke–van HeusenLike Someone In Love provides, for these ears, the most relaxed and charming moments of the whole session; the steady beat and fine recording of the rhythm section are no less important here than the consistently integrated quality of the solos.

Kenny Dorham announces his own solo on Yesterdays, a very beautifully pinpointed interpretation that somehow contrives to make a legato-sounding performance out of the use of many staccato notes. This is again a personal judgment, but Kenny sounds far maturer and far better engineered here than he did on a previous version.

Everybody seems to grab the nearest clave, maracas, jawbone or teaspoon to lend his hand for a fine overall Latin effect an Avila and Tequila, which has a long percussive preamble before introducing the theme. (Four Messengers, minus Kenny, cut this also on BLP 5066 under Hank’s leadership.) Art and Doug Watkins deserve special commendation on this one. Finally the old Gillespie closing theme, Gil Fuller‘s l Waited For You, is brilliantly handled by Kenny in the opening chorus, after which Hank and Horace maintain the mood consistently.

So, as Art Blakey says, take off your shoes and have a ball. The Messengers’ missive comes special delivery through the courtesy of Alfred Lion, and we’re sure you will dig their handwriting, as it bounces off the Bohemia’s wailing walls.