ART BLAKEY Vinilo y CD

Review: Reissued via Craft now, after a long run with Art Blakey's original issuers Riverside Records, Caravan is the first record by the drummer to be released in 1963. With Freddie Hubbard on trumpet, Wayne Shorter on sax, Curtis Fuller on trombone, Cedar Walton on piano and Reggie Workman on bass, Blakey commands a fiery, banging temper on this eight-track record, yet somehow still makes such carpal explosives flow like poetry. The album's most notable element is that Blakey finds immense joy in subtly variating around difficult, tupletting riffs, which nonetheless go on to produce discernible and well-rounded progressions. We wouldn't expect anything less from the master.

Review: Blue Note reissue the drummer Art Blakey and his Jazz Messengers' time-honoured hard bop album Mosaic, often cited as among his best. From the titular opener to the seguing montage-worthy sequences of 'Arabia', 'Crisis' or 'Down Under', we're met with huge, extruding saxes and trombones, backed by Blakey's un-pin-downable drumming, evocative of huge towering New York skylines and crowd bustle; apparently, the album was so tightly performed it needed no alternate takes.