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One of the most acclaimed and respected musicians in jazz, Art Blakey was an American drummer and bandleader, famed for his expert technical ability and enduring influence on the genre. His regular backing group The Jazz Messengers, co-founded with Horace Silver and dubbed "the archetypal hard-bop group of the late 50s" by The Biographical Encyclopedia of Jazz, was renowned for nurturing the talents of some of bop's finest musicians; Freddie Hubbard, Hank Mobley, Donald Byrd and Wayne Short to name just a few. Initially influenced by early jazz and swing drummers Chick Webb, Sid Catlett and Ray Bauduc, Blakey played in numerous groups across the next decade, having been deemed unfit to serve in WWII following injuries sustained in a fight with local police officers. Throughout the 1940s he would play with Mary Lou Williams, the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra, and The Billy Eckstine Big Band which featured a plethora of other be-bop pioneers including Miles Davis, Dexter Gordon, Fats Navarro and Dizzy Gillespie. Following the breakup of Eckstine's band, Blakey spent the next two years travelling around Africa, a period that would have a profound effect on his drumming style for many years thereafter. While there he also converted to Islam and adopted the name Abdullah Ibn Buhaina for some time. Blakey would go on to contribute to a staggering number of albums as a sideman in the early 1950s, performing on more than 20 in the first two years of the decade alone, and playing with the likes of Charlie Parker, Bud Powell and Buddy DeFranco, as well as appearing on Thelonious Monk's first recordings as bandleader. By far his most defining achievements of this era however, were his LPs made for the Blue Note label. These included the live albums A Night at Birdland (1954) and At The Café Bohemia (1956), and the classic Orgy In Rhythm (1957); all three are now considered amongst the finest albums in the bop idiom.

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