Art Blakey, The Jazz Messengers

condition (record/cover): NM / VG+ (light ring wear)

Insert and obi included.

The 1962 edition of the Messengers, and there is a serious argument that it was the strongest of them all: Freddie Hubbard, Wayne Shorter, Curtis Fuller, Cedar Walton and Jymie Merritt, captured live and loose. Art Blakey turns the nursery-rhyme title track into pure swagger, and the three-horn front line gives the band an orchestral punch no quintet could match. Shorter's writing and playing are already pointing somewhere stranger and deeper; Hubbard is in full young-lion flight; Fuller glues it all together with that velvet trombone. Hard bop with muscle and mystery in equal measure. Japanese United Artists pressing.