Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers’s ‘Free For All’ Gets Reissue
The Jazz Messengers’ 1965 album is getting rereleased by Blue Note as part of its Classic Vinyl Reissue Series.
Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers’ 1965 album Free For All is going to be reissued by Blue Note as part of its Classic Vinyl Reissue Series.
This Blue Note Classic Vinyl Edition is stereo, all-analog, mastered by Kevin Gray from the original master tapes, and pressed on 180g vinyl at Optimal.
Free For All features a powerful sextet line-up with the drummer bandleader joined by tenor saxophonist Wayne Shorter, trumpeter Freddie Hubbard, trombonist Curtis Fuller, pianist Cedar Walton, and bassist Reggie Workman. Recorded in February 1964, the sessions were the first time in over two years that the Messengers had recorded for Blue Note.
The four-track album was charged by the energy of the contemporaneous Civil Rights Movement. It opens with two tracks composed by Shorter, “Free for All,” an 11-minute surge of energy, and “Hammer Head.”
Up next is Hubbard’s “The Core,” which is dedicated to the Congress of Racial Equality. “They’re getting at the core, at the center of the kinds of change that have to take place before this society is really open to everyone,” Hubbard remarked for the original liner notes. “And more than any other group, CORE is getting to youth, and that’s where the center of change is.” The title also holds emotional and musical meaning for Hubbard: “The way this worked out, I think we got at some of the core of jazz—the basic feelings and rhythms that are at the foundation of the music.”
Free For All concludes with a joyful rendition of Clare Fischer’s bossa nova-flavored jazz standard “Pensativa.” Hubbard explained that he heard a piano rendition of the song at a gig on Long Island. “The mood got at me, this feeling of a pensive woman,” he said. “And the melody was so beautiful that after I’d gotten home, I couldn’t get it out of my mind.”
