This is my favorite Blakey album. The vinyl is brighter and livelier than CD, but the digital is not bad at all. It was not a successful issue so it was out of print in US for a long time, so finding LP is not as easy as other Blakey sides. I have the Applause reissue from 1981, the sound is excellent. I thoroughly enjoyed it on Tidal this morning too, it's warmer and probably has more bass for the audiophiles as is typical with the modern remasters.
This is a much tougher and darker sounding Jazz Messengers than their other sides from the same period. The quality of playing and their artistic inspiration are on same level as Moanin, but Shorter replacing Golson changes everything musically. The playing is superior to Moanin, imo, but the music content of Witch Doctor is just too dark and "pure hard-bop" for Moanin's more pop-oriented audience. On most tracks the band explores whole-tone harmonic inventions, the "devil's interval," aka flatted fifth tri-tone. It's Blakey's take on modal improvisation that was the rage at the time.
This side has Lee Morgan at his trumpeting and stylistic peak - one of his last records still with his real teeth. Wayne is unusually relaxed here and making all his deliberately "wrong" notes sound so right. Blakey is fully possessed by the spirit of the music and fully unleashed playing loud and fast hard bop tunes with deliciously excessive reverb like Moanin. Timmons doesn't have a showcase as he did with Moanin, but he supports the harmonically experimental theme well and his solos are very bluesy, groovy and enjoyable, as usual.
It's a very bluesy session overall with the tri-tone dissonance adding richly to the dark blues flavor, but probably dooming it commercially. The most difficult song on the album to play from musician's perspective is "Those who sit and wait" which is a typical straight ahead Shorter composition with advanced chord progressions and song structure. It's not bluesy or tritone, but imo it's a contender for top 5 best studio recorded Jazz Messengers performances ever.
