There’s no Blakey album more renowned or beloved than his Blue Note Moanin’ and, apart from anything else, it’s the only studio album of this Messengers line-up that was largely assembled by Benny Golson. Jazz Images’ attempt to turn it into a 2-CD set only illustrates its superiority. The comparatively rare bonus material consists of the previously issued excerpts from two Paris concerts (the LP 1958-Paris Olympia) plus the Messengers’ music for a noir movie about the white slave trade (Des Femmes Disparaissent). The Olympia tracks suffer somewhat from a balance favouring Blakey, with levels on the restrained opening of a live ‘Moanin’’ emphasising Rudy Van Gelder’s engineering expertise. The soundtrack is a different problem, despite including some previously known Golson tunes under new titles (such as ‘Ne Chuchote Pas’), since it contains no fewer than 18 cues totalling 31 minutes with some lasting well under a minute. Given the decision to add two numbers from the live date at Club St-Germain (the only other evidence of this band, recently reissued and reviewed in Jazzwise 235), why choose another ‘Along Came Betty’ and a third ‘Moanin’’ rather than other tracks from that set? The inclusion of 10 largely unfamiliar photos mostly by Frank Wolff is a definite plus, though one wonders how Wolff would feel about the Blue Note album now being in the public domain in Europe – it’ll be another 25 years before that’s true in the USA.