Billboard : 12/01/1956
Spotlight on… selection

The Messengers’ first Columbia album carries on in the brilliant, free-wheeling fashion that attracted so much critical admiration when they were on another label. Along with the Modern Jazz Quartet, this group is at the very top of the East Coast’s purveyors of small-jazz. This particular album is outstanding for the range of ideas and varied exploration of the potentialities of the gift fivesome. A standout is the drum work of Art Blakey in two Hank Mobley originals, Hank’s Symphony and Infra-Rae. As for Mobley (tenor) and Donald Byrd (trumpet), their blowing rates as among their best on vinyl – and that’s saying a lot. An outstanding buy; should be solid inventory for a long time to come.

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Down Beat : 12/26/1956
Ralph J. Gleason : 3 stars

This is the Jazz Messengers’ first LP for Columbia, and the personnel is Donald Byrd, Hank Mobley, Horace Silver, Doug Watkins, Art Blakey. It was made in 1955 before the group split amoeba-like into several parts.

It is, as far as reproduction of sound goes, the best of the LPs of the group that has been released. There is a better control here and a less harsh sound.

As far as the group’s music is concerned, this album contains the good and the bad points of the JMs, almost in equal portions. The sides have the guts, intense swing, masculinity and brazen frenetic excitement that has characterized the JMs since they first began recording. There is also the criticism that they run the motional gamut from frenzy to hysteria, lack mellowness, grace, delicacy, and any beauty that is not stark and that requires depth.

As usual, they set up a terrible turmoil with something like Infra-Rae with Mobley occasionally getting a froelich quality in his solo and Blakey showing that he can play it all-right now. Byrd contributes the most lyric moment with his solo on Nica’s and Love Affair is to me the most wholly successful of the tracks, a gay, light number on which Silver plays with restraint, taste, and delicacy.

It is too bad this group does not record more of the type of thing represented by Love Affair, for its Hurricane Harry approach to the blasters then would be more effective.

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Liner Notes by George Avakian

One of the best groups to emerge during the period when modern jazz decided that swing was not only not old-fashioned but a highly desirable commodity is the Jazz Messengers, a co-operative unit organized in early 1955. The musicians in this album form the personnel which has borne the Messenger banner during most of the unit’s career. They demonstrate, in these free-wheeling performances, that small-combo jazz can be arranged with plenty of room for improvisation, and with carefully worked-out ideas to set the group in a different setting in each number.

The material in this collection consists of two rarely-heard ballads and five originals (by Horace Silver and Hank Mobley). Variety is the keynote here, even though the group contains only five musicians and all the performances are more than usually long. Frequent and varied use of a Latin beat helps make some of this possible; more often, it is in the ensemble writing and the dynamic improvising of the soloists.

Expositions of themes invariably make rich use of the many resources of the group. Often a shifting rhythmic pattern is set up under the first chorus, changing to a swinging 4-4 when the solo section comes in. Even then, contrapuntal passages here and there – as in the unexpected but tension-building cross-rhythms set up by Silver and Blakey midway in Mobley’s solo of Infra-Rae – are frequently used to keep the listener pleasantly off-balance. Infra-Rae, incidentally, is a capsule distillation of the whole Jazz Messengers approach. It contains a little of everything the group does, including Blakey’s showmanship drumming. He has few equals either as a backer for soloists, as an ensemble musician, or as a soloist himself.

Nica’s Dream, with its ever-changing rhythm patterns, is one of Horace Silver’s best compositions, and his solo is filled with unexpected facets of this gifted musician’s imagination. Throughout this album, Silver again shows that he can run the gamut from the esoteric to the downright gutbucket.

Some of the ensemble playing in Nica’s Dream having indicated that the Messengers can interpret ballads without losing the jazz feel, it should be no surprise that It’s You or No One should turn into an all-out jazz piece. Ecaroh is another strange Silver piece, exploring still more possibilities of this unusual quintet. Few jazz writers have so successfully brought mysterioso qualities in close contact with free-swinging music.

Carol’s Interlude is an oddly-constructed Mobley original which unexpectedly lends itself to loose improvisation. The End of a Love Affair finds the Messengers again using Late-American rhythms to kick off a fine pop tune. Hank’s Symphony is another imaginative Mobley tune, leading through several contrasting sections, with the spotlight on some spectacular drum solos. It is frankly a showpiece for Blakey, who has, however, many more thing to do in it than a drummer usually does in a solo number.

The group got its name from a big band called the Messengers which Art Blakey led at times from 1948 to 1950. It is also derived from an expression which became common among musicians about “getting the message” when a band or a soloist plays. Blakey, in an interview with Nat Hentoff in “Down Beat” in 1956, explained further, “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. Because when we do get our message across, those heads and feet do move.”

Blakey and Silver are the best-known members of the group. Both have played with virtually all the top musicians of the modern-jazz scene. Mobley has been around much less, but a tenure with Dizzy Gillespie’s small group served to establish him with the New York crowd. Byrd and Watkins are relatively new; both come from Detroit, which has become in recent years a fertile source of new blood for small jazz combos. Already Byrd is established as one of the best young trumpet players, and Watkins has earned an enviable position as one of the best bassists to come long in years.