From the perspective of the early 2000s, it is clear that few
jazz musicians have had a greater impact on the contemporary mainstream than
Horace Silver. The
hard bop style that
Silver pioneered in the '50s is now dominant, played not only by holdovers from an earlier generation, but also by fuzzy-cheeked musicians who had yet to be born when the music fell out of critical favor in the '60s and '70s.
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.
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From the perspective of the early 2000s, it is clear that few
jazz musicians have had a greater impact on the contemporary mainstream than
Horace Silver. The
hard bop style that
Silver pioneered in the '50s is now dominant, played not only by holdovers from an earlier generation, but also by fuzzy-cheeked musicians who had yet to be born when the music fell out of critical favor in the '60s and '70s.
Silver's earliest musical influence was the Cape Verdean
folk music he heard from his Portuguese-born father.
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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, CT, 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. In 1952, he recorded with
Lou Donaldson for the Blue Note label; this date 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. By 1956,
Silver had left
the Messengers to record on his own. The series of Blue Note albums that followed established
Silver for all time as one of
jazz's major composer/pianists. LPs like
Blowin' the Blues Away and
Song for My Father (both recorded by an ensemble that included
Silver's longtime sidemen
Blue Mitchell and Junior Cook) featured
Silver's harmonically sophisticated and formally distinctive compositions for small
jazz ensemble.
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; 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 is once again receiving a measure of the attention his contribution deserves. Certainly, no one has ever contributed a larger and more vital body of original compositions to the
jazz canon. ~ Chris Kelsey, All Music Guide
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