In the great glimmering city of Los Angeles, on a warm August night in nineteen-sixty-two at the Renaissance Club on Sunset Boulevard, at around nine p.m., a very small hole in the universe opened up inside a jazz drummer’s kick drum.
The jazz drummer’s name was Art Blakey, and he called his group Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers. The song they were playing when the hole inside the kick drum opened up was called “Three Blind Mice.”
It was to be double-bassist Jymie Merritt’s final recording with the group, because he was persistently sick, and it’s hard to recover when staying up late all the time playing jazz. Jymie Merritt was from Philadelphia. He was slated to be replaced by another double-bassist from Philadelphia named Reggie Workman. Art Blakey was also from Philadelphia.
But as it turned out, “Three Blind Mice” was the last recording any of the Jazz Messengers would ever make, and it soon wouldn’t matter if they were from Philadelphia, or from Indianapolis, where trumpet player Freddie Hubbard was from, or Dallas, which was the childhood home of pianist Cedar Walton, or from Newark, which was saxophone great Wayne Shorter’s hometown, or even Antananarivo, which is a real city in Madagascar.