Before I start this post, I wanted to say that I realized last night that I’d already put up a performance of “Donna Lee” this week. Sorry about that. Maybe I should change the name of the blog to “Stop and Hear Donna Lee”.

Art Blakey was born in 1919 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Raised by a very religious foster family, he started out playing the piano in church. Art Blakey started playing drums when the owner of a nightclub where he was gigging ordered him off the piano and onto the drums. Legend has it that this order was made at gunpoint, but I don’t know how true that is.

Here is a 1959 performance by Blakey and The Jazz Messengers in Paris in 1959.