HORACE SILVER

Horace Silver Trio Buy this album

The Stylings of Silver Buy this album

Finger Poppin' Buy this album

Horace Silver is well known as the chief architect of the hard bop style, and his many quintets are legendary, but fewer people are familiar with his early work in the trio format. For this reason, the release of a Rudy Van Gelder Edition of Horace Silver Trio, which collects all of Silver’s trio work from his first two recordings as a leader, is a real treasure. Whether powering through the opening track, “Safari,” swinging on original compoisitions like “Quicksilver,” “Horoscope,” and “Opus De Funk” or providing sharp performances of standards such as “Prelude to a Kiss” or “I Remember You,” Silver’s piano work, influenced by Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk, is always engaging.

Silver’s prowess as a composer is already on display here. Working with an excellent group of musicians that include a variety of bassists (Gene Ramey, Curly Russell, and Percy Heath), drummer Art Blackey, and, on the Blakey tune “Message from Kenya,” the 24 year-old conga drummer Sabu Martinez, Silver is excellent in his role both as soloist and as a vital part of the trio. Fans of jazz piano in general and piano trios in particular are going to want to check this one out.

By the time Stylings of Silver was recorded in 1957, Horace was a bona fide rising star in the jazz world. His quintet recording Six Pieces of Silver had established him as a top-notch composer (with “Senor Blues” becoming an instant standard) and arranger as well as bandleader. He was able to combine the dynamics of a small bebop group with those of a big band, and his arrangements are often as interesting and exciting as charts written for much larger bands. A prime example of this can be heard on the track “Home Cookin’,” which Silver describes as “another one of those nasty-type numbers. I mean ‘earthy,’ I guess. You know what ‘down home’ and ‘cookin’ signify. Greens and grits and all that kind of stuff.” That’s an apt description of much of Silver’s music, but he always makes an attempt to write in a variety of styles for each album. Here there are blues, there are 16-bar and 32-bar constructions, there is a ballad, and there is the blues and gospel influenced “down home” stuff. On this recording Silver’s quintet consists of bassist Teddy Kotick and drummer Louis Hayes, along with a horn line comprised of Art Farmer’s trumpet and Hank Mobley’s tenor sax. The group is very simpatico, but soon enough Mobley joined Max Roach’s group, and Art Farmer also moved on.

On 1959’s Finger Poppin’ Silver’s quintet had retained only Hayes on the drums. The rest of the group was comprised of relatively obscure musicians whose experience had primarily been on the R&B circuit. Trumpet player Blue Mitchell, tenor man Junior Cook, and bassist Gene Taylor were ideal interpreters of Silver’s compositions, and it didn’t take long for them to become known. Mitchell and Cook created a distinctive sound together that is unequaled in Silver’s other quintets; despite the high caliber of musician he was able to draw. There was simply something very special about this trumpet/tenor duet.

Silver’s compositional skills were still at their height here as well, with a variety of tunes and styles, from blues to loping swing to bebop barnburner. In his original liner notes Leonard Feather wrote: “Horace has found, in his current quintet, an outlet that gives him the ideal medium for the expression of his melodic creativity—a window, rather than a door, opening onto his particularly dynamic world of modern jazz.”