YouTube Clip of the Month: Jazz Messengers, 1958

In a relatively short time, YouTube has become the repository of the entire recorded history of the human race. Its sheer gargantuan size means that millions of videos lurk out there beyond the Trending lists, just waiting to be discovered by the discerning time-waster, if only they knew the right keywords to enter. Damn the luck! Fortunately, Popwell is here with a monthly tidbit that you can enjoy right this very minute, in the privacy of your own home, yard, vehicle and/or workspace.

For most of my life, I thought of jazz as a kind of faceless music. By that, I mean that I knew and loved lots of jazz musicians, but only connected with them via the music itself. As far as I was concerned, Thelonious Monk existed only as sounds coming from a piano, Lee Morgan was a trumpet and nothing more. The greats of jazz seemed to have existed on a different plane of existence than mere mortals, one without any real visual component. Sure, there were the ultra-cool, color-filtered pics of jazz gods smoking cigarettes on Blue Note album covers, but I could never picture Miles Davis actually playing in quite the same way as I could Van Halen or Prince, for example.

Well, thanks to YouTube, all that has changed. I’m now a mere click away from an incredible array of video clips of true jazz legends. Rare footage of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie playing “Hot House” together at some 1951 awards show? Check! The John Coltrane Quartet absolutely burning their way through an insane twenty-minute version of “My Favorite Things”? Check! A gorgeously-shot complete concert by the Duke Ellington Orchestra? Check! Okay, so I still can’t find much in the way of good Hank Mobley clips, but I’m now able connect to these performers more directly than before. Watching them work makes their art seem all the more amazing.

My personal favorite jazz player is trumpet genius Lee Morgan. From his breakout performance as a teenage prodigy on Coltrane’s “Blue Train” until his tragic murder in 1972 at the age of 33, Morgan was a shining star, raising the game of every performer he played with. Morgan did a lot of great work as a member of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, who he played with between 1958 and 1961. There’s a bunch of great Jazz Messengers stuff on YouTube, but for my money it’s impossible to top this 1958 show from Brussels.

The show features a short-lived Messengers lineup with Morgan on trumpet, Benny Golson on sax, Jymie Merritt on bass, Bobby Timmons on piano, and Blakey on drums. The band absolutely kills it on every song, from a blistering opening take of “Just By Myself” through the closing Blakey showpiece “A Night in Tunisia.” The high point is the band’s jaw-dropping take on Timmons’ then-new composition “Moanin.” The Messengers had just recorded the tune a month before, and they enthusiastically swing their way through a fifteen-minute version of the tune that’s better than the studio take, for my money.

I don’t even know why I’m still writing. Just watch this.