Mr. Blakey, who was also known as Abdullah Ibn Buhaina, founder and leader of The Jazz Messengers, played with a mixture of powerful abandon and precise control. An extraordinary drummer, he would turn each piece into an epic voyage, starting out calmly, slowly packing the tune with texture after texture, always controlling the dynamics until a thunderous barrage released the tension. Mr. Blakey shaped each performance by manipulating the texture for his soloists as well; the result was a set of performances that always mixed the excitement of improvisation with a real understanding of the personalities and capabilities of the musicians involved.
''Art was an original,'' said the drummer Max Roach. ''He's the only drummer whose time I recognize immediately. And his signature style was amazing; we used to call him 'Thunder.' When I first met him on 52d Street in 1944, he already had the polyrhythmic thing down. Art was the perhaps the best at maintaining independence with all four limbs. He was doing it before anybody was. And he was a great man, which influenced everybody around him.''
While Mr. Blakey was a gifted and important drummer, his contributions to American music as a band leader and talent scout are equally important. Mr. Blakey, like no other band leader for the last 40 years, had acted as a one-man university for young musicians. A partial list of the musicians he hired resembles a history of jazz from the 1950's to the present. They included the trumpeters Kenny Dorham, Clifford Brown, Bill Hardman, Lee Morgan, Freddie Hubbard, Woody Shaw, Wynton Marsalis, Wallace Roney and Terence Blanchard; the saxophonists Lou Donaldson, Jackie McLean, Hank Mobley, Johnny Griffin, Wayne Shorter, Gary Bartz, Bobby Watson, Branford Marsalis, Donald Harrison, Kenny Garrett and Javon Jackson, and the pianists Horace Silver, Bobby Timmons, Cedar Walton, John Hicks, James Williams, Mulgrew Miller and Bennie Green.
Wynton Marsalis: ''Art was important to me because he always displayed the maximum belief in integrity and quality. Even more important, he represents the most mature man our society can develop because he was making life easier for everyone else. He provided the context for musicians to play and develop. And since we weren't on his level, he'd subject himself to us so we'd learn. First he just let the musicians play, but then he'd offer subtle advice, but he'd never discourage you: it was always positive reinforcement. He knew that there's a price to be paid to develop in this music, and he did his best to help us.'' - NYT Obituary, 1990
