Sometimes avant-garde ideas slip into the mainstream in ways you don’t notice right away. Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers were one of the most energetic and crowd-pleasing bands of the early to mid-1960s, particularly when Wayne Shorter was serving as tenor saxophonist and primary composer between 1959 and 1964. But his tunes were often more than simple hard bop heads, and because they already had listener good will on their side, they could take the music surprisingly far out. This album, coming toward the end of Shorter’s tenure with the group, features a ferocious lineup — Freddie Hubbard on trumpet, Curtis Fuller on trombone, Cedar Walton on piano, Reggie Workman on bass — and the 11-minute opening title track is one of the most intense pieces of music they ever released. Blakey’s drums are absolutely apocalyptic; he hits so hard and fast that Rudy Van Gelder’s microphones can barely contain the sound. The main horn melody is a militaristic fanfare that Blakey lays thunderous drum rolls beneath, and Shorter’s opening solo features some of the most impassioned, almost Coltrane-ish playing of his career, rising to a crescendo almost worthy of then up-and-coming free jazz players like Archie Shepp and Pharoah Sanders. The next piece, the aptly named “Hammer Head,” is slower but almost as fierce, while the album’s second side features two somewhat gentler pieces, trumpeter Hubbard’s “The Core” and a version of the floating Latin number “Pensativa.” But even these pieces have real whomp. This album comes at you like a flame thrower.