Horace Silver
A pianist who took the island songs ringing through his father's kitchen and the blues of the church, set them for five instruments, and showed in his own playing what the words hard bop truly meant.
At a glance 🔭💭
Some coordinates adapted from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0) · Pleiades (CC BY 3.0)
Those beside him ⏳🌊
- FamilyJohn Tavares Silver
His father, who came over from Cape Verde; the island folk songs he played in the kitchen became the roots of "Song for My Father."
- InfluenceBud Powell
The bebop pianist Silver took as his model at the keyboard, whose nimble right-hand phrases melted into his own playing.
- ColleagueStan Getz
In 1950 in Hartford, he hired Silver's entire trio and carried him onto the national stage.
- PatronAlfred Lion
As head of Blue Note, he paid even for rehearsals, giving Silver nearly 30 years to refine his own music.
- ColleagueArt Blakey
The drummer with whom Silver founded the Jazz Messengers, he carried on the name after Silver left and kept their friendship intact.
- ColleagueJoe Henderson
A mainstay of the mid-1960s band, he left the most talked-about tenor solo on “Song for My Father.”
I. The kitchen in Norwalk · 1928–1949 (age 0–21)
(Norwalk) He was born in September 1928 in Norwalk, Connecticut. His full name was Horace Ward Martin Tavares Silver. His father, John Tavares Silver, was an immigrant from the island of Maio in Cape Verde, then a Portuguese colony (today the Republic of Cabo Verde), and worked in a Norwalk factory. His mother, Gertrude Edmonds, was a native of New Canaan, Connecticut. He lost his mother at a young age, and he wrote in his memoir that he spent the rest of his childhood at his father's side. (Island songs) On weekends his father and relatives and neighbors from Cape Verde played the folk songs of home on violin, guitar and mandolin, dancing in the kitchen. Silver named these kitchen parties as his earliest memory of music. The minor-key melancholy and swaying rhythms that later seeped into his tunes never strayed far from that memory. (Lunceford) Around the age of eleven, he recalled, he heard the Jimmie Lunceford orchestra play at a nearby amusement park and resolved to become a musician. He took piano lessons while playing tenor saxophone in high school. On saxophone he looked to Lester Young; on piano, to boogie-woogie and the blues, and to Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk. Powell's quick, nimble right hand and Monk's angular harmonies mingled in his hands with the earthy smell of the blues. (Hartford) In the late 1940s he worked the clubs of Hartford and the surrounding Connecticut area, switching between piano and saxophone. A house band in a provincial city did not pay much. But accompanying the touring stars became a school in which he learned repertoire and the craft of accompaniment with his own body.
II. From Hartford to Birdland · 1950–1953 (age 22–25)
(Getz) In 1950 Stan Getz came to sit in at the Club Sundown in Hartford. Silver's trio, the house band—Joe Calloway on bass, Walter Bolden on drums—backed him, and Getz hired the whole trio on the spot. For a little over a year the twenty-two-year-old Silver toured with Getz, experiencing the national stage and the recording studio for the first time. Several of his own compositions also made it onto Getz's records. (New York) Leaving the Getz band in 1951, he moved to New York and settled there. Working as house pianist at the Monday jam sessions at Birdland, he shared the stage with elders such as Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young and the bassist Oscar Pettiford. Playing piano in the band of Lester Young, whose records he had sung along to as a teenager, meant a great deal to him. Big-city living was expensive, and he took whatever work came his way. (Blue Note) The turning point came in 1952, when he took part in a Blue Note recording by the alto saxophonist Lou Donaldson. When Donaldson was unable to make his next session, the label's head, Alfred Lion, reportedly gave the studio time to Silver. Art Blakey sat at the drums. The relationship with Blue Note that began this way lasted nearly 30 years, until around 1980. (Rehearsal) Lion was a rare producer who paid for rehearsals before a recording. Silver gained the time to write his tunes and work them out with the band in advance. This way of working did much to make his music lean on well-built arrangements, introductions and background figures rather than on the accidents of improvisation.
III. The Messengers · 1954–1956 (age 26–28)
(Birdland) In February 1954 Silver took part in a live recording at Birdland as a member of a quintet led by Blakey. Clifford Brown was on trumpet, Lou Donaldson on alto, Curly Russell on bass. Released by Blue Note as “A Night at Birdland,” the recording included Silver's tunes “Quicksilver” and “Split Kick,” and it would later be counted among the starting points of hard bop. (Miles) That same year he was also called in for Miles Davis's Prestige recordings. In the “Walkin'” session in April and a June session with Sonny Rollins, his blues-drenched accompaniment showed another path in an age when cool, refined cool jazz was in fashion. Many hold that Silver's comping played a part in Davis's comeback. (Messengers) In November 1954 and February 1955, Silver recorded for Blue Note with Blakey, Kenny Dorham on trumpet, Hank Mobley on tenor and Doug Watkins on bass. These five became the cooperative band the Jazz Messengers. Lion hesitated over “The Preacher,” as plain as a gospel hymn, finding it too old-fashioned, but Silver recalled that he insisted and it went on the record. The tune sold on jukeboxes and made the band's name. (Independence) In 1956 Silver left the Messengers. In his memoir he wrote that he could no longer bear the growing friction with the police over the heroin problem around the band. He himself never touched heroin. Blakey took over the band's name and led it for more than 30 years, and the two men's friendship lasted to the end.
It is a Miles Davis date, but on this recording, which restored the weight of the blues in the age of cool jazz, Silver's comping rings out like a forecast of hard bop.
- The piece unfolds a 12-bar blues (a blues form that repeats a 12-bar frame) at a relaxed medium tempo for over 13 minutes. Unlike bebop, which showed off its speed, its heart is a weight that seems to walk one step at a time.
- Percy Heath's bass, striding along one note to a beat (walking bass), and Kenny Clarke's cymbals lay the floor, and over it Davis, J. J. Johnson on trombone and Lucky Thompson on tenor take their solos in turn.
- Silver's accompaniment (comping) is worth hearing on its own. He tosses short blues phrases into the soloist's breathing spaces, supporting them as if in conversation.
- Recorded in April 1954 at Rudy Van Gelder's studio in Hackensack, New Jersey. Critics often name this session as an early manifesto of hard bop.
The first record of the cooperative band he founded with Blakey; “The Preacher,” over which Lion had hesitated, ended up making the band's name.
- In “The Preacher,” trumpet and tenor sing a hymn-plain major-key melody with one voice (unison), while the piano pounds out chords like a church accompanist. Choosing a tune anyone could hum along to over intricate bebop was radical for its time.
- “Doodlin'” is a tune in which the horns trade lines at a leisurely pace over a blues frame. Later, with lyrics by Jon Hendricks, it was sung as well.
- Blakey's drums drive the soloists up into the next chorus with snare rolls that surge in behind beats 2 and 4 (press rolls).
- Recorded in two sessions, in November 1954 and February 1955, at Van Gelder's Hackensack studio. Listen alongside the fast bebop number “Room 608” and you can hear how this band, rooted in bebop, turned toward the blues and gospel.
IV. Five instruments · 1956–1963 (age 28–35)
(Quintet) On his own, Silver made the quintet of trumpet·tenor saxophone·piano·bass·drums his basic framework for life. Early on, Art Farmer, Donald Byrd, Hank Mobley, Doug Watkins and the drummer Louis Hayes came and went. “Señor Blues,” from “6 Pieces of Silver,” recorded in November 1956, was his first popular success. (Steady lineup) From 1958 a lineup of Blue Mitchell on trumpet, Junior Cook on tenor, Gene Taylor on bass and Louis Hayes (later Roy Brooks) on drums held together for nearly six years. Touring and recording again and again with the same people, the band absorbed, as naturally as breathing, the short repeated figures laid behind the solos (riffs) and intricate breaks. “Blowin' the Blues Away” (1959), “Horace-Scope” (1960) and the live recording at the Village Gate (1961) came out of this period. (Funky) Critics called the earthy smell of the blues and church music that steeped his music funky. Tunes such as “Sister Sadie” and “Filthy McNasty” entered his peers' repertoires. “Nica's Dream” was dedicated to Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter, known as the patron of Thelonious Monk. (Copyright) What sustained him financially was his publishing. He founded Ecaroh Music—Horace spelled backward—and managed the copyrights to his own tunes himself. It was a rare choice at a time when handing publishing rights to a label or a manager was common. Whenever his tunes were played by others—as when Ray Charles recorded “Doodlin'”—the royalties came back to him. (Japan) After a 1962 tour of Japan, he recorded “The Tokyo Blues,” capturing his impressions of the country. Travel was always a channel that brought him new rhythms.
The album of the first quintet he formed after leaving the Messengers; its track “Señor Blues” was his first popular success.
- “Señor Blues” sets a minor blues over a meter that counts each bar in two groups of three (6/8 time). Many have remarked that its rhythm, rolling like Latin music, recalls the island music of his father.
- While the piano's left hand and the bass stubbornly repeat the same figure, Donald Byrd on trumpet and Hank Mobley on tenor play a dark, sticky theme together.
- Louis Hayes's drums move between Latin rhythm and swing (a push and pull created by slightly dragging the back half of the beat), giving the tune its tension.
- Recorded in November 1956 at Van Gelder's studio. Silver cherished the tune enough to record it again later as a song, with lyrics.
A record of the Mitchell·Cook lineup, together for nearly six years, at its tightest, and the best demonstration of what the word funky actually means.
- In “Sister Sadie,” the horns shout short repeated figures (riffs) behind the solos. The structure seems lifted straight from the church, where the preacher calls and the congregation answers (call and response).
- The title track centers on Silver's piano, which never lets go of blues phrasing even at a fast tempo. The left hand jabs low chords beneath the right hand's short, sharp phrases.
- “Peace” is a quiet ballad that leaves long silences between its chords, showing that this band also knew how to hold sound in reserve.
- Blue Mitchell's bright, rounded trumpet and Junior Cook's smooth tenor always meet in the same place to lock their harmonies, and you hear an ensemble only a long-standing band can produce.
V. A song for my father · 1964–1969 (age 36–41)
(Brazil) In early 1964 Silver visited Brazil. He later recalled that the gently swaying rhythm of the bossa nova he heard there called up memories of the Cape Verdean music his father used to play in the kitchen when he was a boy. The piece he wrote on his return was “Song for My Father.” (Lineup change) That same year the long-standing lineup broke up, and trumpeter Carmell Jones, tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson, bassist Teddy Smith and drummer Roger Humphries came in. The title track, recorded in October 1964, was packaged on a single album with pieces recorded earlier with Mitchell and Cook, and the cover carried a photograph of his father, John. The album became one of the best-selling records in Blue Note's catalog. (Cape Verde) The following year, with “The Cape Verdean Blues,” he put his father's homeland right in the title. Trumpeter Woody Shaw and Joe Henderson stood out front, and on several tracks J. J. Johnson joined on trombone, thickening the harmony to three horns. The music of this period, which carried on into “The Jody Grind” in 1966, laid dance rhythms over a solid hard bop foundation. Homage to an immigrant father, in other words, produced the most popular moments of his music. (Blue Note) In 1966 Blue Note was sold to Liberty Records, and Lion stepped down the following year. Silver stayed with the label. Young trumpeter Randy Brecker and others passed through his band, and even after his colleagues left one by one, he remained Blue Note's longest-serving house musician.
A piece dedicated to his father, born of Cape Verdean memories awakened in Brazil; the album cover carried a photograph of his father, John.
- The piece opens with an accompaniment in which Teddy Smith's bass and Silver's left hand stubbornly repeat the same figure (an ostinato). That one short figure becomes the face of the entire piece.
- Roger Humphries's drums lay down a lightly swaying, bossa nova–like rhythm, and the two horns sing the minor-key theme in harmony.
- Silver's solo comes first. Repeating a handful of blues motifs, he pushes forward on rhythm without much ornament.
- The most often discussed passage is Joe Henderson's tenor solo. Tossing out a short motif, leaving a rest, then varying it bit by bit as he builds, it has been analyzed so widely that jazz students transcribe it and practice it as a textbook.
- The title track was recorded in October 1964 at Van Gelder Studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. The album also includes pieces recorded in 1963 with Blue Mitchell·Junior Cook, so the sounds of the two lineups can be heard side by side.
An album that put the name of his father's homeland in its title, carrying the feeling of “Song for My Father” into livelier dance rhythms.
- Silver said he wrote the title track with the dance rhythms of his father's homeland in mind, and you can hear a buoyant sway moving back and forth between swing and Latin rhythm.
- The sharp, wide-ranging solos of Woody Shaw, a trumpeter barely twenty, are counted as the freshest sound on the album. They stand out especially on the fast “Nutville.”
- On several tracks J. J. Johnson joins on trombone, making three horns. The harmony rings thicker and weightier than with two.
- Joe Henderson's tenor, rough and dark in tone, contrasts with Shaw's bright trumpet.
VI. The United States of Mind · 1970–1980 (age 42–52)
(Turning point) Around 1970 Silver changed the direction of his music, devouring books on metaphysics, self-improvement and healthy living. He believed music should heal the body and mind of the listener, and he began writing lyrics himself and handing them to singers. Words of comfort and encouragement stepped in front of the earthy smell of the blues. (Trilogy) The United States of Mind trilogy—“That Healin' Feelin'” (1970), “Total Response” (1971) and “All” (1972)—featured singers such as Andy Bey, Gail Nelson and Salome Bey. The lyrics were close to exhortations to take care of yourself and love your neighbor. Critics at the time were largely cold, calling them preachy, and longtime fans were bewildered too. (Family) Around this time he married and had a son. He said little publicly about his family. (Series) From 1975 to 1978 he released the “Silver 'n” series, adding brass, woodwinds, percussion, chorus and strings in turn to the quintet. From “Silver 'n Brass” to “Silver 'n Strings Play the Music of the Spheres,” it was an attempt to expand the harmonic sense he had refined within a small group to a large ensemble. The final installment's subtitle, 'the music of the spheres,' laid bare his belief in a cosmic harmony. (West) In the 1970s he moved to California and settled in Malibu. Around 1980 his relationship with Blue Note came to an end. Beginning with the 1952 trio recordings, it had been a rarely long partnership between one label and one musician.
The first installment of the trilogy for which he wrote the lyrics himself, out of a belief that music should heal people; ignored at the time, it reveals his inner life most candidly.
- The songs speak in a voice that quietly urges the listener to take care of themselves and open their heart. Rather than shouting like a sermon, they come across as gentle counsel from someone at your side.
- With Andy Bey at the center, Jackie Verdell and Gail Nelson divide the songs among them to handle the lyrics. Bey's low, deep voice lends weight to the message.
- Even with the lyrics out front, the foundation is still the Silver quintet's groove (the rhythmic flow that makes the body move). Listen to the instrumentals alongside and you can tell the grammar of hard bop is fully alive.
VII. Hardbop grandpop · 1981–2014 (age 53–86)
(Independence) In 1981, as the major labels were cutting back their jazz contracts, Silver founded his own label, Silveto. He saw it as a vessel for music that cares for body and mind, and record sales are said to have depended largely on mail order. Such independence was possible because he had held the publishing rights to his own compositions from early on. (Return) In the 1990s he returned to the major labels. He released “It's Got to Be Funky” (1993) and “Pencil Packin' Papa” (1994) on Columbia, “The Hardbop Grandpop” (1996) and “A Prescription for the Blues” (1997) on Impulse!, and “Jazz Has a Sense of Humor” (1999) on Verve. The grandfather of hard bop was a jokey nickname he gave himself, and the music had returned to a horn-fronted blues groove. (Honors) In 1995 the National Endowment for the Arts named him a Jazz Master. (Memoir) In 2006 the University of California Press published his autobiography, “Let's Get to the Nitty Gritty.” Calmly recounting everything from the kitchen parties of Norwalk to the Blue Note years, the book became the most important primary source on his life. Throughout it he repeated, along with his gratitude to his colleagues, his belief that music heals people. (Last years) In his final years he withdrew from the stage. On June 18, 2014, he died at his home in New Rochelle, New York, at the age of 85. “Song for My Father,” “Señor Blues” and “Sister Sadie” are still played as standard repertoire at jam sessions and in jazz education.
Lesser-known stories
(Cape Verde) The rhythm of “Song for My Father” is often introduced simply as the influence of Brazilian bossa nova. Silver himself, however, in his memoir and in interviews, placed its roots in his father's homeland of Cape Verde. Since the nineteenth century Cape Verdeans had come to New England as whaling crews and cranberry-bog workers and built communities there, and Silver's family was one branch of that immigrant history. Because they were a small immigrant group that did not fit neatly into American society's black-and-white divide, this background was long relegated to a footnote in jazz histories. (Publishing rights) Ecaroh Music goes beyond Silver's personal economic history. In the 1950s and '60s many jazz musicians received almost nothing from their own compositions beyond the lump sum paid for a recording. Silver took control of his publishing rights early, so that income came back to him every time “Doodlin'” or “Song for My Father” appeared on another musician's record. Not being a colorful anecdote, it rarely makes it into popular biographies, but researchers single it out as the foundation that let him run an independent label without a major in the 1980s. (Trilogy) The vocal trilogy of the early 1970s was shunned by critics on release and remained out of print for a long time. When Blue Note reissued it together in the twenty-first century, it opened an occasion to look again at the inner Silver buried beneath the verdict of preachiness—his earnest belief that music should heal people.
Glossary notes 📚🔎
Hard bop
(Meaning) The English hard bop means a hard bebop (bop). The name carries the sense of heavier, firmer flesh laid onto the skeleton of bebop. (In jazz) A jazz style that emerged in the mid-1950s, centered in New York. It kept bebop's fast, complex harmony but mixed in a strong dose of the sticky, joyful feel of the blues and church music (gospel). The usual lineup was a quintet of two horns, trumpet and tenor saxophone, with piano·bass·drums, and Horace Silver and Art Blakey are its leading figures. It's a bit like using every hard math formula and still writing a cheer the whole playground can sing along to.
Funky
(Meaning) The English funky was originally slang for musty, smelly. Jazz musicians turned the word around into praise, using it for a genuine feel that smelled of sweat and earth. (In jazz) In 1950s jazz, funky meant the sticky feel, drawn from blues and gospel, that sets the body bouncing on its own. Silver's “The Preacher” “Sister Sadie” were held up as prime examples. Rather than a soup cooked neatly by the textbook, it's the soup Grandma threw together by feel that somehow tastes deeper — that touch is funky. (Elsewhere) Today it is also used for funk, the dance-music genre popular in the 1970s, or to mean that someone's clothes are distinctive and cool.
Comping
(Meaning) It is said to be a shortening of the English accompany or complement. (In jazz) The accompaniment in which piano or guitar backs a soloist's improvisation with chords struck in short bursts. The key is not to play the same thing as written, but to listen to what the soloist is saying and drop in chords as responses, moment by moment. It's like nodding beside a friend who has gone up front to give a presentation, or backing them up at just the right moment with Exactly!
Riff
(In jazz) A short phrase a few bars long, repeated many times. In Silver's band, while one player soloed, the other horns would punch in riffs behind him as if shouting, lifting the energy. It's like a cheering squad on field day repeating the same chant in time behind a friend who is running. (Elsewhere) In rock music, the repeated guitar phrase that defines a song is called a riff.
Ostinato
(Meaning) The Italian ostinato means stubborn, persistent. The character of the technique—persistently repeating the same figure—shows right in the name. (In jazz) An accompaniment in which the bass or the pianist's left hand repeats a short figure unchanged throughout a piece or a section. Even as the melody and solos change above, the figure underneath does not, giving the piece a hypnotic stability. The opening of “Song for My Father” is the classic example. Picture two friends turning a jump rope at the same steady beat while only the jumper inside does all sorts of tricks.
Chorus
(In jazz) The unit of one complete pass through a tune's form. In a 12-bar blues, twelve bars make one chorus. Soloists set the length of a solo by how many times they go around this circuit, which is why you hear remarks like their third chorus was the peak. It is like running one lap, then two, around a track: the path is the same, but each lap brings a different speed and force. (Elsewhere) In general usage, a choir singing together, or the recurring refrain of a popular song.
Bossa nova
(Literal meaning) The Portuguese bossa nova means a new trend, a new wave. It carries the sense of the fresh sensibility that young Brazilian musicians introduced in the late 1950s. (In jazz) A music that refines the Brazilian samba rhythm into something quieter and softer and blends it with jazz harmony. Its hallmark is a lightly swaying rhythm laid down continuously by guitar or drums, and it became hugely popular among American jazz musicians in the early 1960s. If an exuberant samba is a sprint around the track, bossa nova is a slow stroll along the beach at dusk.