Art Blakey's Birthday (11 Oct 1919)

Subject: Art Blakey's Birthday
From: The Shambles
Date: 11 Oct 06 - 04:40 AM

Art Blakey the famous jazz drummer etc, was born this day (11th October)in Pitts Pa in 1919.

Subject: RE: Art Blakey's Birthday
From: MartinRyan
Date: 11 Oct 06 - 05:55 AM

As a teenager, one of the earliest jazz recordings I had was of Blakey's Jazz Messengers playing "Night in Tunisia". It took up most if not all of both sides of an "EP" record (all i could afford to buy at the time)and was really just one long drum solo! Brings me back, alright.

Regards

Subject: RE: Art Blakey's Birthday
From: The Shambles
Date: 11 Oct 06 - 08:46 PM

Yes Martin your post reminded me.

In the days when record players had a little arm that you dropped on top of the record, I forgot to do this to an Art Blakey LP - that was mainly one long drum solo. The result was that the record would just keep playng.

In fact I went out leaving the record playing. I returned home some hours later to find my dear mother at screaming point. Not knowing how to turn it off and not wishing to damage the borrowed record and player - she had listened to this drum solo all night.

Everytime it came to the end - she relaxed with relief - only for her to place her hands over her ears as it started all over again. I am glad to say that she did recover from the experience - but was never a great Art Blakey fan or a fan of jazz drumming after that.

Subject: RE: Art Blakey's Birthday
From: Jerry Rasmussen
Date: 12 Oct 06 - 11:53 AM

Happy Birthday, Art.

Jerry

Subject: RE: Art Blakey's Birthday (11 Oct 1919)
From: fat B****rd
Date: 19 Oct 06 - 04:07 AM

Bit late due to hols. Must brush up on my Blakey. His bands were breeding grounds for all sorts of great players.

Subject: RE: Art Blakey's Birthday squabble
From: Rowan
Date: 07 Nov 06 - 01:27 AM

At the risk of crossing threads or causing drift, I can distinctly remember my introduction to Art Blakey's music. It was 1961, I think, and Tattersall's (a company in Victoria that ran the only legal lotteries there and in Tasmania) had brought a lottery barrel from Tasmania to Victoria. The barrel contained 150,000 marbles (all wooden) numbered from 1 to 150,000.

The rules in Victoria at that time required the Auditor General or his (they were all male for the next 30 years) representative had to ensure that there was one (and only one) marble with each number on it. This required Tatts to decant the marbles from the barrel and then sort, count out and stack them all, have them inspected and ticked off by the A-G's rep. before returning them into the barrel. This counting was done by two groups of a dozen people seated along two sloping trestle tables that had some quad beading forming 11 channels down the slope. The marbles had all been decanted into tea chests.

Each person would sit at the table and scoop a small bucket of marbles from a tea chest and sort them into the appropriate channels; the marbles would run into empty chests at the bottom end of each channel. Fortunately for us, Tatts wanted the barrel to have only the marbles numbered 1-100,000 in the 'new' barrel. First sorting was into 10,000s, with the supernumaries in the discard channel. The each group of 10,000 was sorted into 1000s and then each group of 1000 marbles was sorted onto trays with 10 rows of 10 dimples, allowing their numbers to be displayed. After inspection the A-G's rep. would tip each tray into the new barrel, sealing it whenever he left it unattended.

I was one of the two dozen who worked at this for the two weeks it took to complete it and, as you can imagine, this task was one of the most boting I've ever done (and I've never willingly entered a lottery since) and we looked for anything to keep us from making errors out of boredom.

One character had a portable record player (remember them?) and brought it along. He also had several records by Art Blakey and his Jazz Messengers. I can't now remember any of the tracks but I sure remember the effect of the music on us.

Cheers, Rowan