Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers - Moanin'

When bebop was king and when Charlie Parker along with his many copycats scoured the land during the 50s people began to forget what it was all about. Jazz evolved into a more intellectual and more demanding musical direction. It almost completely left behind its previous sound of pop music but it also started to forget its roots. Then came along Art Blakey with some other marvelous people and told everyone to calm the fuck down and remember the old blues days. This is pretty much (highly caricatured of course) how hard bop started. Instead of focusing solely on raging solos and all dem harmonies it focused on the melody and the blues feel of jazz. Moanin' is a seminal, and also great, album to explain just what hard bop was and is about. It was new and it was innovative but it also showed respect to the previous sounds of jazz fusing it with the new sound that Charlie Parker popularized. It's sort of a middle ground. And it rips shit up. :D It was also the first album that Blakey did for Blue Note.

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What it was all about.