Billboard : 10/28/1957
Score of 80

A leaping, boppish session that is notable for wealth of stark, emotionally direct solos, and integrated thrust of group as a whole. Most memorable are solo stints of altoist Jackie McLean, and the vigor and fire of drummer-leader Art Blakey. One of the better Messenger sets, sales potential is good.

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Cashbox : 11/02/1957

Releases by the combo offer dealers sure-fire jazz stock, and this new stint by the driving jazzists will also make the sales grade. Five items, two standards, My Heart Stood Still, and Stella By Starlight, are performed with a provocative jazz punch by the personnel, which includes an original “Jazz Messenger” drummer Art Blakey, and fine trumpeter Bill Hardman.

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Liner Notes by Nat Hentoff

The term “hard bop” appears to have been originated by critic-pianist John Mehegan, jazz reviewer for the New York Herald Tribune. Like all labels applied to as assertively individualistic a medium as jazz, the term should be utilized with caution as indicating only a general direction whose practitioners also are apt to wander into other frames of jazz reference.

Among the qualities that might be said to identify “hard bop” is its direct continuation, as the term indicates, of the early modern jazz language first self-discovered and deepened by the late Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, Kenny Clarke and others. The softer, cooler developments of modern jazz, as were exemplified for a time by musicians like Stan Getz and the Gil Evans-infused Miles Davis sessions of 1949-50 (with influential instrumentation of trumpet, trombone, French horn, tuba, alto, baritone saxophone and rhythm) seem to have affected the hard boppers relatively little. Nor certainly is the increased emphases on exploring the possibilities of more challenging written jazz – as in the current work of George Russell, Charles Mingus, John Lewis, Jimmy Giuffre, Teddy Charles, etc. – reflected among the hard boppers.

Improvisation remains the essential concern of the hard boppers. For the most part, such originals as those which they write are rather slight and are actually basing-points for extended improvisation. (A cautionary sentence is in order here to indicate again that there are musicians who may have begun as “hard boppers” and may still play occasionally in that context but to whom much of this definition does not apply. I mean men like Sonny Rollins and Thelonious Monk. Monk, in fact, has never been categorizable. In any case, the responsibility of the listener is to listen to each musician and each group as individual jazzmen and individual units, and not to prejudge by label. Labels are only conveniences, and should not be abused.)

Another aspect of much hard bop playing is that ballads are apt to be treated by these musicians with a goodly amount of the same muscular, full-emotions-ahead attack as is their original material. With many hard boppers, ballads are likely to be taken at medium tempo or up-tempo, or often as explosive tempos. Even when an invitation to dalliance is played by them at reflective tempos, there is often minimal softness of tone and minimal romantic expansiveness of conception. The kind of rich, breathy and unabashedly enveloping ballad playing that characterizes a swing era master like Ben Webster is largely alien to the hard boppers, nor are the hard men particularly attuned to the introspective, finely sensitized lyricism of a Miles Davis.

The hard boppers are not without lyricism, but theirs is a leaping, raw ardor that is impatient with rounding the corners or searching out the more shaded and the more convoluted areas of expression. Their music is “hard,” not in the sense that it lacks emotion, but in the sense that it is, or intends to be, as unsentimental and as spontaneously direct emotionally as it is possible to be.

In a perceptive essay in the British Melody Maker, Raymond Horricks points back to the influence of Charlie Parker on these musicians. Parker obviously influenced every practitioner and theorist of modern jazz, but the hard boppers are more completely under his commanding shadow than certain others of their contemporaries. And, as Horricks says, many of the hard bop units also continue to use Parker’s lean instrumentation. There is often a front line of just trumpet and alto or trumpet and tenor and a guitarless rhythm section. Horricks lists “Art Blakey and the volatile Jazz Messengers, Kenny Dorham and the Jazz Prophets, the Max Roach Quintet, the Adderley Brothers” and various recording units as illustrating the pervasive use of this kind of instrumentation in this particular area of modern jazz.

Horricks concludes by guessing wisely that the quintet formula – aside from its economic advantages in getting the units booked – “allows for greater experimentation within solos… within its framework, there is the opportunity for a man to combine musical intelligence not only with the vital traditions of jazz (the hard rhythmic core, the roots embodied in the blues and the spontaneous imagination) but also with an essentially extrovert emotion carrying his, the performer’s, message of inspiration through to an audience.”

Referring to the blues, jazz roots, Parker and his own work, drummer-leader Art Blakey told Russ Wilson of the Oakland Tribune: “All that’s gone before is very important, and well-grounded musicians know it. For instance, I was talking with Charlie Parker the day he died (March 12, 1955). Just happened to drop in the apartment that afternoon to say hello and see how he was making it. I asked him what he considered the best record he ever made and he said: ‘I haven’t made it yet. I’m working on some new things now.’ Somehow the talk turned to musicians and Bird remarked that it was a sad thing they way many of the young guys coming up didn’t know or had forgotten their foundation – the blues. ‘That’s the basis of jazz’ he told me. And he was so right.” Wilson accurately added that “while the classic 12-bar blues pattern occupies a small portion of his quintet’s repertoire, the inflections and intense spirit of this earthy form are almost always present.”

Blakey, born in Pittsburgh in 1919, is perhaps the most emotionally unbridled drummer in jazz, and there are times when his backgrounds resemble a brush fire. He worked with Fletcher Henderson, Mary Lou Williams, has had his own group intermittently, and backed the young, hungry and erratically brilliant Billy Eckstine band of 1944-47 with such sidemen as Parker, Gillespie, Fats Navarro and Tommy Potter as well as Sarah Vaughan. Blakey later went on to Lucky Millinder‘s band, Buddy DeFranco‘s quartet, freelanced, helped form the original Jazz messengers in late 1954 and is now leader of the current crackling edition.

Altoist Jackie McLean, born in New York in 1932, was the son of a professional guitarist. In his neighborhood band as a youngster were Sonny Rollins and Kenny Drew. He was given informal lessons by Bud Powell and was encouraged by Miles Davis. He has worked with Paul Bley, George Wallington, Charles Mingus, and until recently, with Blakey. His is a searing, hot-though-hard style.

Trumpeter Bill Hardman, born in Cleveland in 1932, was influenced by former Lionel Hampton trumpeter Benny Bailey, Miles Davis and Clifford Brown. He took a job with the Tiny Bradshaw rhythm and blues band from 1953-55 in order to get on the road and gather experience. He later participated for a time in the exacting Charles Mingus Jazz Workshop unit. Bassist Spanky DeBrest, 19, grew up in Philadelphia and quickly acquired a firm reputation with local units. His stay with Blakey represents his first enlistment with a major league team. Pianist Sam Dockery, 27, is from Camden, New Jersey. He spent some two years on the road with Buddy Rich, but returned to work around Camden because, notes Russ Wilson, “as the eldest son of a widow with six children he was the family’s chief support.”

Cranky Spanky, by Bill Hardman, is named, more for reasons of assonance than criticism, after bassist DeBrest. Little Melonae is Jackie McLean’s two-year-old and is drawn by her father. Stanley’s Stiff Chickens is a Hardman-McLean collaboration and is so titled because the music reminded them of the gait of various farmers they had seen on their cross-country trips. Stanley is present only for alliterative purposes.

This Jazz Messengers team has been touring the national jazz circuit and the consensus reaction is that it communicates with its audiences instantaneously, fierily, and with hard honesty.