He hired young players knowing full well they'd leave him. That was the arrangement, more or less. Two years, three if you were slow, and then out the door with your own book of tunes under your arm — Lee Morgan, Benny Golson, Bobby Timmons, Wayne Shorter, Freddie Hubbard, and years later a teenager named Wynton Marsalis. The Jazz Messengers ran like a school where the principal played drums and pushed you out front before you thought you were ready.

And the press roll. Listen for the way it comes up under a horn player going into a solo — starts as a rumble somewhere down in the floor and swells until the soloist has no choice but to rise with it, like a hand under your elbow lifting you off a chair. Nobody could stay seated inside it. You hear it and you hear a man saying go on, go on, it's yours now.

Timmons wrote "Moanin'" and Blakey put it right out front where everybody could hear who'd written it. That session went down at Rudy Van Gelder's place in Hackensack, autumn of '58, and you can hear the room on it.

Pittsburgh, 1919. He drummed for forty-odd years and spent most of them making other people sound like the leader.