Horace Silver and the Jazz Messengers: Hankerin'

Even though just a year (nearly to the day) had elapsed between Art Blakey's classic recordings with Clifford Brown live at Birdland and this Horace Silver-led studio session, quite a bit had changed in Blakey's musical world. His co-op band was now officially "The Jazz Messengers," and their feverish bop influence began to succumb to a more subdued, gospel/blues-influenced hard bop. Dorham and Mobley were the perfect match for this early, transitional edition of the Messengers, able to blow at a blistering pace and also execute Silver's more graceful material. On this track, you can almost sense the group's early influences melting away as the classic hard-bop Messenger sound forms before our very ears. Of special note is Mobley's fine, complex solo and the Blakey signature of all signatures: the constant thumping out of beats two and four with his hi-hat foot that begins in the tune's opening measure and lasts until the final chord is struck!