Art Blakey

📍Hill District, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

“I was born in Pittsburgh in October 1919. My mother died when I was a baby, and my father, who was very light-skinned, left me, and I was raised with other children by a family friend in the Hill District, the heart of Black Pittsburgh, a crowded, lively neighbourhood of steep streets, row houses and churches, and clubs like the Crawford Grill, where all the jazz greats played. The Hill was full of music, and I soaked it up. I didn't do well at school; most of my teachers were white, and many of them were bigots, and I was expelled. By the time I was a young teenager, I was working in the steel mills and playing piano in clubs at night to pay the bills, and I learned to lead a band. The way they tell it, one night a club owner heard a young pianist from the Hill named Erroll Garner, and told me to get off the piano and onto the drums, and that was that. I taught myself to drum, hard and loud, inspired by Chick Webb, and I never looked back. In the 1940s I played with Fletcher Henderson and Billy Eckstine's band, alongside Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, and in 1954 I formed the Jazz Messengers, my school of hard bop, which trained generations of young musicians, from Lee Morgan and Wayne Shorter to Wynton Marsalis. A Pennsylvania historical marker stands where my childhood home was, and Pittsburgh's musicians keep the Hill District's jazz greats in mind.”

Sources: theclio.com wesa.fm wyep.org Wikipedia: Art Blakey