Horace Silver

Horace Silver
Silver by Dmitri Savitski, 1989
Background information
Born	(1928-09-02)September 2, 1928 Norwalk, Connecticut, U.S.
Died	New Rochelle, New York, U.S.
Genres	Jazz, hard bop, modal jazz, mainstream jazz, soul jazz, jazz fusion, post-bop
Occupation(s)	Musician, composer, arranger
Instruments	Piano
Years active	1946–2004
Labels	Blue Note, Silveto, Emerald, Columbia, Impulse!, Verve
Associated acts	Art Blakey, Junior Cook, Bob Cranshaw, Miles Davis, Art Farmer, Joe Henderson, Blue Mitchell, Hank Mobley, Woody Shaw
Website	Official website

Horace Silver (September 2, 1928 – June 18, 2014) was an American jazz pianist, composer, and arranger. He is known for his distinctive playing style and pioneering compositional contributions to hard bop. Between 1952 and 1979 he made more than twenty albums for Blue Note Records. His stay was the longest in the label's history.

Early life

Silver was born on September 2, 1928, in Norwalk, Connecticut. 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. She was a maid and sang in a church choir; he worked for a tire company. 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 6 months, and Maria, who was stillborn.

Silver began playing the piano in his childhood and had classical music lessons. His father taught him the folk music of Cape Verde. At the age of 11 Silver became interested in becoming a musician, after hearing the Jimmie Lunceford orchestra. His early piano influences included the styles of boogie-woogie and the blues, the pianists Bud Powell, Art Tatum, Teddy Wilson, Nat "King" Cole, and Thelonious Monk, as well as some jazz horn players. Silver graduated from St. Mary's Grammar School in 1943. From ninth grade he played tenor saxophone in the Norwalk High School band and orchestra, influenced by Lester Young. Silver played gigs locally on both piano and tenor saxophone while still at school. Around 1946 he moved to Hartford, Connecticut to take up a regular job as pianist in a nightclub.

Later life and career

1950–55

Silver's big break came in 1950, when his trio backed saxophonist Stan Getz at a club in Hartford: Getz liked Silver's band and took them on the road. The saxophonist also gave Silver his recording debut, in December 1950, for the Stan Getz Quartet album. After about a year, Silver was replaced as pianist in Getz's band and he moved to New York City. There, working as a freelance, he quickly built a reputation, based on his compositions and bluesy playing. He worked for short periods with tenor saxophonists Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young, before meeting alto saxophonist Lou Donaldson, with whom he developed his bebop understanding. Donaldson made his first recording on Blue Note Records in 1952, with Silver on piano, Gene Ramey on bass and Art Taylor on drums. 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. Most of the tracks recorded were Silver compositions, and he went on to stay with Blue Note as a leader for the following 28 years.

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 by Art Farmer, Miles Davis, Milt Jackson and others the following year. He also won the Down Beat critics' new star award for piano players in 1954, and appeared at the first Newport Jazz Festival, substituting for John Lewis in the Modern Jazz Quartet.

In New York, Silver and Blakey co-founded the Jazz Messengers, a cooperatively-run group that initially recorded under various leaders and names. 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, then soon thereafter as the 12-inch Horace Silver and the Jazz Messengers. This album contained Silver's first hit, "The Preacher". Unusually in Silver's career, recordings of concert performances were also released at this time, involving quintets from Birdland (1954) and the Café Bohemia (1955). This set of studio and concert recordings was pivotal in the development and defining of hard bop, which combined elements of blues, gospel, and R&B with bebop-based harmony and rhythm. The new, funky hard bop was commercially popular, and helped to establish Blue Note as a successful business.

1956–69

Silver's final recordings with the Jazz Messengers were in May 1956. Later that year, Silver left Blakey after one and a half years, in part because of the heroin use prevalent in the band, which Silver did not want to be involved in. Soon after leaving, Silver formed his own long-term quintet, after receiving offers of work from club owners who had heard his albums. The first line-up was Mobley (tenor saxophone), Farmer (trumpet), Watkins (bass), and Louis Hayes (drums). The quintet, with various line-ups, continued to record, helping Silver to build his reputation. He wrote almost all of the material they played, and, in concert, he "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."

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. 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', from 1959. Silver's quintet became "one of the most popular nightclub and concert attractions in jazz, and an inspiration for countless other bandleaders" by the early 1960s. They also released singles, including "Blowin' the Blues Away", "Juicy Lucy", and "Sister Sadie", for jukebox and radio play. Silver's tour of Japan early in 1962 led to the album The Tokyo Blues, recorded later that year. This quintet's sixth and final album was Silver's Serenade, in 1963.

Around this time, Silver composed for a television commercial for the drink Tab. Early in 1964 Silver visited Brazil for three weeks, an experience he credited with increasing his interest in his heritage. In the same year, he created a new quintet, featuring Joe Henderson on tenor saxophone and Carmell Jones on trumpet. This band recorded most of Silver's best-known album, Song for My Father, which reached No. 95 on the Billboard 200 in 1965, and was added to the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1999. Recordings and personnel changes – sometimes expanding the band to a sextet – continued in the mid-1960s. In 1966 The Cape Verdean Blues charted at No. 130. The liner notes to the album Serenade to a Soul Sister (1968) included lyrics (written but not sung), indicating a new interest for Silver. Silver's quintet, by now including Bennie Maupin, Randy Brecker, and Billy Cobham, toured parts of Europe in October and November 1968, sponsored by the U.S. government. They also recorded one of Silver's last quintet albums for Blue Note, You Gotta Take a Little Love. 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."

1970–80

Silver at Keystone Korner, San Francisco in 1978

At the end of 1970 Silver broke up his regular band, to concentrate on composing and to spend more time with his wife. He had met Barbara Jean Dove in 1968 and married her two years later. They had a son, Gregory. Silver also became increasingly interested in spiritualism from the early 1970s.

Silver included lyrics in more of his compositions at this point, although these were sometimes regarded as doggerel or proselytizing. That Healin' Feelin' (1970), the first of a trio of records later compiled as The United States of Mind, was commercially unsuccessful and Silver had to insist on the support of Blue Note to continue releasing music of the same, new style. He used an RMI electric keyboard for these recordings.

Silver reformed a touring band in 1973. This contained brothers Michael and Randy Brecker. 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]." Silver and his family decided to move to California around 1974, after a burglary at their New York City apartment. The couple divorced in the mid-1970s.

In 1975, he recorded Silver 'n Brass, the first of five Silver 'n albums, which had other instruments added to the quintet. The personnel in his band continued to change, and continued to contain young musicians who made telling contributions. One of these was trumpeter Tom Harrell, who stayed from 1973 to 1977. Silver's pattern in the late 1970s was to tour for six months a year. His final Blue Note album was Silver 'n Strings, recorded in 1978 and 1979. By Silver's account, he left Blue Note after its parent company was sold and the new owners were not interested in promoting jazz. In 1980 he formed Silveto, his own record label, "dedicated to the spiritual, holistic, self-help elements in music", he commented. Silver also formed Emerald at the same time, a label for straight-ahead jazz, but it was short-lived.

1981–2014

Silver in Berkeley, California, 1983

In 1981 Silver stated that he had reduced his touring to four months a year, so that he could spend more time with his son. This also meant that he had to audition for new band members on an annual basis. He continued to include lyrics in his new albums, although these were not always included on the recordings themselves. The song titles reflected his spiritual, self-help thinking: Spiritualizing the Senses from 1983 included "Seeing with Perception" and "Moving Forward with Confidence". His band for performances in the UK and elsewhere in 1987 included trumpeter Dave Douglas and saxophonist Vincent Herring. Douglas reported that Silver seldom gave direct verbal guidelines about the music, preferring to lead through playing. A revival of interest in more traditional forms of jazz in the 1980s largely passed Silver by, and his releases on Silveto were not critical successes. By the early 1990s Silver did not often play at jazz festivals.

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. A recording of the work was released on Bop City Records in 2003. After a decade of trying to make his independent label work, Silver abandoned it in 1993, and signed to Columbia Records. This also signalled a return to mostly instrumental releases. The first of these, It's Got to Be Funky, was a rare big band album. Silver came close to dying soon after its release: he was hospitalized with a previously undiagnosed blood clot problem, but went on to record Pencil Packin' Papa, containing a six-piece brass section, in 1994. That year, he also played as a guest on Dee Dee Bridgewater's album Love and Peace: A Tribute to Horace Silver.

Silver received a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Masters award in 1995, and in the following year was added to Down Beat magazine's Jazz Hall of Fame. He moved from Columbia to Impulse!, where he made the septet The Hardbop Grandpop (1996) and the quintet A Prescription for the Blues (1997). The Hardbop Grandpop 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". He was again unwell in 1997, so was unable to tour to promote his records. His final studio recording was made in the following year – Jazz Has a Sense of Humor, for Verve. 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.

Silver performed in public for the first time in four years in 2004, appearing with an octet at the Blue Note in New York. In 2005, the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences awarded him its President's Merit Award. In 2006 his autobiography, Let's Get to the Nitty Gritty: The Autobiography of Horace Silver, was published by the University of California Press. A 2008 release, Live at Newport '58, from a concert fifty years earlier, reached the top ten of Billboard's jazz chart. Silver died of natural causes in New Rochelle, New York on June 18, 2014. He was survived by his son.

Influences and playing style

Silver was influenced by a wide range of musical styles, notably gospel music, African music, and Latin American music, and sometimes ventured into the soul jazz genre. His early 1950s recordings demonstrate that Powell was a major pianistic influence, but this waned by the middle of the decade.

Silver liked to quote other pieces of music in his own playing and often recreated famous solos in his original pieces as something of a tribute to the greats who influenced him. Peter Keepnews commented that, "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. [...] 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." Writing for The Huffington Post, Chris Talbot described Silver as "an innately funky player with a keen sense of style".

The Penguin Guide to Jazz commented that the earlier Silver recordings had "a crisp, chipper but slightly wayward style, idiosyncratic enough to take him out of the increasingly stratified realms of bebop piano" and 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." Marc Myers observed that "For jazz listeners, 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." His left hand provided "a constant grumbling behind his clearly articulated right-hand lines." Richard Cook reported that his left-hand playing added "notes of darkness to the innate bounce that he liked to put into his bass parts. Instead of the sometimes fulsome decoration of bebop piano, Silver preferred a simpler, more open playing in the right hand, with little riffs and figures making playful entries and exits as a solo would progress. He always played percussively, rarely suggesting excessive force on the keys but mustering a crisp [...] sound."

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". He also employed blues and minor-pentatonic scales. "Silver's comping for trumpeters and saxophonists is a distinctive aspect of his playing. 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." His fingering was idiosyncratic, but this added to the individuality of his pianism, particularly to the authenticity of the blues facets of his playing.

Compositions

Talbot wrote that Silver "incorporated the blues and gospel into his compositions, modernizing jazz at the same time those sounds were transforming other genres like rock 'n' roll and R&B." "Opus De Funk" "is a typical Silver creation: advanced in its harmonic structure and general approach but with a catchy tune and finger-snapping beat." An exception is "Peace", a ballad that prioritizes a calm mood over melodic or harmonic effects.

Early in his career, Silver composed blues-based melodies (including "Doodlin' and "Opus de Funk") and contrafacts, but he soon expanded the range and style of his writing. His compositions included "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." 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". The compositions and arrangements were also designed to make the band sound larger than a quintet.

Silver himself commented that "I look for inspiration all around me. 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. These are just some of the ways that inspiration comes to me from outer sources. Many of my songs are impressed on my mind just before I wake up. Others I get from just doodlin' around on the piano until I luck up on something"; and "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." His compositions, many of them jazz standards, continue to be played widely.

Legacy

The Horace Silver Trio contained "compositions that combined the mischief of bop and the two-handed syncopation of gospel, resulting in what would become known as funk. The album redefined the jazz piano, which up until then was largely modeled on the dexterity and relentless attack of Bud Powell." 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." His music influenced such pianists as Bobby Timmons, Les McCann, and Ramsey Lewis. Cecil Taylor was also influenced by Silver's aggressive approach.

Silver's band introduced many jazz musicians who went on to become leading figures. BBC News said: "Horace Silver has been described as one of the most influential musicians in the history of jazz." Ramsey Lewis, a pianist influenced by Silver, wrote that "Horace Silver was one of the hardest swinging piano players in jazz, both as a section player and a soloist."

In an interview for NPR in 2008, jazz bassist Christian McBride said: "Horace Silver's music has always represented what jazz musicians preach but don't necessarily practice, and that's simplicity. [...] 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." The obituary in The Daily Telegraph summarised Silver as "one of the most exhilarating and influential forces in jazz over the last 65 years. His infectious Latin and hard-bop inflected tunes provided an alternative to the languorous 'cool' epitomised by Miles Davis; yet, like Davis, many of his popular and memorable compositions have become 'standards' in the post-war playbook."

As a composer, Silver led a return to a stress on melody: "after a long period when jazz 'originals' were almost invariably technical exercises based on the chord structure of some favored popular tune, Silver wrote originals that were not only actually original but memorably melodic, presaging a gradual return to melodic creativity among writing jazzmen." Silver's talent did not go unnoticed among rock musicians who bore jazz influences: Steely Dan had a No. 4 hit in 1974 when they copied the introductory riff "Rikki Don't Lose That Number" from the intro of "Song for My Father".

Discography

Main article: Horace Silver discography

References

Bibliography

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