VMP Magazine

The drummer Art Blakey was, without doubt, one of the most brilliant and influential rhythmic architects in jazz history. He was also, weirdly, both iconic and unsung. Other drummers, like Max Roach and Kenny Clarke, often obscure Blakey in discussions about the birth of modern jazz, but he was there too, tuning up the language of the swing era until it became a strange and ferocious music called bebop. Elvin Jones has been broadcast as the owner of the cerebral and acrobatic approach to jazz drumming referred to as polyrhythmic, but no less an authority than Roach argued that Blakey got to four-limbed independence first. When it came to the gospel- and R&B-fueled gait that defined hard bop, Blakey received his just due as the music’s avatar.

On May 27, 1961, Art Blakey sat down at the drumkit in his second home of sorts, the most important recording studio in jazz history, engineer Rudy Van Gelder’s high-ceilinged marvel in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. After a spirited shuffle through a blues by Wayne Shorter, joined by one of jazz’s hall-of-fame working groups — Shorter, tenor saxophone; Lee Morgan, trumpet; Bobby Timmons, piano; Jymie Merritt, bass — Blakey started in on a suite-like, seven-and-a-half-minute drum solo. Throughout what would become “The Freedom Rider,” the title track to an undervalued LP for Blue Note Records, he keeps time for himself with a signature covert snip of the hi-hat. That bedrock in place, Blakey tells the remainder of his story with surging rolls and dynamic patterns and agitated crashes that combine to underscore a triptych of influences: swing-era drum heroes like Big Sid Catlett and Chick Webb, the percussive traditions of Latin America, and the African rhythms he absorbed during his time on the continent in the late ’40s.