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Blakey, Art (Abdullah ibn Buhaina)
4 articles on Blakey, Art (Abdullah ibn Buhaina)
Blakey, Art
Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present: From the Age of Segregation to the Twenty-first Century
Word Count: 434 Includes: Bibliography(b. 11 October 1919; d. 16 October 1990), jazz musician. Arthur William Blakey was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and was raised by relatives and a family friend. His father, Bertram, a barber, had left the family when Blakey was an infant, and his mother died when he was twenty-one months old. By age fourteen he was working as a pianist in a Pittsburgh nightclub. He switched to drums, learning to play a hard swinging style by listening to recordings of Chick Webb and Sid Catlett.After a stint in the Mary Lou Williams combo in 1942, Blakey traveled with Fletcher Henderson's orchestra in 1943–1944. From 1944 to 1947 he played in Billy Eckstine's orchestra, a group that included the influential musicians John Birks “Dizzy” Gillespie, Charlie “Bird” Parker, and Miles Davis. Blakey formed his ...
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Source: Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition
Word Count: 7781919–1990
African American jazz musician, innovator of bop drumming, and leader of the Jazz Messengers. As a drummer and bandleader, Art Blakey had a profound impact on the shape of modern Jazz. During the late 1940s, along with Kenny Clarke and Max Roach, he was one of the creators of modern jazz drumming. His long-standing group, the Jazz Messengers (1955–1990)—together with Miles Davis's quintet with John Coltrane, the Max Roach–Clifford Brown Quintet, and the Horace Silver Quintet—popularized the style known as hard bop. Hard bop draws equally on the harmonic and rhythmic complexity of bebop and on the visceral sounds and simpler rhythms that characterize the Blues and Gospel Music. In an interview published in The Black Perspective in Music, Blakey summed up his approach simply, declaring that he ...
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Source: African American National Biography
(11 Oct. 1919–16 Oct. 1990), jazz drummer and bandleader, was born Art William Blakey in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the son of Burtrum Blakey, a barber, and Marie Roddericker. His father left home shortly after Blakey was born, and his mother died the next year. Consequently, he was raised by a cousin, Sarah Oliver Parran, who worked at the Jones and Laughlin Steel Mill in Pittsburgh. He moved out of the home at age thirteen to work in the steel mills and in 1938 married Clarice Stuart, the first of three wives. His other wives were Diana Bates and Ann Arnold. Blakey had at least ten children (the exact number is unknown), the last of whom was born in 1986.As a teenager Blakey taught himself to play the piano and performed in local dance bands, but he later switched to drums. Like many of his contemporaries, ...
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Source: Grove Music Online
Word Count: 695 Includes: Bibliography(b. Pittsburgh, 11 Oct 1919; d. New York, 16 Oct 1990). American jazz drummer and bandleader. By the time he was a teenager he was playing the piano full-time, leading a commercial band. Shortly afterwards he taught himself to play the drums in the aggressive swing style of Chick Webb, Sid Catlett and Ray Bauduc, and he joined Mary Lou Williams as a drummer for an engagement in New York in autumn 1942. He then toured with the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra (1943–4). During his years with Billy Eckstine’s big band (1944–7) Blakey became associated with the modern-jazz movement, along with his fellow band members Miles Davis, Dexter Gordon, Fats Navarro and others. In 1947 Blakey organized the Seventeen Messengers, a rehearsal band, and recorded with an octet called the Jazz Messengers. He then travelled in Africa, probably ...
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