Horace Silver

From The Guardian

Horace Silver: the perfect musician for the jazz averse

The pianist, who died on Wednesday aged 85, was one of the most accessible and exuberant of jazz's bebop artists, writes John Fordham, who picks his five favourite Silver tracks

 

He focused jazz on its fundamentals. Horace Silver, c1950. Photo by Tom Copi/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

From the mid-1950s on, the perfect antidote for jazz fans to the grumbles of the jazz-averse (that it was a wilfully obscure music, made by introverts who didn’t know the meaning of "entertainment") was to spin them a Horace Silver record. Silver, who died on Wednesday at the age of 85, was one of the most accessible and exuberant of all the jazz artists inspired by the revolutionary bebop movement of the 1940s. If some found bop byzantine and baffling, Silver’s compositions and piano-playing began offering arrow-straight routes through it in the following decade - characterised by R&B and gospel-inflected tunes, earthily funky grooves, and powerful soloing that rarely let the main theme slip far out of earshot. He was also powerfully influenced by the Afro-Portuguese music of the Cape Verde Islands, his father’s birthplace.
Silver’s method came to be known as "hard-bop", and its whiplash backbeats, rootsy rhythms and anthemically chant-like songs made it one of the most widely popular of all jazz styles. He wasn’t its only architect, but he was one of its most widely influential - because he not only focused jazz on fundamentals, but defined the classic small-band lineup of the 50s and 60s (trumpet, sax, piano, bass and drums), talent-spotted rising stars (notably trumpeters Donald Byrd and Dave Douglas and saxist Joe Henderson), and in developing a largely original repertoire, gave the jazz world a raft of new standard-songs still widely played today. Moreover, Silver was the co-founder - with drummer Art Blakey - of the famous Jazz Messengers, the archetypal hard-bop band that under Blakey’s later leadership was to include Wayne Shorter and a teenage Wynton Marsalis in its three decades on the road.
With his genial manner, bent-double playing posture and unorthodox clawlike fingering (the better to hit emphatic chords and make individual notes crack like gunshots), Silver was also a riveting presence on a stage. He undoubtedly turned on many jazz players and listeners who discovered the music over the past half century, and it’s hard to imagine the dancefloor-oriented "acid jazz" movement of the late 1980s happening without him.

Opus de Funk was Silver’s first big compositional success in 1953, when few song titles would have mentioned that f-word. The influence of Bud Powell and the first bebop piano generation is also pretty unmistakeable, but so is Silver’s gleeful directness.

Silver Doodlin': Two years later, and the first Jazz Messengers form, with Blakey on drums, trumpeter Kenny Dorham, saxophonist Hank Mobley, and bassist Doug Watkins. Here’s that band on Silver’s Doodlin’, with the man himself on piano.

Sister Sadie: Blowin’ The Blues Away, in 1959, was one of Silver’s finest and most varied albums for the Blue Note label, mixing folk elements, subtle ballads, and soul-jazz. One of the composer’s most-played and still current examples of the latter (it’s still in composer Mike Gibbs’ band-book today) is Sister Sadie.

Señor Blues: But if earthy and urbanised funk and blues were central to Silver’s music, there was a cooler sensuality running through it too, and some of the most attractive developments in the Latin-jazz of the 1950s and ‘60s were his. As a child, the pianist had also heard Cape Verdean folk music played by his father. Here are two eulogies to all that, Silver’s famous Senor Blues (1956)...

... and the title track from Song For My Father (1964), with the magisterial presence of the late Joe Henderson on tenor sax.