Art Blakey

His biological father was Bertram Thomas Blakey, originally of Ozark, Alabama, whose family migrated northward to Pittsburgh sometime between 1900 and 1910.

Blakey's uncle, Rubi Blakey, was a popular Pittsburgh singer, choral leader, and teacher who attended Fisk University.

Blakey was raised with his siblings by a family friend who became a surrogate mother.

According to Leslie Gourse's biography, the surrogate mother / family figure was Annie Parran and her husband Henry Parran Sr. The stories related by family and friends, and by Blakey himself, are contradictory as to how long he spent with the Parran family, but it is clear he spent some time with them growing up.

Blakey received some piano lessons at school but was also self-taught.

By seventh grade, according to several sources, Blakey was playing music full-time and had begun to take on adult responsibilities, playing the piano to earn money and learning to be a band leader.

Arthur Blakey (October 11, 1919 – October 16, 1990) was an American jazz drummer and bandleader.

Blakey was born on October 11, 1919, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, probably to a single mother who died shortly after his birth; her name is often cited as Marie Roddicker, or Roddericker, although Blakey's own 1937 marriage license shows her maiden name to have been Jackson.

He switched from piano to drums at an uncertain date in the early 1930s.

An oft-quoted account of the event states that Blakey was forced at gunpoint to move from piano to drums by a club owner, to allow Erroll Garner to take over on piano.

The veracity of this story is called into question in the Gourse biography, as Blakey himself gives other accounts in addition to this one.

The style Blakey assumed was "the aggressive swing style of Chick Webb, Sid Catlett and Ray Bauduc".

From 1939 to 1944, Blakey played with fellow Pittsburgh native Mary Lou Williams and toured with the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra.

(Some accounts have him joining Henderson as early as 1939.) While playing in Henderson's band, Blakey was subjected to an unprovoked attack by a white Georgia police officer which necessitated a steel plate being inserted into his head.

These injuries caused him to be declared unfit for service in World War II.

He led his own band at the Tic Toc Club in Boston for a short time.

He was also known as Abdullah Ibn Buhaina after he converted to Islam for a short time in the late 1940s.

Blakey made a name for himself in the 1940s in the big bands of Fletcher Henderson and Billy Eckstine.

He then worked with bebop musicians Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, and Dizzy Gillespie.

While sources differ on the timing, most agree that he traveled to New York with Williams in 1942 before joining Henderson a year later.

From 1944 to 1947, Blakey worked with Billy Eckstine's big band.

Through this band, Blakey became associated with the bebop movement, along with his fellow band members Miles Davis, Dexter Gordon, Fats Navarro, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker and Sarah Vaughan among others.

After the Eckstine band broke up, Blakey states that he traveled to Africa for a time: "In 1947, after the Eckstine band broke up, we—took a trip to Africa. I was supposed to stay there three months and I stayed two years because I wanted to live among the people and find out just how they lived and—about the drums especially."

Blakey is known to have recorded from 1947 to 1949.

On December 17, 1947, Blakey led a group known as "Art Blakey's Messengers" in his first recording session as a leader, for Blue Note Records.

The records were released as 78 rpm records at the time, and two of the songs were released on the "New Sounds" 10" LP compilation (BLP 5010). The octet included Kenny Dorham, Sahib Shihab, Musa Kaleem, and Walter Bishop, Jr.

Around the same time (1947 or 1949 ) he led a big band called Seventeen Messengers.

The band proved to be financially unstable and broke up soon after.

In the mid-1950s, Horace Silver and Blakey formed the Jazz Messengers, a group which he led for the next 35 years.

The group was formed as a collective of contemporaries, but over the years the band became known as an incubator for young talent, including Freddie Hubbard, Wayne Shorter, Lee Morgan, Benny Golson, Kenny Dorham, Hank Mobley, Donald Byrd, Jackie McLean, Johnny Griffin, Curtis Fuller, Chuck Mangione, Chick Corea, Keith Jarrett, Cedar Walton, Woody Shaw, Terence Blanchard, and Wynton Marsalis.

The Biographical Encyclopedia of Jazz calls the Jazz Messengers "the archetypal hard bop group of the late 50s."

He studied and converted to Islam during this period, taking the name Abdullah Ibn Buhaina and the nickname "Bu", although he stopped being a practicing Muslim in the 1950s and continued to perform under the name "Art Blakey" throughout his career.

As the 1950s began, Blakey was backing musicians such as Davis, Parker, Gillespie, Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk; he is often considered to have been Monk's most empathetic drummer, and he played on both Monk's first recording session as a leader (for Blue Note Records in 1947) and his final one (in London in 1971), as well as many in between.

Blakey toured with Buddy DeFranco from 1951 to 1953 in a band that also included Kenny Drew.

He stated in a 1979 interview, discussing the context of the decision at the time:

"I didn't go to Africa to study drums – somebody wrote that – I went to Africa because there wasn't anything else for me to do. I couldn't get any gigs, and I had to work my way over on a boat. I went over there to study religion and philosophy. I didn't bother with the drums, I wasn't after that. I went over there to see what I could do about religion. When I was growing up I had no choice, I was just thrown into a church and told this is what I was going to be. I didn't want to be their Christian. I didn't like it. You could study politics in this country, but I didn't have access to the religions of the world. That's why I went to Africa. When I got back people got the idea I went there to learn about music."

- Art Blakey quoted by Herb Nolan

Blakey was inducted into the Down Beat Jazz Hall of Fame (in 1981).

Posthumously, he was inducted into the Modern Drummer Hall of Fame in 1991 and the Grammy Hall of Fame (in 1998 and 2001).

He was awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2005.