Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers – The Witch Doctor
2021 Blue Note Tone Poet | Original release 1967
This is a fantastic 1961 session (not issued until ’67) with Lee Morgan, Wayne Shorter, and Bobby Timmons, but man the drum solos are recorded horribly. Seems really odd, seeing as it was the drummer’s group… Nice Tone Poet pressing though, in general. One of my pandemic pleasures has been buying up lots of these Blue Note reissues of titles that have generally been beyond my reach; under Don Was’s stewardship of the catalog, they have been doing a first-rate job at making them available to people who are not willing or able to pay the ‘trophy hunter’ prices of the collectors market. There are occasional blips and hiccups in quality control — I returned a Paul Chambers release last summer which had very noticeable distortion which, according to a little research, seemed to afflict a whole bunch of copies in that pressing run. But by and large I have no complaints. Or at least few.
A1 The Witch Doctor 5:25
Written-By – L. Morgan
A2 Afrique 6:55
Written-By – L. Morgan
A3 Those Who Sit And Wait 5:47
Written-By – W. Shorter
B1 A Little Busy 6:15
Written-By – B. Timmons
B2 Joelle 5:15
Written-By – W. Shorter
B3 Lost And Found 5:05
Written-By – C. Jordan
Bass – Jymie Merritt
Drums – Art Blakey
Piano – Bobby Timmons
Tenor Saxophone – Wayne Shorter
Trumpet – Lee Morgan
Engineer [Recording Engineer] – Rudy Van Gelder
Lacquer Cut By – KPG*
Liner Notes – Nat Hentoff
Mastered By [LP Mastering] – Kevin Gray
Photography By – Francis Wolff
Photography By [Cover] – Martin Felix
Art Direction – Frank Gauna
Producer [Original Session] – Alfred Lion
Supervised By [LP Reissue Supervision] – Joe Harley
Notes
Recorded March 14, 1961.
LINEAGE: 2021 BN Tone Poet vinyl; Pro-Ject RM-5SE with Audio Tecnica Signet TK7E cartridge; Speedbox power supply; Creek Audio OBH-15; Audioquest Black Mamba and Pangea Premier interconnect cables; M-Audio Audiophile 192 Soundcard ; Adobe Audition at 32-bit float 192khz; clicks and pops removed manually with Adobe Audition 3.0; dithered and resampled using iZotope RX Advanced. Converted to FLAC in either Trader’s Little Helper or dBPoweramp. Tags done with Foobar 2000 and Tag and Rename.
I have this one as well. Blakey with Lee Morgan and Bobby Timmons (love Timmons) is an automatic thumbs up.