Blakey Art & Jazz Messengers – Free for All (Mono, Blue Note Classic)

Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers' Free For All captures the group at full stretch in February 1964, returning to Blue Note after more than two years away with music clearly charged by the civil rights era. This was the classic sextet edition of the Messengers: Blakey with Wayne Shorter, Freddie Hubbard, Curtis Fuller, Cedar Walton, and Reggie Workman. The result is a hard-bop session with unusual heat and urgency, especially on Shorter's title track and the equally forceful Hammer Head.

What makes the album endure is how focused that intensity feels. Hubbard's The Core, dedicated to the Congress of Racial Equality, ties the record directly to its political moment without turning it into a programmatic statement; the band simply plays with enough fire to make the point. Then Pensativa, Clare Fischer's bossa-tinged closer, opens the mood out beautifully after all that pressure. Many listeners place this among the strongest albums Blakey made with the Messengers, and it is easy to hear why: the frontline is razor-sharp, Blakey drives everything from underneath, and the whole set balances discipline with near-overflowing momentum.

For this Blue Note Classic edition, the album returns in an all-analog stereo cut mastered by Kevin Gray from the original analog tapes and pressed on 180g vinyl at Optimal, making it a particularly appealing way to revisit one of the fiercest records in the Blakey catalogue.

Features

• LP, 180g, Stereo, Blue Note Classic Vinyl Series
• All-analog mastering by Kevin Gray from the original analog tapes
• Pressed at Optimal
• Single sleeve

Reviews

• A passionate Jazz Messengers workout that proves essential. - AllMusic.com