AS OF JANUARY 13, 2023 FIVE HUNDRED MUSICAL ARTISTS HAVE BEEN FEATURED IN THE SOUND PROJECTIONS MAGAZINE THAT BEGAN ITS ONLINE PUBLICATION ON NOVEMBER 1, 2014.
THE 500th AND FINAL MUSICAL ARTIST ENTRY IN THIS NOW COMPLETED EIGHT YEAR SERIES WAS POSTED ON THIS SITE ON SATURDAY, JANUARY 7, 2023.ACCESS TO EACH ARTIST CAN BE FOUND IN THE 'BLOG ARCHIVE' (ARTISTS LISTED IN WEEKLY CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER) AND IN THE ‘LABELS’ SECTION (ARTIST NAMES, TOPICS, ETC.) ON THE RIGHT SIDE OF THE HOME PAGE. CLICK ON THESE RESPECTIVE LINKS TO ACCESS THEIR CONTENT:
https://soundprojections.blogspot.com/
https://soundprojections.blogspot.com/2016/02/horace-silver-1928-2014-legendary.html
PHOTO: HORACE SILVER (1928-2014)
http://www.allmusic.com/artist/horace-silver-mn0000267354/biography
Horace Silver
(1928-2014)
Artist Biography by Chris Kelsey
Silver's earliest musical influence was the Cape Verdean folk music he heard from his Portuguese-born father. Later, after he had begun playing piano and saxophone as a high schooler, Silver came under the spell of blues singers and boogie-woogie pianists, as well as boppers like Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell. In 1950, Stan Getz played a concert in Hartford, Connecticut, with a pickup rhythm section that included Silver, drummer Walter Bolden, and bassist Joe Calloway. So impressed was Getz, he hired the whole trio. Silver had been saving his money to move to New York anyway; his hiring by Getz sealed the deal.
Silver recorded exclusively for Blue Note until that label's eclipse in the late '70s, whereupon he started his own label, Silveto. Silver's '80s work was poorly distributed. During that time he began writing lyrics to his compositions, and his work began to display a concern with music's metaphysical powers, as exemplified by album titles like Music to Ease Your Disease and Spiritualizing the Senses. In the '90s, Silver abandoned his label venture and began recording for Columbia. With his re-emergence on a major label, Silver once again received a measure of the attention his contributions deserve. Certainly, no one ever contributed a larger and more vital body of original compositions to the jazz canon. Silver died in New York on June 18, 2014 at the age of 85.
Tuesday, June 24, 2014
Horace Silver, 1928-2014: Legendary Pianist, Composer, and Bandleader
(b. September 2, 1928--d. June 18, 2014)
Since January 9, 2014 we have lost the following GIANTS among us: Amiri Baraka, Mabel Williams, Chokwe Lumumba, Maya Angelou, Fred Ho, Vincent Harding, Yuri Kochiyama, Ruby Dee, and now Horace Silver. While these justly revered figures have peacefully made their respective transitions and we are now fortunate enough to fully embrace their inspiring ancestral force in our lives, it is indeed sobering and truly humbling to remember and acknowledge just how profound and valuable the quality and depth of their lives and the creative legacies they have left have been and will continue to be for all of us. For they taught us what it really means to change and transform the world through the sheer force of one's personal contribution and courageous example in both Art and Life and for that we are and must remain eternally grateful. Thank you Horace for your incredible music and the extraordinary lifeforce that it embodies and represents. Rest in Peace and Power brother...
Kofi
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/19/arts/music/horace-silver-85-master-of-earthy-jazz-is-dead.html?_r=0 MUSIC
Horace Silver, 85, Master of Earthy Jazz, Is Dead
By PETER KEEPNEWS
JUNE 18, 2014
New York Times
Credit Alan Nahigian
Horace Silver, a pianist, composer and bandleader who was one of the most popular and influential jazz musicians of the 1950s and ’60s, died on Wednesday at his home in New Rochelle, N.Y. He was 85.
His death was announced by Blue Note Records, the company for which he recorded from 1952 to 1979.
After a high-profile apprenticeship with some of the biggest names in jazz, Mr. Silver began leading his own group in the mid-1950s and quickly became a big name himself, celebrated for his clever compositions and his infectious, bluesy playing. At a time when the refined, quiet and, to some, bloodless style known as cool jazz was all the rage, he was hailed as a leader of the back-to-basics movement that came to be called hard bop.
Hard bop and cool jazz shared a pedigree: They were both variations on bebop, the challenging, harmonically intricate music that changed the face of jazz in the 1940s. But hard bop was simpler and more rhythmically driven, with more emphasis on jazz’s blues and gospel roots. The jazz press tended to portray the adherents of cool jazz (most of them West Coast-based and white) and hard bop (most of them East Coast-based and black) as warring factions. But Mr. Silver made an unlikely warrior.
His albums included “Song for My Father,” which featured his father on the cover.
“I personally do not believe in politics, hatred or anger in my musical composition,” he wrote in the liner notes to his album “Serenade to a Soul Sister” in 1968. “Musical composition should bring happiness and joy to people and make them forget their troubles.”
And Mr. Silver’s music was never as one-dimensional as it was sometimes portrayed as being. In an interview early in his career he said he was aiming for “that old-time gutbucket barroom feeling with just a taste of the backbeat.” That approach was reflected in the titles he gave to songs, like “Sister Sadie,” “Filthy McNasty” and “The Preacher,” all of which became jazz standards. But his output also included gently melodic numbers like “Peace” and “Melancholy Mood” and Latin-inflected tunes like “Señor Blues.” “Song for My Father,” probably his best-known composition, blended elements of bossa nova and the Afro-Portuguese music of the Cape Verde islands, where his father was born.
His piano playing, like his compositions, was not that easily characterized. Deftly improvising ingenious figures with his right hand while punching out rumbling bass lines with his left, he managed to evoke boogie-woogie pianists like Meade Lux Lewis and beboppers like Bud Powell simultaneously. Unlike many bebop pianists, however, Mr. Silver emphasized melodic simplicity over harmonic complexity; his improvisations, while sophisticated, were never so intricate as to be inaccessible.
Horace Ward Martin Tavares Silver was born on Sept. 2, 1928, in Norwalk, Conn. His father, who was born John Silva but changed the family name to the more American-sounding Silver after immigrating to the United States, worked in a rubber factory. His mother, Gertrude, was a maid and sang in a church choir.
Although he studied piano as a child, Mr. Silver began his professional career as a saxophonist. But he had returned to the piano, and was becoming well known as a jazz pianist in Connecticut, by the time the saxophonist Stan Getz — soon to be celebrated as one of the leading lights of the cool school — heard and hired him in 1950.
“I had the house rhythm section at a club called the Sundown in Hartford,” Mr. Silver told The New York Times in 1981. “Stan Getz came up and played with us. He said he was going to call us, but we didn’t take him seriously. But a couple of weeks later he called and said he wanted the whole trio to join him.”
Mr. Silver worked briefly with Getz before moving to New York in 1951. He was soon in demand as an accompanist, working with leading jazz musicians like the saxophonists Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young. In 1953, Mr. Silver and the drummer Art Blakey formed a cooperative group, the Jazz Messengers, whose aggressive style helped define hard bop and whose lineup of trumpet, tenor saxophone, piano, bass and drums became the standard hard-bop instrumentation.
After two and a half years, during which Mr. Silver began his long and prolific association with Blue Note, he left the Jazz Messengers, which carried on with Blakey as the sole leader, and formed his own quintet. It became a showcase for his compositions.
Like Blakey, Miles Davis (with whom he recorded) and a few others, Mr. Silver was known for discovering and nurturing young talent, including the saxophonists Hank Mobley, Joe Henderson and Michael Brecker; the trumpeters Art Farmer, Woody Shaw, Tom Harrell and Dave Douglas; and the drummers Louis Hayes and Billy Cobham. His longest-lived ensemble, which lasted about five years in the late 1950s and early ’60s, featured Blue Mitchell on trumpet and Junior Cook on tenor saxophone.
As interest in jazz declined in the ’70s, Mr. Silver disbanded his quintet and began concentrating on writing lyrics as well as music, notably on a three-album series called “The United States of Mind,” his first album to feature vocalists extensively. He later resumed touring, but only for a few months each year, essentially assembling a new group each time he went on the road.
“I’m shooting for longevity,” he explained. “The road is hard on your body. I’m trying to get it all over with in four months and then recoup.” He said he also wanted to spend more time with his son, Gregory, who survives him.
In 1981, Mr. Silver formed his own label, Silveto. His recordings for that label featured vocalists and were largely devoted to what he called “self-help holistic metaphysical music” — life lessons in song with titles like “Reaching Our Goals in Life” and “Don’t Dwell on Your Problems” that left critics for the most part unimpressed.
Jon Pareles of The Times wrote in 1986 that Mr. Silver’s “naïvely mystical lyrics” made his new compositions sound like “near-miss pop songs.” On later albums for Columbia, Impulse and Verve, Mr. Silver returned to a primarily instrumental approach.
Mr. Silver was named a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master in 1995 and received a President’s Merit Award from the Recording Academy in 2005.
Many of his tunes became staples of the jazz repertoire — a development, he said, that surprised him. “When I wrote them,” he said in a 2003 interview for the website All About Jazz, “I would say to myself that I hope these at least withstand the test of time. I hope they don’t sound old in 10 years or something.”
Rather than sounding dated, his compositions continued to be widely performed and recorded well into the 21st century. And while he acknowledged that “occasionally I hear an interpretation of one of my tunes that I say that they sure messed that one up,” he admitted, “For the most part I enjoy all of it.”
Monday, September 2, 2013
HAPPY 85th BIRTHDAY TO THE GREAT HORACE SILVER, LEGENDARY PIANIST AND COMPOSER
The legendary pianist and composer Horace Silver (b. September 2, 1928), one of the seminal and crucial creative links between the black modernist musical styles known popularly as "bebop" and "hardbop" throughout the 1950s, '60s, '70s and beyond as well as one of the masters of developing a fresh and innovative synthesis of these dynamic post 1945 styles with black vernacular traditions in blues, funk, and gospel musics which became a very popular genre known widely as "Soul Jazz" which were represented by such major groups of the period as the original 'Jazz Messengers' an ensemble which Silver cofounded with the famed drummer Art Blakey in 1954 as well as various bands led by such important musicians and composers as Cannonball and Nat Adderley, the electrifying Clifford Brown-Max Roach Quintet, and many different trios, quartets, and larger ensembles led by a large and prominent number of pianists, organists, drummers, trumpet players, and saxophonists of so-called Modern Jazz in the elctrifying 1945-1980 era. What follows is a heartfelt tribute to one of the most creatively lyrical, soulful, and consistently compelling musicians and composers in post WW2 American music on his 85th birthday. ENJOY...
Kofi
by Horace Silver with Phil Pastras (Editor)
University of California Press; First edition (hardcover), 2006; first edition (paperback), August, 2007
Horace Silver is one of the last giants remaining from the incredible flowering and creative extension of bebop music that became known as "hard bop" in the 1950s. This freewheeling autobiography of the great composer, pianist, and bandleader takes us from his childhood in Norwalk, Connecticut, through his rise to fame as a musician in New York, to his comfortable life “after the road” in California. During that time, Silver composed an impressive repertoire of tunes that have become standards and recorded a number of classic albums. Well-seasoned with anecdotes about the music, the musicians, and the milieu in which he worked and prospered, Silver’s narrative—like his music—is earthy, vernacular, and intimate. His stories resonate with lessons learned from hearing and playing alongside such legends as Art Blakey, Charlie Parker, and Lester Young. His irrepressible sense of humor combined with his distinctive spirituality make his account both entertaining and inspiring. Most importantly, Silver’s unique take on the music and the people who play it opens a window onto the creative process of jazz and the social and cultural worlds in which it flourishes.
Let’s Get to the Nitty Gritty also describes Silver’s spiritual awakening in the late 1970s. This transformation found its expression in the electronic and vocal music of the three-part work called The United States of Mind and eventually led the musician to start his own record label, Silveto. Silver details the economic forces that eventually persuaded him to put Silveto to rest and to return to the studios of major jazz recording labels like Columbia, Impulse, and Verve, where he continued expanding his catalogue of new compositions and recordings that are at least as impressive as his earlier work.
Horace Silver: Hard Bop Pioneer Forges Ahead
Silver's earliest musical influence was the Cape Verdean folk music he heard from his Portugese-born father growing up in Connecticut. Later, after he had begun playing piano and saxophone as a high schooler, Silver came under the spell of blues singers and boogie-woogie pianists, as well as boppers like Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell. In 1950, Stan Getz played a concert in Hartford, Connecticut, with a pickup rhythm section that included Silver, drummer Walter Bolden, and bassist Joe Calloway. So impressed was Getz, he hired the whole trio. Silver had been saving his money to move to New York anyway; his hiring by Getz sealed the deal. Silver worked with Getz for a year, then began to freelance around the city with such big-time players as Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, and Oscar Pettiford.
He made several recordings with Getz, proving that Silver's funky, bluesy style of piano was already well-formed in his early 20s. Silver worked with a wide range of musicians and played regularly at a number of Manhattan clubs. His big break came when Lou Donaldson abruptly cancelled a recording date, and Blue Note asked Silver to make the session instead with his own trio.
This began a long relationship with the label, and provided a platform for his playing with several other leaders, including Miles Davis and Art Blakey, as well as a chance to record many of his own compositions. Silver's start with Blue Note in 1952 led him to his first recordings as a leader. In 1953, he joined forces with Art Blakey to form a cooperative under their joint leadership. The band's first album, Horace Silver and the Jazz Messengers, was a milestone in the development of the genre that came to be known as hard bop. Many of the tunes penned by Silver for that record — "The Preacher," "Doodlin'," "Room 608" — became jazz classics and have been performed and recorded by many musicians including Louis Armstrong, Sarah Vaughan, and Dizzy Gillespie among others. These same songs set a new standard in using soul in jazz. From 1954-6, Silver and Blakey played in the co-operative Jazz Messengers, until Blakey took over the band and Silver formed his own quintet.
He has led his own groups consistently since 1956. Silver's first breakthrough as a composer came with pieces written for the Messengers, such as The Preacher, but on his own albums he went on to create a string of memorable pieces that similarly combined a catchy tune with a forceful gospel-inspired beat, such as Sister Sadie, Cape Verdean Blues and Song For My Father. His bands have consistently been a training ground for great soloists, and his sidemen have included a host of subsequently famous names. In the late 1970s and early 1980s he experimented with larger groups and a different style, but from midway through the '80s he returned to hard bop, and in the 1990s signed with Verve records, creating some worthy successors to the many classic albums he made during his 28 years at Blue Note. His piano style involves sharply defined, bluesy right hand phrasing, over a grumbling left-hand bass that is unlike the style of any other player, and remains his immediately identifiable musical signature.
His influence continues with the release of Rockin’ With Rachmaninoff, Silver’s Bop City Records debut. The concept of the album is based on a dream of Silver’s in which Duke Ellington and Rachmaninoff meet in heaven. Rachmaninoff is then introduced to many jazz greats such as Louis Armstrong, Thelonious Monk, Coleman Hawkins, “Muddy” Waters, Mahalia Jackson and many others. These musical tales converge many of the great styles largely pioneered by Silver throughout his career. These songs are driven by Silver’s signature piano styling and powerful arrangements, and once again demonstrate his significant impact on the contemporary mainstream of jazz.
http://alldylan.com/today-horace-silver-is-85/
Today: Horace Silver is 85
"Jazz is not background music. You must concentrate upon it in order to get the most of it. You must absorb most of it. The harmonies within the music can relax, soothe, relax, and uplift the mind when you concentrate upon and absorb it. Jazz music stimulates the minds and uplifts the souls of those who play it was well as of those who listen to immerse themselves in it. As the mind is stimulated and the soul uplifted, this is eventually reflected in the body." ~Horace Silver
“We all have to open our minds, stretch forth, take chances and venture out musically to try and arrive at something new and different.” ~Horace Silver
A Fireside Chat with Horace Silver
FRED JUNG: When did you become an Angeleno?
HORACE SILVER: I've been divorced for years. I got divorced when my son was about five years old. At that time, I was married and we were undergoing some bad experiences in New York. You know, Fred, I love New York. I still love New York, but we had been burglarized. Me and my wife had gone on vacation and we came back and our apartment had been burglarized. They just about cleaned the whole damn apartment out, took her fur coat and all her jewelry, took the stereo and kitchen appliances, the place was almost empty. They got us good because we were in Europe on a vacation for two weeks. We decided that we wanted to get out of New York. I always did love California. I used to come out from New York and play here once a year and I always enjoyed it so much. I loved the weather and the people. I talked it over with my wife and she agreed and we decided to move out here.
FJ: There is the cautionary phrase, "out of sight, out of mind," were you ever troubled that perhaps being away from New York would have an adverse fallout to your robust career?
HS: No, no, I didn't. Maybe earlier I had that fear, but I didn't have that fear then because by that time I had made a name for myself in jazz. I could move anywhere and commute and do my gigs and still do my tours and recordings. I felt that I could live where I wanted to live because by that time I had built a reputation.
FJ: Word around town is that you have long supported the music in Los Angeles, regularly attending shows at the Jazz Bakery and Catalina Bar & Grill.
HS: I want to keep up with what's going on. I want to hear all the old timers that come in from New York, who play at the Jazz Bakery or Catalina's, check them out and give them a hug, but I also want to hear some of these youngsters that are coming out here. There are some fine, young players and I like to go out and check them out and encourage them.
FJ: It has become a part of jazz lore, but as the story goes, very early in your career, you were struggling to move to New York, Stan Getz hired you and you were able to do so.
HS: That's pretty right. I had been saving my money to go to New York and try to make it in music. I got sick at that time and I had maybe seven hundred dollars in the bank and I had spent all that money on doctor bills. So I guess I used that as an excuse not to go because deep down within. I had a fear of going because what if I went down to New York and I didn't make it? So I had procrastinated on going, although I had all this money saved up. Then when the medical bills came and I had spent all this money, it gave me an excuse not to make the move. But the good Lord was looking after me and Stan Getz came through Hartford and heard me and my trio and hired us. That was a blessing.
FJ: Perhaps raw pre-Getz, you fastly became the most significant addition to the Blue Note catalog.
HS: I used to play at the Paradise Bar and Grill on 110th Street and 8th Avenue with a guy named Big Nick Nicholas. We had the gig there five nights a week. It was him on tenor, Kalil Mahdi on drums, and myself on piano, no bass, and we played there five nights a week. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, we could play anything we wanted to play and all the guys could come and sit in and jam with us. But Friday and Saturday, we had to play for dancing and for the floorshow. Charlie Parker came in and sat in with us a couple of times. Gene Ammons, Sonny Stitt, Joe Newman, Ike Quebec, a mixture of swing era and bebop musicians would come in and sit in with us. Lou Donaldson came in, and that is how I met Alfred Lion. I was a good friend of Lou Donaldson and Alfred used to come in, because he was always scouting for talent, and he heard Lou and he liked Lou and so he recorded Lou. Lou asked me to be on his session and so I made this record with Lou and then a second record for Blue Note. Lou was supposed to make a third record for Blue Note, which I was supposed to be on and Alfred called me and said that Lou couldn't make the session and that he had already booked the studio and to come in and make a trio album for him. That was my opportunity.
FJ: Interesting that he scouted talent, rather than waiting for tapes to come to him a day late and a dollar short.
HS: That is the thing, he didn't wait for somebody to tell him who was great. Alfred got out and went to the clubs at night. He came to the Paradise and listen to the jam sessions to see if there was anything he liked and that is how he discovered Lou.
FJ: Your Blue Note sessions are not only touted for the music, but also the esthetic, the covers were art.
HS: They let me approve them. Frank Wolff usually took all the picture and Reid Miles did all of the designing. When they would get it together, they would have me come in and take a look at it. Most of the time, I approved of it. I told Alfred that most of the guys that recorded for him were concerned with doing a good record and the packaging, they didn't give a shit about. I didn't want a picture on the cover that I didn't like and every time I looked at the cover, I cringed. He gave me that privilege of doing that and that is how I learned to be a producer, watching him and what he did and him allowing me to have input on the covers and liner notes.
FJ: Blue Note has an aggressive reissue program, so eventually, all your releases will be available to the public in some fashion. Do you have plans on doing the same for your Silveto recordings?
HS: Not really. Silveto is still a production company, but I don't produce records anymore. I've got this new record coming out on Bop City Records, which I leased to them. I've leased them the master.
HS: I had a dream one night that Duke Ellington and Rachmaninoff met in heaven and they both were admirerers of each other's music and Duke took Rachmaninoff on a tour around heaven to meet all the jazz greats that had died and gone there like Louis Armstrong, Coleman Hawkins, and Thelonious Monk. When I woke up from the dream, I thought that this would make a good idea for a stage play. So I sat down and wrote one. After I got it done, I was concerned as to how I was going to put this on. I knew Mayor Tom Bradley was a big jazz fan and so I approached him at an affair. Him and Billy Taylor went to college together and Billy Taylor was performing in town and I went there and brought a package of my Silveto Records and gave them to Mayor Bradley as a present. I included a little letter in there saying if he could help me get Rockin' with Rachmaninoff put on in L.A., I would donate my services free. They would just have to pay the dancers, singers, and narrator. His secretary called me a few weeks later and said that he wanted to have a meeting with me. He introduced me to the head of the cultural affairs department and it took us about a year to get this thing put on, but we did put it on at a theater in Hollywood for a weekend. We got a great review in the paper, but nothing ever happened after that. So I decided to take the band and singers into the studio and record this music for posterity.
This was a major point in my career. I had never written a stage play before. I wanted to put this down on tape and bring it out on my Silveto label. That was my intent, but in the meantime, things got so bad with the Silveto label, where the distributors were not paying me, I had to throw in the towel. I went to Columbia and asked them if they would be interested in listening to it, but they weren't even interested in listening to it.
Then I went to Impulse! and same thing. The thing sat there in my closet for eleven years. Finally my contract with Verve ended and I was free. I thought that now would be the time to get this thing out of the closet and mix the sound because I had never mixed the sound before. It was on two-inch tape. So we got in the studio and mixed the sound and I wanted to find someone to release it because I wasn't going back to trying to put out my own records anymore because these distributors are a bunch of crooks. They take your records and they never pay you for them. Then I heard Al Schmitt and some partners were starting this company, Bop City Records. I called Al and asked if he wanted to hear it and he said yes and I sent him a copy. He called me back and said he liked it and I made a deal to lease it to them. It is coming out October 28.
FJ: And health and wealth are in the win column?
HS: Almost, not quite. I am working on something right now. Norah Jones did my tune "Peace" and I feel I haven't been paid the right money for it. They never applied for a license for it and when I found out about it, it had been out already for a year and a half or so. I sent them a license and they signed it and sent it back, but they paid me from the date on the license and not the release. I am trying to get that resolved because Norah Jones sells a lot of records. But I'm feeling pretty good. I have a little sciatic problem that bothers me from time to time, my right hip, but I am getting treatment for it. Other than that, I am fine.
FJ: Have you retired from performing?
HS: Not exactly. Let me put it this way, Fred, I've been out there on the road for fifty years and I am kind of tired of it now. It is not that I don't want to play in front of the people. I like to do that. I am going into the studio in April to do a new album with the Silver Brass Ensemble and then I would like to tour behind that.
FJ: Impressively, even Cecil Taylor suggests your influence.
HS: I haven't seen Cecil in a long time, but one thing is for sure, if I am playing somewhere and Cecil is anywhere near it, he always shows up and we hang out. I'm very pleased that he likes my stuff.
FJ: And the future?
HS: Well, I am hoping and praying that God will alert me when I get too old and feeble to make a good record and stop making records.
FJ: Here is hoping that never happens.
HS: Me too (laughing). A few of my idols have fallen under that. Lester Young, as great as he is, towards his later years, he was not in good physical health, but I presume he needed the money and he made some records that were not up to his standard. Same thing with Coleman Hawkins, the last record he made was not up to his standard, Bud Powell, same thing. One thing I can say about Thelonious Monk, he quit when he was ahead. He knew when to stop. You won't find a weak record out by Thelonious. Also, I've started a non-profit organization called the Horace Silver Foundation to give annual scholarships to deserving piano students. I am affiliated with USC and our first show will be there November 16, Sunday afternoon at 4. The winner will receive a ten thousand dollar scholarship and go directly to the school of their choice. It is free and please come.
A Fireside Chat With Horace Silver
"When I wrote them (my compositions), I would say to myself that I hope these at least withstand the test of time. I hope they don't sound old in ten years..."--Horace Silver
All About Jazz: Let's start from the beginning.
Horace Silver: I took up the piano, merely as a monkey see, monkey do type of a thing. There was a girl who lived next door to me. We were about the same age and we used to play together. She had a younger sister and sometimes we would play with her too. She was pretty young, but me and this girl, we used to play together. When her dad or mother bought her a bicycle, I went and I asked my dad for a bicycle. When she got her roller skates, I asked my dad for them. I tried to copy all the stuff that her parents were giving her, I asked my dad for. So finally, her brother was a pianist and he played in some bands around town here locally and finally, she decided that she wanted to study the piano and so her parents got her a piano, well, they had a piano actually. So I wanted to play the piano and do the same thing, copy her.
So my uncle worked out in the country somewhere for these rich white people who were moving to Florida and they had an old, upright piano that they wanted to get rid of and so he asked if he could get it and him and my dad found somebody with a truck and they went out there and got the piano and brought it home and put it in the kitchen and then I started taking lessons. That is how I started. After two weeks or three weeks, I got bored with playing scales and exercises and I told my dad that I wanted to quit, but he said, "No, you are not going to quit. You wanted this and I got it for you and you are going to stick with it." He said, "One day, you will thank me for this." And I do, today, thank him for it. But that is how I got started. Actually, I wasn't that much interested in it at that time.
It wasn't until I started being able to read music a little bit then I would go to the five and ten cent store and buy sheet music like "Moonlight Serenade" by Glenn Miller and "Stardust" by Hoagy Carmichael and all of these things that I would bring home and play to make it a little bit more interesting to me. It wasn't really until I heard the Jimmie Lunceford band at a local amusement park in Connecticut. I heard that band one Sunday, me and my dad and that band turned me on. That Lunceford band, they sounded so good. I just said to myself, "That's what I want to be. I want to be a musician." I made my dedication that night. I was about eleven years old at the time.
AAJ: What were some of your other listening pleasures?
HS: Well, I used to go to the five and ten cents store at Woolworth and they had a record section, the old 78 rpm records and I would buy Tommy Dorsey, Jimmy Dorsey, Count Basie, Slim and Slam, Slim Gaillard, Slim and Slam, and various other records. Whatever appealed to me, I would take them home and listen to them and get inspired.
AAJ: During your distinguished career, you have played alongside the likes of Stan Getz, Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Art Blakey, Lou Donaldson, Sonny Rollins, Milt Jackson, Cannonball Adderley, Clifford Brown, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, J. J. Johnson, Kenny Dorham, and Art Farmer. Does anyone linger in your memory?
HS: Yeah, well, Miles Davis because I always tell people that you learn with everybody you play with. They're older musicians. They're geniuses. They're inspirational and you learn a lot from playing with them. Either they show you things or else you learn from observing what they do. But I think I learned the most, from any one guy, and that was from Miles Davis. We used to live in the same hotel and he used to come to my room and I had a piano in my room and he would show me some different chords on the piano and I learned some harmonic voicings from him. Also, I just learned from watching what he did and being inspired by his great genius.
AAJ: In three decades, during the Fifties, Sixties, and Seventies, you led well over thirty sessions as a leader for Blue Note Records, not counting the numerous sessions you appeared on. It almost seems like you were the house pianist.
HS: Well, Blue Note began long before I came with it, but when I got with it, it was sort of like a fluke how I got to do my own record session there because Lou Donaldson hired me to do his record. I did the first record with Lou and then I did a second record with Lou and then I was supposed to do a third record with Lou. About three days before the session, Alfred (Alfred Lion) called me and said, "Well, Lou can't make it. We've already rented the studio. Why don't you come out and make a trio session for us." I said, "Great." Luckily, I had a lot of material and I got a chance to practice for three days and got my thing together and went onto make this first trio album. That led to two more trio albums and I did three trio albums and eventually, I did a quintet album with Kenny Dorham, Hank Mobley, and Doug Watkins, Art Blakey, and myself and as a result of doing that album, I decided to make a go out of it.
AAJ: That was the OG edition of the Jazz Messengers.
HS: I don't know exactly how long we played together. We didn't get that much work to tell you the truth. We worked a few gigs here and there.
AAJ: One would think club owners would be foaming at the mouth to get you guys onto the bandstand.
HS: Yeah, well, that's the way it was in those days. We couldn't get a gig at Birdland for a while there. Nobody seemed to play much attention to us, the major jazz clubs. But anyway, we stuck together for a while until the thing dispersed.
AAJ: The Horace Silver Quintet has quite an impressive alumni roll. Your thoughts on Hank Mobley, who appears on Six Pieces of Silver and The Stylings of Silver.
HS: Oh, a great musician, very underrated. He's one of the great jazz saxophonists of our time, I think, in my opinion, very creative and very inventive, always full of ideas, a lot of feeling when he plays. He is one of my favorite tenor saxophone players, Hank Mobley.
AAJ: The late Art Farmer, who appears on The Stylings of Silver and Further Explorations by the Horace Silver Quintet.
HS: Art Farmer too, another beautiful musician, a wonderful person. He had such a wonderful style. He was really a stylist on his horn and Kenny Dorham too. I loved Kenny Dorham's playing. Kenny Dorham and Hank Mobley together, at that time, when we had those two guys in the frontline, I think, that was one of the hippest frontlines that I have ever played with.
AAJ: And Blue Mitchell, who along with Junior Cook, made up the frontline on classics like Finger Poppin' with the Horace Silver Quintet, Blowin' the Blues Away, Horace-Scope, Doin' the Thing (At the Village Gate), The Tokyo Blues, and Silver's Serenade.
HS: Oh, Blue was great. Blue had that happy medium. He pleased the musicians as well as the public. He knew how to get funky and get on down and rock the house with his playing and he could play hip too and he could play pretty. He covered the whole thing and had a lot of feeling. I will tell you, most of all the trumpet players that came after him, followed his pattern. He set the style for trumpet playing in my quintet.
AAJ: And Blue's partner in crime, Junior Cook.
HS: Junior Cook, another very fine player, underrated. Jun was a fine musician.
AAJ: As notable as Horace Silver, the pianist and Horace Silver, the bandleader have been, I have always been more partial to Horace Silver, the composer with exceptional hits like "The Preacher," "Senor Blues," "Soulville," "Cookin' at the Continental," "Peace," "Sister Sadie," "Strollin,'" and "Song for My Father."
HS: Well, I never thought they would be. When I wrote them, I would say to myself that I hope these at least withstand the test of time. I hope they don't sound old in ten years or something. But I listened to some of those records we made ten, twenty years ago and they sound like they could have been made yesterday. So I always loved to compose. It is a talent that I discovered I had and I just started going to work with it. The way in which they come to you is not something that you can predict. Compositions could be instantaneous. You can get an idea and spout it all out and play it on the piano and write it out on paper or put it on a tape recorder. It could be a few minutes and then it could take you several days or several weeks. It depends on the situation because sometimes, you get a smidgen of an idea and you can't seem to complete it. It might take you weeks to complete it and then it might take you ten minutes, or half an hour, or the rest of the day, or three or four hours. It is unpredictable.
AAJ: Does it become easier as the years pass by?
HS: I would say that sometimes it is easy and sometimes it is not so easy. Whether it is easy or hard, it is fun. That's the main thing. I enjoy doing it. It's fun and when I complete it and it's good, I am very happy. It is a lot of fun, whether it takes an hour or it takes two weeks.
AAJ: Classic Blue Note albums like Finger Poppin' with the Horace Silver Quintet, Doin' the Thing (At the Village Gate), Senor Blues, and You Gotta Take a Little Love have long been deleted and are unavailable for purchase in the States.
HS: I don't know. I would say that there is a lot of stuff that they have on the shelf there that I wish they would re-release, the Silver 'n series: Silver 'n Brass, Silver 'n Wood, Silver 'n Percussion, Silver 'n Strings, Silver 'n Voices. All that stuff is on the shelf that they haven't re-released that. I don't know why, but it is just sitting there. Several years ago, Michael Cuscuna called me and said that they were thinking about releasing the Silver 'n series. He thought that some of it could be remastered. He thought that some of it could have been mixed better and would I be willing to go into the studio with him and help him to remix it and I said, "Sure, I would be glad to." And that was the end of that. I never heard more about it. There is a lot of stuff there.
AAJ: Just as historic as the music of those Blue Note albums are the cover art, which even today is vanguard. What was the extent of your input?
HS: Well, I approved or disapproved. Like what I'm doing now with Silveto Productions, who produces Horace Silver for Verve Records, I come up with the concept for the cover and work with the art department and the photographers in getting it done. I come up with the concepts, but in those days, I didn't come up with any concepts. All I did was once the whoever artist that designed it, did it, then Alfred would call me and I would go down to the office and take a look at it. Most of the time, I approved of it, but sometimes I said, "No, I don't like that." Once in a while, that happened, but very often. Reid Miles was fine. He did most of the stuff. He did some good work.
AAJ: After three decades with Blue Note, you formed your own label, Silveto.
HS: I had the label for about ten years. After I did The United States of Mind (That Healin' Feelin,' Total Response, All), that three-volume set called The United States of Mind, that particular music that I did on The United States of Mind, had a spiritual connotation to it. It had a lot of singing. It had a lot of good solos too. It had more singing than I've had on records before. I don't know because for some reason, it didn't sell that well, but I was very keen on doing this spiritual concept with the music and I knew that, at that time anyway and maybe even today, but at that time, Blue Note or any other company probably wouldn't want to go for that concept. So I said that the only way that I will continue this concept is to do it myself. So I decided to start my own label.
AAJ: That must have been an arduous undertaking.
HS: Yes, it was. It was very difficult. It was basically a one man operation and I didn't have any other people signed up. It was a label with just myself. Although, I did release a Clark Terry quartet album, which was made from the tapes it was made at a club in Long Island. It was all pretty difficult. I had to do everything because it was a one man operation. You had to write the music, arrange it, write it out, rehearse it, and record it, and then the playback, and then you had to mix the sound and get the master done. You had to get a graphic guy to design the cover for you, a photographer, a graphic guy to design the lettering and the linear notes and things. It was a lot of work. Then you had to take the master tapes to the plant and have them do the pressing. It was a lot of stages to go through. But it was good. It was a good experience for me because it taught me how to be a producer.
AAJ: After releasing a handful of albums on Silveto, you recorded It's Got to Be Funky and Pencil Packin' Papa for the Columbia label.
HS: Right, I was only with Columbia for a couple of years. We did two records for them and that was it. I wish they would re-release them because there is some fine music there. You might still be able to find a few copies that are still available, but it is not re-released. It is a shame, because I am proud of that music. Those two records came out beautifully. Andy Bey sang beautifully on it and so did, on the other one, O.C. Smith sang beautifully on Pencil Packin' Papa.
AAJ: What personality takes precedent, Horace Silver, the composer, Horace Silver, the pianist, or Horace Silver, the bandleader?
HS: Well, hopefully, I would like to be known for all three because I'm a pretty fair pianist and I'm a good composer. I'm a good lyricist and I try to be a good bandleader. And I try to be a good businessman, for a musician (laughing). I mean, musicians are not always the greatest business people, but I realized that it is a part of the business. You have to be involved in the business if you are going to make out and so I try to be a good businessman as well.
AAJ: And the royalty checks are still coming in?
HS: Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, I am so happy, that these young musicians are recording a lot of my material, some of the older tunes. A lot of people are recording my material and so I get checks from various record companies throughout the country. For the most part, I enjoy all of it. Occasionally, I hear an interpretation of one of my tunes that I say that they sure messed that one up. I would say that ninety-five percent of what I hear, I like what I hear. I'm very honored that they like the music so much that they would do it. There is a whole lot of composers out there and a whole lot of good material and to think that they have chosen some of mine is very gratifying.
AAJ: And the future?
HS: Actually, I was scheduled to go to New York in September to do a new album, but I was ill so I couldn't go. I'm feeling quite a bit better now. I'm not a hundred percent. I'm quite a bit better. I'm hoping to get to New York around the spring of 2001 and get in there and do this album. The music is already all written. It is ready to go.
AAJ: Is that going to be another quintet recording?
HS: No, I'm doing something different. I'm not going to say what it is right now. There is plenty left, a lot of things that I want to do career wise, a lot of goals that I want to achieve. There are things that I have thought about for the last ten or fifteen years, musical goals that I wanted to try, but haven't had the time or the opportunity to try to get them to come off. I ain't through yet. I've got a lot more to do and a lot more to give to the world.
HS: I've always loved music since I was a small boy. I used to go to the five and ten cents store and buy the old 78s rpm records. I was into all the big bands in those days. I used to buy records by Tommy Dorsey and Jimmy Dorsey and by Glenn Miller and Count Basie and Duke Ellington and Earl "Fatha" Hines, and all of the big bands. I used to collect their records. I was really into that. I've always loved music and it's funny that I just kind of gravitated towards wanting to play the piano. I did play the tenor saxophone for a short while too, but piano has always been my mainstay.
AAJ: Why not play both?
HS: I think I was biting off more than I could chew. I wanted to play the tenor. I wanted to play the piano and I wanted to compose and arrange. There was so much for me to try to get into that I would find one week that my chops were up on the piano and down on the saxophone and then the next week, I'd be up on the saxophone and down on the piano. In the middle, I was trying to write music and arrange music and finally I just got to the point where I said, "Well, I'm going to have to make a choice, because I can't handle all of this at once, in one scoop." So I decided to let the tenor go and stick with the piano and with the composing and arranging.
AAJ: What influenced Horace Silver's music?
HS: Basically my influences have been American influences. It's been blues, gospel, swing era music, bebop music, Broadway show music, classical music.
AAJ: Does that diversity lend to the overall appeal of your music?
HS: Yes, definitely. Yes. It's like making a stew. You put all these various ingredients in it. You season it with this. You put that in it. You put the other in it. You mix it all up and it comes out something neat, something that you created.
AAJ: You were a Blue Note artist for over twenty-five years, how did your relationship with Blue Note initially begin and why do you think it prospered for both you and the label through the years?
HS: I met Alfred Lion at a club that I played at called The Paradise Bar and Grill, which is 110th Street and 8th Avenue. It was located at that spot at that time. I played there with a really fine tenor saxophonist named Big Nick Nicholas. He had played with all the big bands. He was with Dizzy's band and a lot of different big bands. He had a little combo there, playing right about five nights a week there. On the weekends, we would play for floorshows and during the front part of the week when there was no floorshows, a lot of musicians would sit in and jam with us. How I met Alfred was at that club called The Paradise Bar and Grill. It was kind of a little neighborhood kind of a joint and we played in there about five nights a week. Ike Quebec was a good friend of Alfred Lion. Ike Quebec, the tenor player, he brought him in several times. Alfred was always going out to hear music, live music. I met him at that time. It just so happens that I was on the stand, jamming with Lou Donaldson. Alfred really took a liking to Lou Donaldson and asked us to record for him. Lou, in turn, asked me to be his pianist on that session.
So that is how I got acquainted with Alfred Lion. It was a very nice association, because we were not only employer/employee relationships were good, but we were friends too. We used to go out to eat. Alfred loved to eat good cuisine, all different types of different foods. I was into that too. Me and Alfred and Francis Wolff, his partner, we used to go, a lot of times, they'd call me and say, "Let's go out to dinner." We'd go to an Italian restaurant. He knew all the great restaurants in New York. We'd go to smorgasbord, get smorgasbord one weekend. Next week, we'd go to a British restaurant and get the British type of cooking or a French restaurant or Indian restaurant. We were just all over the place, eating some great food.
AAJ: You made over forty albums of your own as a leader for the Blue Note label.
HS: Good Lord's been kind to me, that's all I can say. I wake up in the morning with music in my head a lot of times. I won't say every morning, but I wake up in the morning sometimes with eight bars in my head and I just go to the piano. It's almost like taking dictation. I will end up writing a channel or a bridge to the tune, but the first eight bars of the tune I get a lot of times when I wake up in the morning. I hear it in my head and I just go check it out on the piano and put it on my tape recorder and develop it.
AAJ: But what was it about the Blue Note label that allowed Horace Silver to harness that creativity?
HS: They let me do my thing. They allowed me to do my thing. Alfred said, they didn't dictate to me as to what kind of music that they wanted me to play or what tunes, what musicians that I was going to use. They let me do my thing. That's one reason I stayed there for twenty-eight years.
AAJ: Blue Note has just put out a box set retrospective of those twenty-eight years.
HS: I don't have the box set as of yet, but I got a listing of the tunes that are on there. I think Michael Cuscuna did a wonderful job. He approached me. He got it together and he sent me a listing, he faxed me a listing of all the tunes that were going to be on there. I approved of all of them. I made about three different changes. I think there are forty-five, forty-six tunes on the album, on those four CDs rather, and I only asked them to change three of them, not that the ones he picked weren't good, I had a couple of others that I thought were more important pieces of music to put on there. He made about three different changes at my suggestion. The rest, he put together all himself.
AAJ: During that period, you had a very close association with Art Blakey.
HS: Art was a great guy and one hell of a drummer. One thing, well many things I learned. I learned something about working with all of these great musicians, but one great thing that I think I learned from Art is to give all of yourself when you get up on that bandstand. That bandstand is like an alter. It's like holy ground or sacred ground. When you get up on that stage or that bandstand, throw everything else out of your mind and just give one hundred percent or a hundred and fifty percent of yourself. Give your all. I remember one time, Art giving us a lecture at the Café Bohemia. I guess he wasn't satisfied as to what the band was doing. He said, "Look, you guys. I don't care if you had a fight with your girlfriend or with your wife, or whatever problems you have got outside. When you come into this club, leave that shit outside and come up here onto this bandstand and let's take care of business. When you want to pick them problems up when you go home, that's your business. When you come in here, leave that shit outside and let's get up on there and cook." Get up on the bandstand and take care of business. And that's what he did. That's what he encouraged us all to do.
AAJ: And Miles Davis?
HS: Oh, Miles was a genius. He was a great, great, great musician and a beautiful guy too. He was a little eccentric some times, or a little, he's a Gemini. Geminis, they have this, what they call dual personalities. One minute they are jovial and the next minute, they're kind of on the grouchy side. When he was grouchy, I just kind of stayed away from him. When he was in a good mood, I tried to be around him. It was just great to be around him when he was in a good mood. We would always talk music. I always found that when great musicians get together and they start talking music, they become like little children. They become giddy and silly and laughing and talking. They love the music so much that it is such a joy to talk about it. I think we met at Birdland. I'm not quite sure how we met. I think it was at Birdland where we met though. He heard me there and I was introduced to him.
AAJ: Milt Jackson?
HS: Milt, I can't remember how we met, but it might have been at Birdland too. Everybody came to Birdland. I did a few records with Milt. It was always a joy to play with him. He's such a great, great artist.
AAJ: Journalists credit you with being one of the pioneers of hard bop, what is hard bop?
HS: Oh, that's a term that the critics put out on the music, but I would say that it's bop with a little more energy to it. There was polite bop and then there was hard bop. The polite bop was more sophisticated or more, the hard bop is real slam, bang, kicking ass kind of music.
AAJ: So you are fine with the nickname "Hard Bop Grandpop"?
HS: The "Hard Bop Grandpop"? Oh, yes (laughing). I get a kick out of it. Yes, I get a kick out of it.
AAJ: Why is it your music lends itself better to a quintet format rather than the conventional piano trio that your peers utilized?
HS: I like to hear my music played with something larger than just a trio. There's nothing wrong with playing with a trio either. It's OK, but I've always liked to hear my music played with some horns and sometimes a larger instrumentation than the quintet. We've done "Silver 'n Brass." We've done "Silver 'n Woodwinds." We've done "Silver and Voices," "Silver 'n Percussion," "Silver 'n Strings." We've done septets, sextets, octets. I try to stretch out and do something a little bit more different than just a quintet, but the quintet is my mainstay. The quintet is what the people love me for. They love Horace Silver in a quintet. I love the quintet setting. It's just that every now and then I just need something different.
AAJ: Let's touch on a former member of one of your quintets, Tom Harrell.
HS: Tom is a great artist. Yes, Tom, I just heard about Tom from Woody Herman. I was playing in Chicago and Woody was in Chicago. He wasn't playing that night or something and he came by the club to hear us. I saw him standing out there at the bar, so when I came off the stage, I went over to him to say hi. I think that was the first time that I had met him and I introduced myself to him. We got to talking. We had a couple of drinks and he said, "Man, I got a fine young trumpet player in my band. He's crazy about your music." I said, "Gee, I've got to check him out sometime. Maybe I can use him." The next time I saw him, we played up in Boston at the Jazz Workshop in Boston. In the back of the room, there was another jazz room called. Woody's band was in one room and we were in the front room called the Jazz Workshop. Naturally, during our intermission, we'd run back into the other room and try to catch one of Woody's tunes if he was still on, the same thing with his band. When they got off, they came running into our room and try to catch us. I went in there one night, between intermissions, and heard them playing their last song of their set and this trumpet player stood up and took a solo. And I was knocked out. I said, "Damn, this cat is playing his ass off. Who is this cat?" I went over and introduced myself and we met. I got his phone number and everything and it was Tom. At that time, Randy Brecker was playing trumpet with the band and when Randy left, I said, "Well, I know who to get. Let me call and see if Tom is available." I called and I got Tom. I have had some great players in my band. I've been very fortunate. They are all good. I love them all. And they've all added to the Horace Silver sound and I thank them for it.
AAJ: If you were putting a band together of players, past or present, whom would you have filling the saxophone, trumpet, bass, and drum chairs?
HS: Good question. It would depend on what project I got going. It could be a big band project. It could be a small band. It could be a quartet, a quintet, a sextet, a septet. It could be a certain type of jazz. It could be all Latin music or it could be all blues. It could be an album of all ballads. I would have to find out what the project was first and then I would go zeroing in on what musicians I would use. I wouldn't just say I would use this guy or that guy or another because they may not fit that particular project. I look at my project. What am I doing here? Is this like the regular Horace Silver thing or is this an album of all ballads or is this going to be an album of all Latin music. Who's going to fit this music? I try to decipher that. I would hate to name names. I'm not going to name no names because there are too many good musicians out here. For example, the guys that are on my last record, Jazz Has a Sense of Humor. They're great and I am hoping to use them again because they sound so well together, Ryan Kisor, Jimmy Greene, John Webber, and Willie Jones. They are all good players, but the five of us seemed to gel well together. I am hoping to use them again on something else. But there are other players out there too. They're not the only ones, Fred.
AAJ: Are you and Elvin the last of the leaders mentoring young musicians?
HS: Well, I don't think it is dying per say. I think that, well, most of the heavyweights, the giants are dead. All these great, of course there are some people with us, of the older guys who are masters, like Milt Jackson or Ahmad Jamal or Cedar Walton and oh, I don't know, I'd hate to leave anybody out, but I mean some of the ones from the older generation who are really masters. There are so few of them left, especially those who would have a quintet or anything larger than a quintet. You've got some piano players. They can mentor a bassist and a drummer, but I mean, you don't have the Art Blakeys and the Jazz Messengers group anymore to bring young guys into the fold and train them to move on in their careers. You don't have Dizzy Gillespie. You don't have Cannonball anymore. You don't have those kinds of groups anymore so those guys can get that type of experience.
AAJ: Let's talk about your new album on Verve, Jazz Has a Sense of Humor, and does jazz really have a sense of humor?
HS: Definitely. I think all music should have a sense of humor at some point, not that every piece of music has to have humor, but, well, speaking for myself, I like the bulk of my music to have humor. There are times when I want to get very serious with my music. I might have a very serious song title for a tune and I might have a very serious lyric, which is very in depth and very profound and very serious, so therefore there is really not a sense of humor to that, but that is just a small portion of my music. I would say seventy-five to eighty percent of my music, I try to keep it on the light hearted side with some fun and laughter in it. It's uplifting and it's entertaining. I love all of those band members. They are great players, each and every one of them.
And if you look back at Horace Silver's career, you will find that a lot of my music has a sense of humor, tunes like "Juicy Lucy," They have humorous titles. They have humorous lyrics to them. I'm a lover of comedy. When I was a teenager, I used to play in a local club back in Norwalk, Connecticut, a local Black club on the weekend. They would always have a comedian on the floorshow. We would have to play for the floorshow, a striptease dancer, a singer, and a comedian. I used to listen to those jokes, a lot of them were dirty. I would go the next day on a Monday and I would tell them to my classmates. They would crack up. I love humor. I love Richard Pryor and Jack Benny, all of those great comedians. It's important, I think, just as important that the world have music to give us some happiness and joy, to uplift them. They need some comedy to uplift them too. I'm a great lover of comedians. I love, what's this guy's name? This Jewish comedian, Jackie Mason. He's funny. I've got a couple of videotapes of him. He's a really good comic.
AAJ: Is laughter the best medicine?
HS: Laughter and music, both of them. They go hand in hand. They're both light hearted and they both can help you forget some of your problems sometimes, until you can find a solution to them. In the mean time, it can take some of the pressure off your butt.
AAJ: At this stage of your career, what is more important to you, your artistry as a pianist or your artistry as a composer/arranger?
HS: Well, both, I like both. If someone was to come to me and put a gun to my head and say, "Look, you've got to make a choice. Either you are going to go on with the piano or you are going to go on with the composing, because you can't do both." I would have to say composing, because there is no end of joy, well, I get joy out of playing the piano and playing for a live audience and getting their reaction, but there is nothing like the thrill that you get with it when you write a song. It's like pulling a rabbit out of a hat. There's nothing there. All of the sudden, you get one little gem of an idea and you keep working on it. You develop it and it develops into a beautiful melody, a beautiful harmony, a beautiful rhythm. And then you arrange it and you rehearse it and you record it. Boy, that is a thrill.
AAJ: Where do you see the future of this music?
HS: I see all of these elements will come into play in the future. I think if you look at music from way back, different elements kind of come together. It's like, well, for example, I don't know if it's a good analogy or not, but yesterday I went out and bought some vegetables. I bought something called broco-cauliflower. It's a hybrid between broccoli and cauliflower. It looks like a cauliflower, but it's green like broccoli. I think that's the way with music. All these different elements mix with each other and you get a hybrid. Eventually, somewhere down the line, it's going to be a hybrid of music with all these different influences coming together. Does that make sense? I hope.
AAJ: And the future for Horace Silver?
HS: I'm working on another album now. I haven't got in the studio, but I'm writing the music for one now, for next year's CD.
AAJ: Another quintet album?
HS: No, it's going to be something a little different.
AAJ: What is jazz to Horace Silver?
HS: It's my life, my love, my everything.
AAJ: Can you imagine doing anything else?
HS: Oh, no, no. Who would want to do anything else?
Horace Silver
Photo by Tom Pich/tompich.com
Bio
Horace Silver was the heart of the hard bop era, helping to form the influential Jazz Messengers and composing many blues and gospel-flavored songs that have become part of the jazz canon, including "Lonely Woman," "Song For My Father," "Señor Blues," "The Preacher," "Nica's Dream," and "Peace." His piano playing was heavily rhythmic, driving his musical colleagues to greater heights in their solos.
Silver was exposed to music at an early age, hearing Cape Verde Islands folk music from his father. Silver later used the island rhythms and flavor to great effect on his 1960s albums Song For My Father and Cape Verdean Blues. He took up the saxophone and piano in high school, and was influenced early on by the blues of Memphis Slim, various boogie woogie piano players, and the bebop pianists Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk. After a 1950 stint backing guest soloist Stan Getz on a gig in Hartford, Connecticut, Silver was enlisted by Getz to join him on tour for the next year. Getz recorded three of Silver's earliest compositions, "Split Kick," "Potter's Luck," and "Penny."
In 1951, he moved to New York and quickly found work with Coleman Hawkins, Bill Harris, Oscar Pettiford, Lester Young, and Art Blakey. In 1952, as a result of a Lou Donaldson record session, he began what became a 28-year relationship with the Blue Note label. Between 1953-55 he played in the groundbreaking band the Jazz Messengers, co-led by Blakey. The band was at the forefront of the hard bop movement that followed bebop. By 1956, Silver formed his own band and Blakey maintained the Jazz Messengers name as his own. Both Silver's band and the Jazz Messengers turned out to be proving grounds for a number of exceptional, aspiring musicians. Among those who passed through his band were Art Farmer, Donald Byrd, Joe Henderson, Blue Mitchell, Charles Tolliver, Stanley Turrentine, Woody Shaw, and Randy and Michael Brecker. Silver's terse, funky playing influenced pianists as disparate as Herbie Hancock and Cecil Taylor. For several years in the 1980s, he recorded on his own Silveto label, writing lyrics to his compositions with a decidedly metaphysical bent. In the 1990s, he returned to the hard bop sound he helped create. His autobiography, Let's Get to the Nitty Gritty, was published in 2006.
Selected Discography
Horace Silver and the Jazz Messengers, Blue Note, 1954
Blowin' the Blues Away, Blue Note, 1959
Song For My Father, Blue Note, 1964
Cape Verdean Blues, Blue Note, 1965
The Hardbop Grandpop, GRP, 1996
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=91687982
Concerts
For Senor Blues: A Horace Silver Tribute
Set List
- "Peace"
- "Senor Blues"
- "Nica's Dream"
- "The Jody Grind"
- "Doodlin'"
- "Filthy McNasty"
- "Song for My Father"
Performers:
- Christian McBride, bass
- Cedar Walton, piano
- Tom Harrell, trumpet
- Charles Tolliver, trumpet
- Randy Brecker, trumpet
- George Coleman, sax
- Bennie Maupin, sax
- Joe Lovano, sax
- Roger Humphries, drums
- Andy Bey, vocals
- Dee Dee Bridgewater, vocals
"Horace Silver's music has always represented what jazz musicians preach but don't necessarily practice, and that's simplicity," McBride says. "It sticks to the memory; it's very singable. It gets in your blood easily; you can comprehend it easily. It's very rooted, very soulful."
In a career that's spanned more than 50 years, Silver has performed with great jazz instrumentalists such as Stan Getz, Lester Young, Miles Davis, and Art Blakey. The pianist was one of the first to combine R&B and gospel with jazz to create a style called hard bop.
A legion of all-stars gathered at Walt Disney Concert Hall to celebrate Silver's music. Artists such as Joe Lovano, Tom Harrell, and Randy Brecker took turns performing some of Silver's compositions for quintet, while pianist Cedar Walton played Silver's part on the piano. The performance also featured vocals from Andy Bey and Dee Dee Bridgewater.
But there was one musician that McBride was determined to add to the evening's line-up: drummer Roger Humphries. McBride says he had to track him down.
"Roger Humphries has been such a legendary underworld figure for so many years," McBride says. "I mean, he's one of those kind of guys where he sounded so great on all those Horace Silver records, but he moved back to Pittsburgh over 30 years ago. And, you know, he just stopped traveling. Nobody had really heard from him, except people in Pittsburgh. So it was time for him to make his comeback on the national scene. So Roger came in and just sounded so good, sounded so good –- I was really honored to play with him."
Silver doesn't play anymore, so he watched from the audience, as many of his former colleagues played in his honor.
"I figured that so many of Horace Silver's former musicians are still alive and sounding great, why not put 'em back together again?" McBride says.
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Horace Silver
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Horace Ward Martin Tavares Silver[note 1] (September 2, 1928 – June 18, 2014) was an American jazz pianist, composer, and arranger, particularly in the hard bop style that he helped pioneer in the 1950s.
After playing tenor saxophone and piano at school in Connecticut, Silver got his break on piano when his trio was recruited by Stan Getz in 1950. Silver soon moved to New York City, where he developed a reputation as a composer and for his bluesy playing. Frequent sideman recordings in the mid-1950s helped further, but it was his work with the Jazz Messengers, co-led by Art Blakey, that brought both his writing and playing most attention. Their Horace Silver and the Jazz Messengers album contained Silver's first hit, "The Preacher". After leaving Blakey in 1956, Silver formed his own quintet, with what became the standard small group line-up of tenor saxophone, trumpet, piano, bass, and drums. Their public performances and frequent recordings for Blue Note Records increased Silver's popularity, even through changes of personnel. His most successful album was Song for My Father, made with two iterations of the quintet in 1963 and 1964.
Several changes occurred in the early 1970s: Silver disbanded his group to spend more time with his wife and to concentrate on composing; he included lyrics in his recordings; and his interest in spiritualism developed. The last two of these were often combined, resulting in commercially unsuccessful releases such as The United States of Mind series. Silver left Blue Note after 28 years, founded his own record label, and scaled back his touring in the 1980s, relying in part on royalties from his compositions for income. In 1993, he returned to major record labels, releasing five albums before gradually withdrawing from public view because of health problems.
As a player, Silver transitioned from bebop to hard bop by stressing melody rather than complex harmony, and combined clean and often humorous right-hand lines with darker notes and chords in a near-perpetual left-hand rumble. His compositions similarly emphasized catchy melodies, but often also contained dissonant harmonies. Many of his varied repertoire of songs, including "Doodlin'", "Peace", and "Sister Sadie", became jazz standards that are still widely played. His considerable legacy encompasses his influence on other pianists and composers, and the development of young jazz talents who appeared in his bands over the course of four decades.
Early life
Silver was born on September 2, 1928, in Norwalk, Connecticut.[2] His mother, Gertrude, was from Connecticut; his father, John Tavares Silver, was born on the island of Maio, Cape Verde, and emigrated to the United States as a young man.[3][note 2] She was a maid and sang in a church choir;[5] he worked for a tire company.[6] Horace had a much older half-brother, Eugene Fletcher, from his mother's first marriage, and was the third child for his parents, after John, who lived to six months, and Maria, who was stillborn.[7]
Silver began playing the piano in his childhood and had classical music lessons.[8] His father taught him the folk music of Cape Verde.[9] At the age of 11, Silver became interested in becoming a musician, after hearing the Jimmie Lunceford orchestra.[10] His early piano influences included the styles of boogie-woogie and the blues, the pianists Nat King Cole, Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, Art Tatum, and Teddy Wilson, as well as some jazz horn players.[11]
Silver graduated from St. Mary's Grammar School in 1943.[12] From ninth grade, he played Lester Young-influenced tenor saxophone in the Norwalk High School band and orchestra.[13] Silver played gigs locally on both piano and tenor saxophone while still at school.[14] He was rejected for military service by a draft board examination that concluded that he had an excessively curved spine,[15] which also interfered with his saxophone playing.[16] Around 1946 he moved to Hartford, Connecticut, to take up a regular job as pianist in a nightclub.[17]
Later life and career
1950–55
Silver's break came in 1950, when his trio backed saxophonist Stan Getz at a club in Hartford: Getz liked Silver's band and recruited them to tour with him.[2] The saxophonist also gave Silver his recording debut, in December 1950, for a quartet date.[18] After about a year, Silver was replaced as pianist in Getz's band and he moved to New York City.[19] There, working as a freelance, he quickly built a reputation, based on his compositions and bluesy playing.[20][21] He worked for short periods with tenor saxophonists Lester Young and Coleman Hawkins,[22] before meeting altoist Lou Donaldson, with whom he developed his bebop understanding.[23] Donaldson made his first recording on Blue Note Records in 1952, with Silver on piano, Gene Ramey on bass and Art Taylor on drums.[23] Later that year, another Blue Note quartet session was booked for Donaldson, with Art Blakey replacing Taylor, but the saxophonist withdrew and producer–owner Alfred Lion offered Silver the studio time for a trio recording.[24] Most of the tracks recorded at it were Silver originals,[2] and he went on to stay with Blue Note as a leader for the following 28 years.[22]
Silver was also busy recording as a sideman. In 1953, he was pianist on sessions led by Sonny Stitt, Howard McGhee, and Al Cohn, and, the following year, he played on albums by Art Farmer, Miles Davis, Milt Jackson and others.[25] Silver won the Down Beat critics' new star award for piano players in 1954,[26] and appeared at the first Newport Jazz Festival, substituting for John Lewis in the Modern Jazz Quartet.[27] Silver's early 1950s recordings demonstrate that Powell was a major pianistic influence, but this had waned by the middle of the decade.[28]
In New York, Silver and Blakey co-founded the Jazz Messengers, a cooperatively-run group that initially recorded under various leaders and names.[29] Their first two studio recordings, with Hank Mobley on tenor saxophone, Kenny Dorham on trumpet, and Doug Watkins on bass, were made in late 1954 and early 1955 and were released as two 10-inch albums under Silver's name,[30] then soon thereafter as the 12-inch Horace Silver and the Jazz Messengers.[2] This album contained Silver's first hit, "The Preacher".[31] Unusually in Silver's career, recordings of concert performances were also released at this time, involving quintets at Birdland (1954) and the Café Bohemia (1955).[32] This set of studio and concert recordings was pivotal in the development and defining of hard bop,[33] which combined elements of blues, gospel, and R&B, with bebop-based harmony and rhythm.[34] The new, funky hard bop was commercially popular,[35] and helped to establish Blue Note as a successful business.[36]
1956–69
Silver's final recordings with the Jazz Messengers were in May 1956.[37] Later that year, he left Blakey after one and a half years,[34][38] in part because of the heroin use prevalent in the band,[2] which Silver did not want to be involved in.[39] Soon after leaving, Silver formed his own long-term quintet, after receiving offers of work from club owners who had heard his albums.[40] The first line-up was Mobley (tenor saxophone), Farmer (trumpet), Watkins (bass), and Louis Hayes (drums).[40] The quintet, with various line-ups, continued to record, helping Silver to build his reputation.[41] He wrote almost all of the material the band played;[41] one of these, "Señor Blues", "officially put Horace Silver on the map", in the view of critic Scott Yanow.[42] In concert, Silver "won over the crowds through his affable personality and all-action approach. He crouched over the piano as the sweat poured out, with his forelock brushing the keys and his feet pounding."[2]
After more than a dozen sideman recording sessions in 1955 and a similar number in 1956–57, Silver's appearance on Sonny Rollins, Vol. 2 in April 1957 was his last for another leader, as he opted to concentrate on his own band.[22][43] For several years from the late 1950s, this contained Junior Cook (tenor saxophone), Blue Mitchell (trumpet), Gene Taylor (bass), and either Hayes or Roy Brooks (drums). Their first album was Finger Poppin', in 1959.[44] Silver's tour of Japan early in 1962[45][46] led to the album The Tokyo Blues, recorded later that year.[47] By the early 1960s, Silver's quintet had influenced numerous bandleaders and was among the most popular performers at jazz clubs.[5] They also released singles, including "Blowin' the Blues Away", "Juicy Lucy", and "Sister Sadie", for jukebox and radio play.[48][49] This quintet's sixth and final album was Silver's Serenade, in 1963.[50]
Around this time, Silver composed music for a television commercial for the drink Tab.[51] Early in 1964, Silver visited Brazil for three weeks,[52] an experience he credited with increasing his interest in his heritage.[51] In the same year, he created a new quintet, featuring Joe Henderson on tenor saxophone and Carmell Jones on trumpet.[53] This band recorded most of Silver's best-known album, Song for My Father,[53] which reached No. 95 on the Billboard 200 in 1965,[9] and was added to the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1999.[54] Recordings and personnel changes – sometimes expanding the band to a sextet – continued in the mid-1960s.[55] In 1966, The Cape Verdean Blues charted at No. 130.[9] The liner notes to the album Serenade to a Soul Sister (1968) included lyrics (written but not sung), indicating a new interest for Silver.[56] His quintet, by then including saxophonist Bennie Maupin, trumpeter Randy Brecker, bassist John Williams, and drummer Billy Cobham, toured parts of Europe in October and November 1968, sponsored by the U.S. government.[57][58] They also recorded one of Silver's last quintet albums for Blue Note, You Gotta Take a Little Love.[59] The Penguin Guide to Jazz's retrospective summary of Silver's main Blue Note recordings was that they were of a consistently high standard: "each album yields one or two themes that haunt the mind, each usually has a particularly pretty ballad, and they all lay back on a deep pile of solid riffs and workmanlike solos."[47]
1970–80
At the end of 1970, Silver broke up his regular band, to concentrate on composing and to spend more time with his wife.[60] He had met Barbara Jean Dove in 1968 and married her two years later.[61] They had a son, Gregory.[62] Silver also became increasingly interested in spiritualism from the early 1970s.[2][63]
Silver included lyrics in more of his compositions at this point, although these were sometimes regarded as doggerel or proselytizing.[2][34] The first album to contain vocals, That Healin' Feelin' (1970[64]), was commercially unsuccessful and Silver had to insist on the support of Blue Note executives to continue releasing music of the same, new style.[34] They agreed to a further two albums that contained vocals and Silver on an RMI electric keyboard; the three were later compiled as The United States of Mind, but were soon dropped from the catalog.[65]
Silver reformed a touring band in 1973.[60] This contained brothers Michael and Randy Brecker.[66] Around this time, according to saxophonist Dave Liebman, Silver's reputation among aspiring young jazz musicians was that he was "a little – not commercial, but not quite the real deal [in jazz]."[67] Silver and his family decided to move to California around 1974, after a burglary at their New York City apartment while they were in Europe.[68] The couple divorced in the mid-1970s.[62]
In 1975, he recorded Silver 'n Brass, the first of five Silver 'n albums, which had other instruments added to the quintet.[69][70] The personnel in his band continued to change, and continued to contain young musicians who made telling contributions.[71] One of these was trumpeter Tom Harrell, who stayed from 1973 to 1977.[71][72] Silver's pattern in the late 1970s was to tour for six months a year.[73] His final Blue Note album was Silver 'n Strings, recorded in 1978 and 1979.[74] His stay was the longest in the label's history.[75] By Silver's account, he left Blue Note after its parent company was sold and the new owners were not interested in promoting jazz.[76] In 1980, he formed the record label Silveto, "dedicated to the spiritual, holistic, self-help elements in music", he commented.[34] Silver also formed Emerald at the same time,[76] a label for straight-ahead jazz, but it was short-lived.[34]
1981–98
The first Silveto release was Guides to Growing Up in 1981, which contained recitations from actor and comedian Bill Cosby.[77][78] Silver stated in the same year that he had reduced his touring to four months a year, so that he could spend more time with his son.[79] This also meant that he had to audition for new band members on an annual basis.[79] He continued to write lyrics for his new albums, although these were not always included on the recordings themselves.[80][81] The song titles reflected his spiritual, self-help thinking; for example, Spiritualizing the Senses from 1983 included "Seeing with Perception" and "Moving Forward with Confidence".[81][82] The next albums were There's No Need to Struggle (1983) and The Continuity of Spirit (1985).[83] His band for performances in the UK and elsewhere in 1987 included trumpeter Dave Douglas and saxophonist Vincent Herring.[84][85] Douglas reported that Silver seldom gave direct verbal guidelines about the music, preferring to lead through playing.[85] A revival of interest in more traditional forms of jazz in the 1980s largely passed Silver by,[86] and his albums on Silveto were not critical successes.[5] Its last release was Music to Ease Your Disease, in 1988.[87] By the early 1990s Silver did not often play at jazz festivals,[88] but his need to tour was limited, as he received steady royalties from his songbook.[22]
Rockin' with Rachmaninoff, a musical work featuring dancers and narration, written by Silver and choreographed and directed by Donald McKayle, was staged in Los Angeles in 1991.[89] A recording of the work was released on Bop City Records in 2003.[90] After a decade of trying to make his independent label work, Silver abandoned it in 1993, and signed to Columbia Records.[91][92] This also signalled a return to mostly instrumental releases.[5] The first of these, It's Got to Be Funky, was a rare big band album.[92][93] Silver came close to dying soon after its release: he was hospitalized with a previously undiagnosed blood clot problem,[94] but went on to record Pencil Packin' Papa, containing a six-piece brass section, in 1994.[95] That year, he also played as a guest on Dee Dee Bridgewater's album Love and Peace: A Tribute to Horace Silver.[96]
Silver received a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Masters award in 1995,[5] and in the following year was added to Down Beat's Jazz Hall of Fame[97] and received an Honorary Doctorate of Music from Berklee College of Music.[98] He moved from Columbia to Impulse! Records, where he made the septet The Hardbop Grandpop (1996) and the quintet A Prescription for the Blues (1997).[99] The former was nominated for two Grammy Awards: as an album for best instrumental performance, individual or group; and for Silver's solo on "Diggin' on Dexter".[100] He was again unwell in 1997, so was unable to tour to promote his records.[94] His final studio recording was made in the following year – Jazz Has a Sense of Humor, for Verve Records.[101] One continuation from his early career was that Silver recorded his own compositions for his later albums and they were typically new, rather than re-workings of previous releases.[102]
1999–2014
Silver performed in public for the first time in four years in 2004, appearing with an octet at the Blue Note Jazz Club in New York.[103] He was rarely seen in public after this.[104] In 2005, the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences awarded him its President's Merit Award.[5][54] In 2006, Let's Get to the Nitty Gritty: The Autobiography of Horace Silver, was published by the University of California Press.[105] A 2008 release, Live at Newport '58, from a Silver concert fifty years earlier, reached the top ten of Billboard's jazz chart.[106]
In 2007, it was revealed that Silver had Alzheimer's disease.[104][107][108] He died of natural causes in New Rochelle, New York, on June 18, 2014, aged 85.[34] He was survived by his son.[9]
Playing style
Silver's early recordings displayed "a crisp, chipper but slightly wayward style, idiosyncratic enough to take him out of the increasingly stratified realms of bebop".[109] In contrast to the more elaborate bebop piano, he stressed straightforward melodies rather than complex harmonies, and included short riffs and motifs that came and went over the course of a solo.[5][110] While his right hand provided cleanly played lines, his left added bouncy, darker notes and chords in a near-perpetual rumble.[37][110] Silver "always played percussively, rarely suggesting excessive force on the keys but mustering a crisp [...] sound."[110] His fingering was idiosyncratic, but this added to the individuality of his pianism, particularly to the authenticity of the blues facets of his playing.[111] The Penguin Guide to Jazz gave the overall assessment that "Blues and gospel-tinged devices and percussive attacks give his methods a more colourful style, and a generous good humour gives all his records an upbeat feel."[109] Part of the humor was Silver's predilection for quoting other pieces of music in his own playing.[112]
Writer and academic Thomas Owens stated that characteristics of Silver's solos were: "the short, simple phrases that all derive from the three-beat figure ♩ ♩ | ♩, or a variant of it; the pianist's 'blue fifth' (those rapid slurs up to [... a flattened fifth]); and the low tone cluster used strictly as a rhythmic punctuation".[112] He also employed blues and minor pentatonic scales.[113] Music journalist Marc Myers observed that "Silver's advantage was pianistic grace and a keen awareness that by resolving dark, minor-passages in airy, ascending and descending major-key chord configurations, the result could produce an exciting and uplifting feeling."[41] In his accompanying of a soloing saxophonist or trumpeter, Silver was also distinctive: "Rather than reacting to the soloist's melody and waiting for melodic holes to fill, he typically plays background patterns similar to the background riffs that saxes or brasses play behind soloists in big bands."[113]
Compositions
Early in his career, Silver composed contrafacts and blues-based melodies (including "Doodlin'" and "Opus de Funk").[102] The latter was "a typical Silver creation: advanced in its harmonic structure and general approach but with a catchy tune and finger-snapping beat."[101] His innovative incorporation of gospel and blues sounds into jazz compositions took place while they were also being added to rock 'n' roll and R&B pieces.[114]
Silver soon expanded the range and style of his writing,[102] which grew to include "funky groove tunes, gentle mood pieces, vamp songs, outings in 3/4 and 6/8 time, Latin workouts of various stripes, up-tempo jam numbers, and examples of almost any and every other kind of approach congruent with the hard bop aesthetic."[115] An unusual case is "Peace", a ballad that prioritizes a calm mood over melodic or harmonic effects.[116] Owens observed that "Many of his compositions contain no folk blues or gospel music elements, but instead have highly chromatic melodies supported by richly dissonant harmonies".[113] The compositions and arrangements were also designed to make Silver's typical line-up sound larger than a quintet.[117]
Silver himself commented that inspiration came from multiple sources: "I'm inspired by nature and by some of the people I meet and some of the events that take place in my life. I'm inspired by my mentors. I'm inspired by various religious doctrines. [...] Many of my songs are impressed on my mind just before I wake up. Others I get from just doodlin' around on the piano".[118] He also wrote that, "when I wake up with a melody in my head, I jump right out of bed before I forget it and run to the piano and my tape recorder. I play the melody with my right hand and then harmonize it with my left. I put it down on my tape recorder, and then I work on getting a bridge or eightbar release for the tune."[119]
Influence and legacy
Silver was among the most influential jazz musicians of his lifetime.[101] Grove Music Online describes his legacy as at least fourfold: as a pioneer of hard bop; as a user of what became the archetypal quintet instrumentation of tenor saxophone, trumpet, piano, bass, and drums; as a developer of young musicians who went on to become important players and bandleaders; and for his skill as a composer and arranger.[120]
Silver was also an influence as a pianist: his first Blue Note recording as leader "redefined the jazz piano, which up until then was largely modeled on the dexterity and relentless attack of Bud Powell", in Myers' words.[41] As early as 1956, Silver's piano playing was described by Down Beat as "a key influence on a large segment of modern jazz pianists."[22] This went on to include Ramsey Lewis, Les McCann, Bobby Timmons,[120] and Cecil Taylor, who was impressed by Silver's aggressive style.[2]
Silver's legacy as a composer may be greater than as a pianist, because his works, many of which are jazz standards, continue to be performed and recorded worldwide.[22] As a composer, he led a return to an emphasis on melody, observed critic John S. Wilson: for a long time, jazz musicians had written contrafacts of great technical complexity, but "Silver wrote originals that were not only actually original but memorably melodic, presaging a gradual return to melodic creativity among writing jazzmen."[121]
Discography
Bibliography
- Cook, Richard (2003). Blue Note Records: The Biography. Justin, Charles & Co. ISBN 978-1-932112-10-8.
- Cook, Richard; Morton, Brian (2008). The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings (9th ed.). Penguin. ISBN 978-0-14-103401-0.
- Gioia, Ted (2012). The Jazz Standards – A Guide to the Repertoire. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-993739-4.
- Owens, Thomas (1996). Bebop – The Music and Its Players. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-510651-0.
- Shipton, Alyn (2001). A New History of Jazz. Continuum. ISBN 978-0-8264-4754-8.
- Silver, Horace (2006). Let's Get to the Nitty Gritty: The Autobiography of Horace Silver. University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-25392-6.
Further reading
- Silver, Horace (1995). The Art of Small Jazz Combo Playing. Hal Leonard. ISBN 978-0-7935-5688-5.
External links
- Horace Silver Discography at the Hard Bop Home Page
- Listening In: An Interview with Horace Silver by Bob Rosenbaum, Los Angeles, December 1981 (PDF file)
- "The Dozens: Twelve Essential Horace Silver Recordings" by Bill Kirchner
Horace Silver - "Song for My Father":
Horace Silver - "Señor Blues"
COMPOSITION BY HORACE SILVER
HORACE SILVER: PIANO
JUNIOR COOK: TENOR SAXOPHONE
BLUE MITCHELL: TRUMPET
GENE TAYLOR: BASS
LOUIS HAYES: DRUMS
Live in concert:
"Senor Blues" by Horace Silver 1959:
In
the fifties and sixties the Netherlands as well as the Scandinavian
countries had an enormous attraction for American jazz musicians. It
appeared that they were much more appreciated and also, there were no
racial barriers for so many to overcome in their homeland.
We
see here a clip with the Horace Silver Quintet in 1959 recorded, in what
looks to me the Singer Theatre in Laren, about 15 minutes on a bicycle
from my home in Bussum. In 1951, Horace Silver (born in 1929) moved to
New York City where he accompanied saxophonists Coleman Hawkins, Lester
Young and many other legends. In the following year, he met the
executives at Blue Note while working as a sideman for saxophonist Lou
Donaldson. This meeting led to Silver signing with the label where he
would remain until 1980. He also collaborated with Art Blakey in forming
the Jazz Messengers during the early 1950s (which Blakey would continue
to lead after Silver formed his own quintet in 1956).
During
these years, Silver helped create the rhythmically forceful branch of
jazz known as "hard bop" He based much of his own writing on blues and
gospel---the latter is particularly prominent on one of his biggest
tunes, "The Preacher." While his compositions at this time featured
surprising tempo shifts and a range of melodic ideas, they immediately
caught the attention of a wide audience. Silver's own piano playing
easily shifted from aggressively percussive to lushly romantic within
just a few bars. At the same time, his sharp use of repetition was funky
even before that word could be used in polite company. Along with
Silver's own work, his bands often featured such rising jazz stars as
saxophonists Junior Cook and Hank Mobley, trumpeter Blue Mitchell, and
drummer Louis Hayes.
Horace Silver - "Serenade to a Soul Sister"
(Composition by Horace Silver, 1968):
Horace Silver - piano
Charles Tolliver - trumpet
Stanley Turrentine - tenor saxophone
Bob Cranshaw - bass, electric bass
Mickey Roker - drums
Horace Silver - "Filthy McNasty"
(Composition by Horace Silver):
Horace Silver - piano; Blue Mitchell - piano; Junior Cook - tenor sax; Gene Taylor - Bass; Roy Brooks - drums.
“NUTVILLE" (1968):
Composition by Horace Silver
Horace Silver Quintet:
Piano: Horace Silver Bass: Bob Cranshaw Drums: Roger Humphries Trumpet: Woody Shaw Tenor Saxophone: Joe Henderson
Composer: Horace Silver
Horace Silver - "The Jody Grind":
Horace Silver (piano)
* Woody Shaw (trumpet)
* James Spaulding (flute, alto sax)
* Tyrone Washington (tenor sax)
* Larry Ridley (bass)
* Roger Humphries (drums)
Recorded on 1966 for Blue Note
HORACE SILVER QUINTET-- "Let's Get To The Nitty Gritty" (Composition by Horace Silver Blue Note 1963; remastered in 1997):
"Cool Eyes" - Horace Silver Quintet 1958:
Live in concert in Denmark
The enormously popular Horace Silver Quintet play their signature tune, "Cool Eyes" during a 1959 broadcast for the Dutch KRO Company (KRO stands for Catholic Radio Broadcaster). These broadcasts were usually done during the day in a theater close to Hilversum, the Dutch radio and TV town. I vaguely remember that the public during these radio- and TV performances was usually invited and tickets were free. When one looks at this audience there is very little that would inspire any musician and maybe that is why the band had their backs towards that audience.
The music played is certainly inspired, well recorded and with great close-ups of the musicians.
Pianist Horace Silver together with trumpeter Blue Mitchell, tenor saxophonist Junior Cook, bassist Gene Tailor and drummer Louis Hayes play their new style of hard bop with great flair and skill. The instrumentation of his quintet (trumpet, tenor sax, piano, double bass, and drums) served as a model for small jazz groups from the mid-1950s until the late 1960s.
Related Articles A Fireside Chat with Horace Silver (2003) A Fireside Chat With Horace Silver (2001) My Conversation with Horace Silver (1999)
Discuss Horace Silver and his music... Horace Silver Corner Horace Silver Discography