Jazz Messengers keep Blakey’s legacy swinging

Few musicians create a legacy the way Art Blakey did: he redefined drumming into something at once volcanic and swinging; he developed a sound, the horn-heavy, hard-bop Blue Note sound, that put muscle back into the musically anemic 50s; and he founded a school, the Jazz Messengers, that for 36 years turned eager young students, from Shorter and Hubbard to Marsalis, into a Who’s Who of today’s masters.

It’s been seven years since the man called Buhaina passed away, but his legacy roared at the Maine Center for the Arts Sunday, when five illustrious alumni — Curtis Fuller on trombone and Benny Golson on tenor from the early years, mid-era trumpeter Terence Blanchard, and two who were among the last to graduate, pianist Geoff Keezer and bassist Peter Washington — along with Lewis Nash in the drum chair, showed a smallish, lucky and very appreciative audience just what it means to be a Messenger.

The concert got off to a somewhat sleepy start, as befitted a dreary winter afternoon, but everybody was wide awake by the third tune, Fuller’s tricky “Oh By the Way.” Fuller, who along with J.J. Johnson saved the trombone from post-Swing terminal sweetness, demonstrated the diffuse, mellow yet edgy tone, the bopping lines, that makes his voice so unmistakable. Blanchard’s sassy solo and blistering cadenza were a mere taste of what was to come.

Golson, whose own compositions make up a one-man hit parade, was master of ceremonies, introducing the players and the songs in a courtly, Ellingtonian style not unlike his tenor sound — big, confident, colorful and insinuating, yet never showy. As much as his horn contributed, it was his pen, his famous “Blues March,” that lit up the band, with Washington walking in double time, Blanchard bugling the paint off the walls and Nash doing things with paradiddles 100 marching bands could not match.

The closer, and the high point of the concert, was “A Night In Tunisia.” Blakey’s playing was aptly described as a brushfire raging behind the band. Nash, best known for his subdued work with the great vocalist Betty Carter, clearly has an incendiary streak himself. His polyrhythmic intro to the Gillespie piece, switching from brushes to mallets to sticks, was astonishing, almost as astonishing the swooping, screaming solo Blanchard turned in that had the audience on its feet in an involuntary reflex.

Blakey was fond of saying jazz “cleans away the dust of everyday life.” With the `lite’ jazz crowd of today trying to do it with a trickle of tepid water and soap bubbles, these Jazz Messengers are a welcome reminder that sometimes the only way to get something really clean is to burn it.