Drummer Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers are in full flight for this 1966 performance of "The Egyptian" featuring Lee Morgan on trumpet and John Gilmore tenor saxophone. This was filmed by the BBC for seminal jazz television program "Jazz 625".
Arthur "Art" Blakey (October 11, 1919 – October 16, 1990), known later as Abdullah Ibn Buhaina, was an American Grammy Award-winning jazz drummer and bandleader.
Along with Kenny Clarke and Max Roach, he was one of the inventors of the modern bebop style of drumming. He is known as a powerful musician and a vital groover; his brand of bluesy, funky hard bop was and continues to be profoundly influential on mainstream jazz. For more than 30 years his band, Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers included many young musicians who went on to become prominent names in jazz. The band's legacy is thus not only known for the often exceptionally fine music it produced, but as a proving ground for several generations of jazz musicians; Blakey's groups are matched only by those of Miles Davis in this regard.
Blakey was inducted into the Jazz Hall of Fame in 1982, the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2001, and was awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2005.
