Every piece of recorded music exists, in some sense, merely as an object for connoisseurs. Blue Note records of the 50s and 60s are more exposed than most jazz records to this defeat because of the fetishism attached to every aspect of their much-imitated cover art and (almost secondarily) to the names, styles, discographies, and destinies of the musicians. To love the music through the object thus becomes an increasingly complicated task. A lover of this music, so as not to become its unconscious betrayer, must seek to preserve its original creative values and to remain in the primary relationship to which the music calls its audience.

Art Blakey's music gives pleasure through simple contrasts, devices that would sound dangerously obvious in lesser hands than those of the members of the explosive drummer's long-time working unit, the Jazz Messengers. Take the shift in dynamics during the head of "The Back Sliders," on Roots and Herbs, a 1961 Messengers session Blue Note has just reissued. After playing the first of two rhythmically parallel phrases at the established volume, the band comes down to a confidential hush for the second of the two, then back up to kick out the conclusion with a predictable but exciting pow. It's one of those great Jazz Messengers effects, and the kind of thing that wouldn't occur to most jazz musicians today; it would be too quaint. For another example of the startling force of simple contrast, check the arrangement of the head of "United." The piano and bass drop in and out, their jauntiness setting off the stark loveliness of the island-tinged theme as stated by tenor saxophone (Wayne Shorter) and trumpet (Lee Morgan) with percussion.

"The Back Sliders" has tremendous solos by both Shorter and Morgan. At the end of Shorter's fifth chorus, in the most unexpected place imaginable, he alludes openly to the very famous blues lick that was at the back of his mind when he began his solo; then, after a rest, he quotes it again at the beginning of the sixth chorus, but with a slight rhythmic displacement (slamming the strong first note on the offbeat) that's also marvelously effective. Morgan seems at first dismayed at having to follow Shorter's brilliant statement, but after some impatient vocal prodding from the leader ("blow your horn, blow your horn"), Morgan assembles one hell of a solo, sacrificing some of his trademark fireworks in favor of elegance and a slowly gathering logic.

Presumably the whole incident—Morgan's seeming initial hesitation, followed by Blakey's exhortation—had been routined. One of the great things about the Jazz Messengers was their histrionic sense. Shorter begins his solo on "Afrique" (on The Witch Doctor, the other 1961 Blue Note session to resurface lately) like an exquisitely accomplished actor playing a blind drunk. This character stumbles through what could be the ruins of "Mary Had a Little Lamb," then appears to collect himself and finds, at his ready disposal, the characteristic Shorter magnificence, made the more pleasing by the game of loss and renewal within which it emerges.

In their solo albums of the 60s, both Shorter and Morgan depart from Blakey's quintet format and straightforward, having-a-ball approach to explore a wider range of moods and textures. Morgan's newly reissued album The Sixth Sense (Blue Note), from 1967, is an excellent, and overlooked, example of the trumpeter's post-Blakey work. It's a sextet session, which means, unfortunately, less solo space for everybody—particularly regrettable in view of the presence of alto saxophonist Jackie McLean, whose acid colors and tonal adventurousness complemented the sophisticated aggression and irony in Morgan's sound better than anyone (as on Morgan's Leeway and McLean's Consequence). Appropriately, McLean is the first soloist on the explosive "Short Count," which is characterized by ominous bass rumblings (Victor Sproles) and spectacular drumming by Billy Higgins. McLean's freest solo on this session, on the one-chord modal "Afreaka," is impressive but sounds slightly overheated; he doesn't have enough time to build organically to his climactic frenzy.

Morgan is fine, especially on the ingenious "Anti Climax" and in his muted solo on Calvin Massey's "The Cry of My People," a song that recaptures the brooding atmosphere of Coltrane's "Spiritual" and "Alabama." But the star of this session is pianist Cedar Walton, a terribly underrated musician who belongs right up there with such acknowledged greats of hard-bop piano as Wynton Kelly, Sonny Clark, and Hampton Hawes. Together with Sproles, Walton gives varied, imaginative underpinning to the album's often sparse, open harmonies, creating the sharply defined textures so essential to the "Blue Note sound." Walton's solo on "The Sixth Sense," which includes a beautiful bit of interplay with Higgins, shows that Walton had already perfected the combination of lyricism and bite that most of today's neo-hard-bop pianists appear to be still striving for.

The obscure tenor saxophonist Frank Mitchell, with his well-balanced mid-sixties Hank Mobley-like, Coltrane-plus-funkiness sound, also claims his share of solo space on the album. (Mitchell died, perhaps from the kind of causes that jazz musicians of a certain generation are reluctant to talk about; I suspect so because I recently asked Cedar Walton and Jackie McLean what happened to him, and they were reluctant to talk about it.) Mitchell also appears on the CD's three previously unreleased tracks, which reissue producer Michael Cuscuna calls the only "releasable" results of an otherwise "abysmal" Morgan date from 1968. The three 1968 performances have a thicker rhythmic quality than the ones from the earlier session, due especially to the complexity of bassist Mickey Bass, and also to pianist Harold Mabern's stabbing comping style and tendency to land behind the beat.

The existence of an "abysmal" Lee Morgan session suggests another thought. It's difficult to talk about records like The Sixth Sense, The Witch Doctor, and Roots & Herbs without, on the one hand, seeming to overvalue them from enthusiasm for the idiom and for the players' styles, or, on the other, making them insignificant by reducing them to idiomatic and stylistic examples. One is in danger of becoming the pathetic and unwilling hackworker of one of the most unproductive of all critical tasks: contriving to set up an artificial balance between history and appreciation. It's better to love the aesthetic object, to see nothing but it at the moment when one talks about it, and in this way to refuse connoisseurship and spurn the aloof embrace of measure. At the same time, the innocence of a pre-intellectual relationship to the object would be an empty pose. One is left asserting, rather helplessly but also with a certain confidence, the primacy of the pleasure the object gives, a pleasure that the act of talking about the object would perpetuate.