You can't seperate modern jazz from rock or from rhythm and blues - you can't seperate it. Because that's where it all started, and that's where it all come from - that's where I learned to keep rhythm - in church.

Keeps the mind active. From 1959 to 1961 the group featured Wayne Shorter on tenor saxophone Jymie Merritt Lee Morgan and Bobby Timmons. Later career
Blakey went on to record dozens of albums with a constantly changing group of Jazz Messengers – he had a policy of encouraging young musicians: as he remarked on-mike during the live session which resulted in the A Night at Birdland albums in 1954: "I'm gonna stay with the youngsters.

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. The band's legacy is thus not only known for the 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. 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.