Art Blakey started out as a pianist. In the early 1930s, while still a teenager, he was playing piano for money in the nightclubs of his home town, Pittsburgh. By his own account, he only moved to the drums because a club owner pointed a pistol at him and gave his piano stool to a younger player called Erroll Garner.
Blakey told that story to audiences for decades, and it appears in obituaries, record-label biographies and on his official website. His biographer was less sure it happened that way. Here is what the different accounts say, and what is known about how one of the most important drummers in jazz ended up behind the kit.
A teenage pianist in Pittsburgh
Blakey was born in Pittsburgh on October 11, 1919. His mother died shortly after his birth and he was raised by a family friend, Annie Parran, in a Seventh-day Adventist household. He had some piano lessons at school and taught himself the rest.
By the seventh grade he was playing music to earn a living and learning how to run a band. Leslie Gourse’s 2002 biography, Art Blakey: Jazz Messenger, has him expelled from school at 14 and working as a self-taught pianist in a Pittsburgh bar. He later told the drummer Art Taylor that he took up music to get out of the coal mine and the steel mill.
The night Erroll Garner sat in
The version Blakey told most often is set at the Democratic Club, the Pittsburgh nightclub where he had a piano job. One night another local youngster sat in on piano. He was Erroll Garner, born in Pittsburgh in June 1921 and so almost two years younger than Blakey. Garner had been playing since the age of three and never learned to read music.
The club’s owner heard Garner, decided he was the better pianist, and told Blakey to move over to the drums. In Blakey’s telling the instruction came with a gun, and a biography published by Mosaic Records specifies a .38-calibre revolver.
“The pistol gave me no choice,” Blakey said, in a line reported by one jazz writer.
Nobody has fixed the date. The Smithsonian puts it in 1934, when Blakey was 14 or 15 and Garner 12 or 13. Other accounts say only “the early 1930s” or “the mid-1930s”.
Why his biographer had doubts
Gourse interviewed Blakey’s former wives, one of his children, fellow musicians and friends for her book. She found that he often told the same story in quite different ways, and she questioned the gunpoint account because Blakey himself gave other versions of how he changed instrument.
In one of them his band had been playing a Pittsburgh club called the Ritz for two years when he replaced himself on piano with Garner and took over the drum chair. In another he simply heard Garner play at a local club and concluded that his own future was on the drums. Gourse also notes that Blakey was already interested in the drums before Garner turned up.
The accounts do agree on the outline: Blakey began on piano, Garner’s arrival ended that, and the switch happened in a Pittsburgh club in the 1930s. On stage, Blakey liked to finish the story by telling the audience: “That’s the reason I do what I’m doing today.”
From the Democratic Club to the Jazz Messengers
As a drummer, Blakey modelled himself on the hard-swinging players of the day: Chick Webb, Sid Catlett and Ray Bauduc. According to his official biography he worked for Webb as a valet, and Catlett once disciplined him for drinking on the bandstand.
In 1942 he went to New York with the pianist Mary Lou Williams, who had also grown up in Pittsburgh, for an engagement at Kelly’s Stable. He joined Fletcher Henderson’s orchestra the following year, and from 1944 to 1947 he was the drummer in Billy Eckstine’s big band alongside Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Dexter Gordon, Sarah Vaughan and a young Miles Davis.
Max Roach met him on 52nd Street in 1944 and remembered the nickname other drummers gave him: “Thunder”.
On December 17, 1947, Blakey made his first recordings as a leader, for Blue Note, with an octet billed as Art Blakey’s Messengers. In the mid-1950s he and the pianist Horace Silver formed the Jazz Messengers, and Blakey led the band until his death on October 16, 1990, five days after his 71st birthday.
You can hear where it all led in our guide to 10 of Art Blakey’s best albums, or in the story of Moanin’.
And Erroll Garner?
Garner moved to New York in 1944. Ten years later he wrote “Misty”, and in 1955 he recorded Concert by the Sea, one of the best-selling jazz albums of its time…
