Art Blakey And The Jazz Messengers - Moanin' (1968 US Blue Note Liberty Pressing BST 84003, Japanese Import Obi, Vinyl LP)

Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers - Moanin' | Vinyl LP - 1968 US Blue Note Liberty Pressing (BST 84003), with Japanese Toshiba direct-import obi and insert

Moanin' is the album that put Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers back at the centre of jazz. Blakey had led versions of the band since the mid-fifties, but the 1958 edition, with a twenty-year-old Lee Morgan on trumpet, Benny Golson on tenor, Bobby Timmons on piano and Jymie Merritt on bass, was the one that broke through, and this record is why. It opens with Timmons's title track, a gospel-drenched, call-and-response tune so infectious it helped launch the whole funky, soulful strain of hard bop, and the album never lets the quality drop. Golson, who acted as the band's musical director, wrote four of the six pieces: the sleek "Along Came Betty", the driving "Are You Real", the three-part drum feature "The Drum Thunder Suite", and "Blues March", a swaggering march-time blues that became a Messengers signature. Morgan is brilliant throughout, brash and joyful, Timmons brings the church, and Blakey drives the whole thing with the thunder that made him the most propulsive drummer in jazz. It is hard bop at its most irresistible.

The record made stars of nearly everyone on it. Benny Golson would leave within a year to co-found the Jazztet with Art Farmer, taking "Blues March" and "Along Came Betty" into the standard repertoire; Lee Morgan would go on to his own run of Blue Note classics; and Blakey would keep the Messengers running for another three decades as jazz's great finishing school.

This copy has a story of its own. It is a US Blue Note pressing from the Liberty era, a West Coast pressing on the blue and white Liberty label, but it was brought into Japan by Toshiba and sold there as an official direct-import edition, so it carries a Japanese obi and an insert with liner notes by the critic Shoichi Yui. The jacket and record are American; the obi and insert are Japanese. This is the 1968 US Liberty pressing, catalogue number BST 84003, in its Japanese import dress.