Art Blakey was born October 11, 1919, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He made his name in the 1940s in the big bands of Fletcher Henderson and Billy Eckstine, and worked alongside the founding generation of bebop, including Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, and Dizzy Gillespie. His thunderous press rolls, cross beats, and drum rolls that built from quiet tremors into frenzied explosions became one of the most recognizable sounds in jazz drumming.

Blakey co-founded the Jazz Messengers and led the group from 1956 until his death in 1990, a run during which an estimated 167 young musicians passed through its ranks, many going on to become major stars in their own right, among them Wayne Shorter, whose own career is covered in full in his JazzProfiles.com profile. Blakey's Blue Note recordings, among the best performed and most adventurously crafted of the hard-bop era, helped define the genre itself: a harder-edged, blues- and gospel-inflected descendant of bebop that Blakey's own drumming was central to establishing.

Blakey was inducted into the Down Beat Jazz Hall of Fame in 1981, and posthumously into the Modern Drummer Hall of Fame in 1991 and the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1998 and 2001, and received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2005. He died October 16, 1990, in New York City, at age 71.

Blakey's playing, thunderous, propulsive, and built around dramatic dynamic shifts, didn't just power the Jazz Messengers, it functioned as a de facto finishing school for young jazz musicians for over three decades, a bandleader whose greatest legacy may be the sheer number of major careers that passed through his group.