“A partial list of the musicians he hired resembles a history of jazz from the 1950s to the present,” the critic Peter Watrous wrote. When Blakey died in 1990, at age 71, the New York Times didn’t hedge in their effort to illustrate the range of his influence. Personnel shifted frequently, though the yardstick for talent remained sky-high. They were bulletproof in sound and mission-a beacon of midcentury swing through the fusion era-yet also mercurial. But the Jazz Messengers mostly hurdled through the years as a ruggedly dependable institution. He steered the Messengers for three-plus decades, and he certainly came across some lulls and obstacles during this marathon, facing down ardent competition from rock and pop, his own organizational shortcomings and other challenges in and out of his control. Many of those disciples have become bandleaders and jazz schools in Blakey’s image. And this is crucial: Blakey emboldened them to write original music for the band, and saw the process of them leaving his company to form their own bands as organic growth. His long-running working band, the Jazz Messengers, which he headed up with the pianist Horace Silver in the ’50s before helming it alone, nurtured a great number of the most important musicians to ever play jazz. At odds with the prevailing jazz-as-art ethos that attached itself to bop, he valued his audiences and endeavored to entertain. His more celebrated legacy is as a mentor who traded in tough love, common sense and enough anecdotes to fill a thousand biopics. The reason Blakey might be overlooked as a pioneering technician is a good problem to have. Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers The Freedom Rider

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