Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers: Mosaic (Blue Note Classic Vinyl series) [BLUE NOTE]

Why you'll love it

This Blue Note Classic Vinyl series pressing is a 180g stereo reissue pressed in Germany. Mosaic introduced the Messengers' new three-horn sextet, and every member of the front line brought a tune.

This edition

• Blue Note Classic Vinyl series
• 180g vinyl
• Stereo
• Pressed in Germany

About the album

Losing Lee Morgan and Bobby Timmons in the same year would rattle most bandleaders. Art Blakey just added a chair. With Freddie Hubbard on trumpet, Cedar Walton on piano and Curtis Fuller's trombone joining Wayne Shorter's tenor, the Jazz Messengers became a sextet, and on October 2, 1961, they went into Rudy Van Gelder's studio with Alfred Lion to show what the bigger sound could do.

Walton's title track opens the album with a dramatic, modal fanfare, and the writing is shared all round. Hubbard contributes the bright, swinging "Down Under" and the urgent closer "Crisis," Shorter brings the shadowy "Children of the Night," and Fuller's "Arabia" rides an exotic minor groove. Jymie Merritt's bass and Blakey's thunderous drums push every soloist to the edge of the stage, and the three horns voice the heads with a richness the old quintet never had to bother with.

This lineup stayed together into 1964 and became one of the most celebrated in the band's long history, with Reid Miles's cover and Francis Wolff's photos to match. Blakey let his young sidemen write the whole book here, and on this evidence he picked his sidemen rather well.

Also at Kops: more Art Blakey on vinyl · browse Classic Jazz

Tracklist

Listen

On Blue Note (cat# 5524253), a reissue of the 1962 album.