On December 17, 1947 Art Blakey led a group known as “Art Blakey’s Messengers” in his first recording session as a leader, for Blue Note Records. The records were issued as 78’s at the time and two of the songs were released on the New Sounds 10” LP compilation (BLP 5010). This octet included Kenny Dorham, Howard Bowe, Sahib Shihab, Musa Kaleem, Ernest Thompson, Walter Bishop, Jr., and LaVerne Baker. Around the same time – in 1947 or 1949 – Blakey led a big band called “Seventeen Messengers”. The orchestra proved to be financially unstable and broke up soon after. The use of the “Messengers” tag finally stuck with the group co-led at first by both Blakey and pianist Horace Silver, though the name was not used on the earliest of their recordings. The first stable formation of Art Blakey’s celebrated “Jazz Messengers” was born in 1954, and consisted of Kenny Dorham, Hank Mobley, Horace Silver and Doug Watkins. That exact group recorded the Blue Note LP The Jazz Messengers at the Cafe Bohemia in November of 1955. That album would be followed by the Columbia LP presented here, on which Donald Byrd was already replacing Dorham on trumpet (the rest of the group is the same). The band, as shown here, would only remain together for a year. The album is highlighted by the earliest recordings of two of Silver’s songs, “Nica’s Dream” and “Ecaroh,” and plenty of typically hard swinging from the band