horace silver...

Musicians often have curious minds, and the pianist and composer Horace Silver was no exception. An often overlooked musician in the public eye, Silver wrote some of the most performed jazz standards of the modern era. His playful inquisitiveness was essential for the language of jazz. And this quality is glimpsed in the titles of some of his albums and compositions – Silver’s Blue, Ecaroh, 6 Pieces of Silver, Horace-Scope.

A contemporary of Miles Davis, Silver was born in 1928. In his early 20s he moved to New York, and so was surrounded by great jazz musicians like Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young whilst working at the famous Birdland club. Jazz was at a transitional time. Musicians were beginning to react aggressively against the swing era and the big bands that had come to dominate the scene during the 1930s.

In the 1940s, Charlie Parker (with whom Silver played on a number of occasions) and Dizzy Gillespie, and many others besides, had forged a new highly virtuosic style of jazz called bebop. It reacted against the medium tempos and refined nature of swing with a more angular approach, looking to the modernist classical composers and the rhythms of afro-cuba and beyond.

Though Silver had been heavily influenced by early swing and stride pianists such as Art Tatum and Teddy Wilson, he was also influenced by beboppers such as Bud Powell. But his disconcertingly simple style of composition and melodic construction lends most to the influence of Thelonious Monk, whose own individual style of writing and playing had been defined against bebop. It was within this mix of ideas and influences that Horace Silver found his own unique voice.

Silver’s signing to Blue Note Records and his association with Art Blakey, with whom he co-led The Jazz Messengers, set about the development of possibly the most popular style of modern jazz – the early hard bop recordings. Silver took the bebop and stride pianists of his formative years and used the Latin sounds of Getz, and his father’s folk music, the sounds of early blues singers such as Memphis Slim and simple gospel harmonies. He combined them all to create something new, something different to everything else that was going on in jazz at the time.

Adam Biggs / The Conversation

Photo by William Claxton