Art Blakey; Drummer, Mentor Led the Jazz Messengers

Art Blakey, the kinetic, indomitable drummer and musical mentor who was the first to present such significant jazz talents as Horace Silver, Freddie Hubbard, Chuck Mangione and the brothers Marsalis, died Tuesday in a New York City hospital.

He was 71 and lost a two-month struggle with lung cancer.

Times jazz critic Leonard Feather said Blakey had returned from one of his many tours to Japan in August, thinking he had pneumonia. But his illness was diagnosed as cancer.

Born in Pittsburgh where he toiled in the steel mills by day while listening to the Earl Hines and Dick Stabile bands on the radio at night, Blakey started out as a pianist. He taught himself well enough to perform at local clubs but--as he said in a 1981 interview--”one evening Erroll Garner sat in for me. I knew that was the end of my life as a pianist.”

He also taught himself the drums and by 1944 had become a member of the pioneering be-bop orchestra led by singer Billy Eckstine.

“Everybody was in it at one time or another,” Blakey liked to recall. And he was right.

Charlie Parker and Dexter Gordon were on saxophones; Dizzy Gillespie was on trumpet and a young woman named Sarah Vaughan shared the vocals with Eckstine, who also played trombone.

Blakey became known for his frenetic snare drum patterns, fiery cymbals and eccentric rhythms in a band that many credit with reshaping the face of modern jazz.

After later working with the Buddy De Franco Quartet, Blakey formed the first of his Jazz Messengers groups (alternately quintets or sextets) at Birdland in New York in 1954.

Early members of the group included pianist Silver, trumpeter Kenny Dorham, saxophonist Hank Mobley and bassist Doug Watkins. The band toured Europe and played all around the United States for the next three decades, including a White House performance in 1981.

Over the years, Blakey’s Messengers came to include trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, who was only 18 when he joined Blakey in 1981. Older Marsalis brother Branford, a saxophonist, was already a member. Others were trumpeters Mangione, Hubbard and Clifford Brown, saxophonists Jackie McLean, Wayne Shorter and Johnny Griffin, and pianists Keith Jarrett, Walter Davis and JoAnne Brackeen, the first woman Messenger.

In the late 1970s, Blakey’s ear for talent brought Valeri Ponomarev, a Kiev-born trumpeter only months out of the Soviet Union, into the Messengers.

But Blakey denied being a teacher, saying that as a self-taught musician, “I don’t know anything myself.”

Yet at another time he said, “When I take these 18-year-old kids out on tour, it makes most of the pros feel like cutting their wrists. . . . They’re going to take the music farther than it has been.”

In a television film about Blakey’s career, Messengers alumnus Davis said: “I think no one in jazz has brought more great musicians to music than Art Blakey.”

The 1981 Newport Jazz Festival gave over an evening to “The Blakey Legacy,” in which the drummer was joined by the players who had been with his band during the previous quarter century.

When the Marsalis brothers opted for individual fame, Blakey quickly replaced them with two other promising youths--trumpeter Terence Blanchard and saxophonist Donald Harrison. (Recently Blanchard and Branford Marsalis teamed on the title duet of the soundtrack of Spike Lee’s film “Mo’ Better Blues.”)

There was more than just a musical side to Blakey. He was a fierce defender of racial justice, in the process incurring the displeasure of some blacks.

He brought whites and then Asians into his group, although “I know a lot of blacks resented it and would talk about it behind my back.”

He also was puzzled why more whites than blacks would show up for his appearances, blaming black radio stations for ignoring jazz.

Blakey toured the world, preferring Japan, Germany and Brazil for “the way you are treated as a human being.” And well into his 60s he continued to play with the same determination and elan he had shown as a young man--arms flailing and feet pumping, groaning and growling as he beat upon his drums.

Writer and critic Nat Hentoff once called Blakey “perhaps the most emotionally unbridled drummer in jazz, and there are times when his backgrounds resemble a brush fire.”

While the Messengers came in time to be considered an aggressive extension of be-bop, their leader said it was not necessarily intended that way.

“I didn’t make decisions,” Blakey said in 1981. “I got into jazz (and) I stayed there. . . . Even though I could have gotten into rock and made a lot of money, I’m very stubborn.”

Blakey’s survivors include two daughters, Evelyn and Lillian, both singers. His son, Art Jr., a drummer, died in 1988 at age 47.