Jazz Articles about Horace Silver

Horace Silver: The Hard Bop Grandpop

by Marc Davis
June 25, 2014

With musicians, and artists generally, there's a tendency to think the best work is the earliest. It's usually true. Paul McCartney was never better than when he recorded with the Beatles. Chuck Berry's best work was the early hits like “Johnny B. Goode" and “Roll Over Beethoven." Tom Wolfe hasn't written anything as good as “The Right Stuff" and “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test." So it is, too, with jazz musicians. Dizzy Gillespie's seminal work came ...

Horace Silver: Blue Note Records and His Lady Music

by Ed Hamilton
June 19, 2014

The Q&A portion of this article first appeared on KPFK 90.7 FM (Los Angeles) in 1974. 75 years ago Blue Note Records was started by two German immigrants who loved jazz and believed that the music should be heard and preserved. Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff collaborated and built the Blue Note vault of music that included the artistry of immortals: Miles Davis, Sonny Clark, Sidney Bechet, Clifford Brown, Art Blakey, The Jazz Messengers, Lee Morgan, Freddie ...

Horace Silver: Song For My Father

by Greg Simmons
December 3, 2011

Horace Silver Song For My Father Blue Note Records 1963 The nice thing about reissuing classic, fifty year-old records is the benefit of hindsight; delving into a well-established catalog that's been lauded for decades helps ensure that every release will be desirable. The classic Blue Note Records catalog of the 1950s and '60s is about as evergreen a collection of albums as could be imagined. There are so many great titles that it's difficult, ...

Horace Silver: The Cape Verdean Blues

by Greg Simmons
February 18, 2011

Any review of an XRCD extended resolution CD reissue of hard bop pianist Horace Silver's The Cape Verdean Blues is going to be as much about the success of the format as it is about the music.The music on old recordings, re-released in expensive high-tech format by specialist Elusive Disc (in it's series of Blue Note album transfers from the original master tapes) is presumed to have artistic value, otherwise no one would bother with such an expensive, ...

Horace Silver: Finger Poppin'

by Samuel Chell
March 31, 2009

Finger Poppin' (1959) followed Silver's most under-appreciated (and perhaps most ambitious) Blue Note date, Further Explorations (1958). The cast is different (though the fiery Louis Hayes remains on drums), but the compositions and arrangements by Silver are no less artful and the soloists as inspired as the frontline of Art Farmer and Clifford Jordan from the preceding album. This time it's Blue Mitchell and Junior Cook negotiating the fast tempo and tricky stop-and-go melodies with precision and ease, with Mitchell ...

Horace Silver: Live at Newport '58

by Stuart Broomer
March 15, 2009

From his first recordings with the Jazz Messengers in 1954, Horace Silver's values as pianist, bandleader and composer have been clearly evident: buoyant swing propelled by strong riffs and ensemble drive, along with expressive, edited-in-advance solos. There's a kind of controlled enthusiasm at the center of Silver's music, a slightly formal celebration that owes much to gospel music and the classic Basie band of the '30s. Live recordings of the Silver Quintet at its peak in the ...

Horace Silver: Live at Newport '58

by J Hunter
April 7, 2008

The John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk Quartet earth-shaker At Carnegie Hall (Blue Note, 2005) set a pretty high watermark, and other historical recordings inevitably have a lot to live up to. Pianist Horace Silver's Live at Newport '58 is very good, and is certainly historically significant, but is it Carnegie Hall good? Perhaps not quite.

Silver had brought a new group to headline the Sunday afternoon session at the Newport Jazz Festival. That group would turn ...