Album of the Year

Wynton Marsalis joined Art Blakey's band as a teenager without having heard a single Blakey record — just playing scales over the chords, not yet knowing that a solo is something you construct, as he admitted at twenty-two. That was the starting point of the man later cast as jazz's traditionalist-in-chief.

The saxophonist on Art Blakey's 1981 album Album of the Year was an unnamed twenty-year-old: Branford Marsalis. The Marsalis family's later fame didn't exist yet — his career started inside Blakey's band, not the other way around.

Wynton Marsalis's 1985 album Black Codes (From the Underground) is known for its tight ensemble unison, but Branford Marsalis later recalled that only Wynton actually rehearsed — the band itself barely ran through the material together.

Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers is remembered as a finishing school for young players, but Branford Marsalis recalls Blakey as the man who first showed him how weak his ballad playing was. Before he became one of the genre's leading saxophonists, he was simply a rookie who couldn't yet handle a ballad.

In 1981, bassist Charles Fambrough stood next to a still-unknown teenage trumpeter, Wynton Marsalis, in Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers. After Album of the Year and Keystone 3, Fambrough was called back for Marsalis's own debut as a leader, Wynton Marsalis (1982).