Horace Silver, Hard Bop and Six Pieces of Silver

Plus taking a big step forward on Substack

Welcome music lovers!

Today’s edition of ‘Listening Sessions’ is dedicated to Horace Silver, focusing on his great album, Six Pieces of Silver. I hope you enjoy the essay and will share your thoughts as well.

Before I get to the essay, I wanted to share some news about my Substack and my launch of paid subscriptions.

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Taking a Big Step Ahead

I’ve been writing and publishing ‘Listening Sessions’ for over three years now. Through 120 editions, it’s grown from a small collection of readers to over 1,600 subscribers. Some of you have been here since day one and some of you joined more recently. I'm delighted to have you all as part of this community that bonds over a love of music and the joy of listening to it.

I’ve been listening to music for as long as I can remember. Some of my first memories are of hearing and enjoying music—no joke. And as I got older, the idea of writing about music and trying to transfer my enthusiasm for it onto the page was one I constantly put to the side until I pressed send on my first post here in May 2021.

Today, it feels like being a music writer and critic is something I am meant to do. That’s why it is deeply humbling and gratifying to have found an audience for my work and that you all feel it is worthy to enter your email box every 10 days.

You may have noticed through the blurb that I have been using recently in the middle and at the end of each edition of my Substack that I have decided that it’s time to take a big step forward.

Turning on paid subscriptions here is something that has made me anxious and I’ve spent months wondering about it. The reticence comes from, in part, the gumption required to ask you all to consider supporting my work financially. For me, the decision to “go paid” is not to offer less but to give you all more. The work that forms the backbone of ‘Listening Sessions’ will not be paywalled. The essays I have been writing about the music that I love will continue to be available to both free and paid subscribers.

For those who take out a paid subscription, I will be writing a quarterly reflection (at least that is the frequency I will start out with) on music covering a variety of topics including an update on how my Substack is doing. This will be available for paid subscribers only. The first reflection will be sent at the end of October.

Taking out a paid subscription to ‘Listening Sessions’ will help me expand on the work I do here, including interviewing musicians and seeing how I can add more audio and visual material to my work. Paid subscriptions are available on a monthly ($6) and yearly ($50) basis (all funds in Canadian dollars).

Your investment in me will allow me to dedicate more time and energy to this work. I would value any consideration you may give to supporting me as I take this step. I’m excited to get started!

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Horace Silver, Hard Bop and Six Pieces of Silver

The heyday of Blue Note Records—a period of time that roughly stretched from 1954 to 1970—was one built on the music, an astonishing collection of albums that form one of the genre’s foundational texts. To know jazz is to, in part, know Blue Note. And yet the label’s legacy is not built entirely on the aural evidence of its dominance, its visual iconography also fuels its enduring mystique.

A lot of it has to do with the label's album covers, designed and usually photographed by Reid Miles—over 500 of them between 1955 and 1967—featuring brash typography and striking portraits. Trumpeter Donald Byrd posing with a Jaguar E-Type for his A New Perspective. Pianist Andrew Hill caught in the glare of a spotlight for Judgment! Drummer Art Blakey stone-faced with a cigarette dangling out of the right of his mouth with a polka-dot pixilation for added effect for Indestructible. For the latter, the photo was shot by Francis Wolff, the co-head of Blue Note with Alfred Lion during its glory years.

Wolff’s photography took listeners inside the studio—almost always Rudy Van Gelder’s—providing a visual representation of what it was like to be among the musicians when the music was being created. The photos Wolff took were often snapshots of alluring cool: his photograph of Herbie Hancock during the session for Wayne Shorter’s Speak No Evil is but one example. The pianist is caught in a moment of aloof introspection with his left hand cushioning his head as his right hand is playing the piano.

Another Wolff photo tells of something different. It was taken on October 21, 1956 in Hackensack, New Jersey during the time when Van Gelder used his parents’ abode to record. It’s from tenor saxophonist J.R. Monterose’s lone date for Blue Note. It’s of Horace Silver at the piano. His shirt is drenched in sweat. A lock of his hair breaks free to curl around his left eye. He is smiling contentedly, looking utterly absorbed in playing, unconcerned or maybe even unaware of how uncomfortable it may have been to be so overheated. True to Wolff and the label, Silver looks cool. But, it’s a cool that came from generating a whole lot of heat.

Forty years after the shot was taken, Silver released an album called Hard Bop Grandpop that summed up well his standing in the jazz world in 1996. Back in ’56, he was busy being one of hard bop’s founding fathers if not the most important founding daddy of them all.

If pleasure can be considered a reliable barometer of the worth of an artist, then Silver was pure gold. Others were more daring. Others were more adventurous. Others craved messing with the formula more. Silver found the pocket and it forever remained good.

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Thank you for reading ‘Listening Sessions.’

If you like what you are reading, please consider subscribing to my Substack. Free and paid subscription plans are available. The best way to support my work of spreading the joy of listening to music is to take out a paid subscription of $6/month or $50/annually (dollar amounts in Canadian funds).

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Even when he forsook more earthbound concerns for the ethereal and New Age, his music remained elemental. Take a live performance of ‘Old Mother Nature Calls’ from his United States of Mind period of the early seventies that was taped for an episode of Ellis Haizlip’s program Soul. The song is doctor’s orders—eat your greens, avoid fatty, processed foods—set to music. Andy Bey, a tremendous singer, digs into Silver’s deeply earnest lyrics (“inner cleaning time”!) with Bob Cranshaw’s electric bass and Mickey Roker’s drums backing Silver—dashikied and playing an electric piano.

Silver’s solo is a one-chorus wonder. Save for the B section, he stays within an octave or two. He offers with his right hand hip ornamentations of the melody that dig into the groove with his left hand pushing forward with timely comping.

Horace Silver was a methodical player. Think of his solo on ‘Song for My Father,’ his most famous composition. It unfolds with deliberative pace that neither sacrifices syncopation nor swing. His statement on ‘The Jody Grind’—a line that is just as indelible as ‘Song for My Father’ to my ears—also prioritizes pace even as Silver ups the intensity level briefly at the 3:30 mark for some pianistic pyrotechnics.

Horace Silver could also dig deep into the music. Consider his galloping improvisation on ‘Blowin’ the Blues Away.’ Here, his left hand is not calmly interjecting with chords but stabbing them brusquely. On the concluding section of his fourth chorus, as his right hand begins to play a serpentine line, his left hand begins to curve around it in a kind of jazz fugue which continues through the next chorus. At its conclusion, Silver then switches it up and begins a multi-chorus exploration of a gospel-shout riff.

This kind of emphatic wonderment powers the recordings Blue Note made at Birdland on February 21, 1954 of drummer Art Blakey leading a quintet with trumpeter Clifford Brown, alto saxophonist Lou Donaldson, Silver and bassist Curley Russell. Initially released as three 10-inch releases and then condensed into two 12-inch releases, the proceedings begin with emcee Pee Wee Marquette’s legendary introduction. He notes to the audience, “when you applaud for the different passages, your hands go right on the records so when they play them over and over around the country, you may be some place and say, “well, that’s my hand on one of those records that I dug down at Birdland”” and gives an extravagant elongation when announcing Blakey’s name. It’s all a set-up for Silver’s ‘Split Kick,’ a line based on the changes of the standard ‘There Will Never Be Another You.’

What unfolds in not only the grand promise of Clifford Brown realized with a solo for the ages—a masterwork of ebullient lyricism—or of Blakey’s as a bandleader and drummer who could coax out the latent brilliance of his charges, but also of hard bop and of Horace Silver.

By then, he had made his mark through his work with Stan Getz as well as on a series of trio recordings he cut for Blue Note—‘Opus de Funk’ is the most famous of these tracks. Two weeks after the Birdland date, Silver recorded with Miles Davis for the first of five times in quick succession, including defining performances of ‘Walkin’,’ a simple blues line attributed to Richard Carpenter and ‘Blues ‘n’ Boogie,’ one of Dizzy Gillespie’s signature pieces. Where Silver would springboard into the forefront was through the founding edition of the Jazz Messengers that he co-founded with Blakey that included Kenny Dorham on trumpet, Hank Mobley on tenor saxophone and Doug Watkins on bass. This group would codify hard bop as simpler than bebop and gutsier than West Coast cool jazz. Bursting with declarative lines. Steeped in the blues and traditional song form yet not neglectful of the Great American Songbook.

Silver’s sessions with the band under his leadership on Blue Note at the end of 1954 and the beginning of 1955 were important. ‘The Preacher’ and ‘Doodlin’’ remain textbook examples of how gospel and a strutting gait were to be vital parts of the hard-bop playbook. A live date under Blakey’s name at the Café Bohemia illustrated how his band was destined to become the finishing school for jazz’s young lions.

Silver left the Jazz Messengers in the middle of 1956, mostly as a way to avoid the drug use that was endemic in the New York scene at the time. Around that time, he recorded a session for Epic, a subsidiary of Columbia, to fulfil a contract that the Messengers had with Columbia. The album, Silver’s Blue, featured the group's lineup at the time—Donald Byrd had replaced Dorham by then (on two tracks, Joe Gordon subs in for Byrd)—save for Blakey. In the drum chair was either Art Taylor or Kenny Clarke.

The album has a relaxed, laid-back vibe. Taylor’s metronomic timing and Clark’s more martial beat are primary reasons why. It’s fascinating to hear them play off Silver and company. They inspire a level of lyricism perhaps not always associated with hard bop, particularly on the album’s three standards, as well as a casualness that makes the recording an exercise in superlative taste.

Even so, when hearing ‘To Beat or Not to Beat’ with Clarke keeping time, I can’t help but feel that the band was working at cross purposes here (I say this not to knock Clarke, among the most influential and important time keepers in post-Second World War jazz).

Later that year, Silver would re-record the tune, retitled ‘Cool Eyes,’ to lead off the debut release on Blue Note of his own group. In the band would be Byrd, Mobley, Watkins and a 19-year old Detroiter, Louis Hayes. In addition to the new title, Silver retooled the composition to include a short passage to introduce solos by Mobley, Byrd, himself and Watkins. Hayes’ spritely accompaniment, full of subtle accents to push along the theme statement and improvisations, also helped turn ‘Cool Eyes’ into a leaner, meaner machine.

It also well pointed to where Mobley and Byrd were in developing their individual sounds. Mobley’s tone was lighter than what it would become by the turn of the sixties and Byrd was already well on his way to building an approach that pulled away from the brasher styles of Brown and Gillespie but never reaching the minimalism of Davis. On ‘Cool Eyes,’ both players lyrically explore the contours of Silver’s line. When it’s the composer’s turn to solo, the tempo seems to increase just a hair as he pushes more into the beat. The performance provides the unmistakable feeling that Six Pieces of Silver was destined to be an important record.

The seven pieces that comprise it speak to Silver’s breadth of vision. ‘Camouflage’ is nominally a gospel shout through the call and response of the first section which then moves into a peppy resolution. Hayes keeps the rhythmic shifts locked down tight and Silver keeps them intact for short solos by Mobley, himself and Byrd. There’s a spirit of daring invention here, a marriage of simplicity with complexity that Silver would return to over and over again throughout his career.

After the get-up-and-go of ‘Camouflage,’ there is the rhapsody of ‘Enchantment.’ It’s romantic and almost a calypso. The slight vibrato that Byrd adds on the crests of Silver’s melody adds to the ardour of the piece. Again, once the solos begin, Hayes does not move into straight time but keeps the dancing beat of the theme intact, adding the occasional tom roll for dramatic flourish.

‘Virgo’ is a flag waver, a chance for everyone to chuck subtlety and simply burn. The two ballads on Six Pieces of Silver—‘Shirl’ and the standard ‘For Heaven’s Sake’ composed by Elise Bretton, Sherman Edwards and Don Meyer—are on the opposite side of the spectrum and feature Silver, Watkins and Hayes only.

Silver was an underrated ballad player and ‘Shirl’ is fairly representative of his writing in the idiom. It’s a introspective, melancholic composition with its overall undulation one which Silver would return often as was the decision to play its theme using primarily block chords. It’s here where I hear the influence of Bud Powell on Silver’s playing most strongly as well as in how he slowly unfurls ‘For Heaven’s Sake,’ saving the greatest emphasis for the sigh at the end of each A section, the point of the song's greatest musical interest.

The best of the six pieces by Silver on the album is also the best-known. ‘Senor Blues’ is of a long line of characters that were brought to life through his pen. They were a colourful bunch of rogues: ‘Filthy McNasty,’ ‘Sexy Sadie,’ the aforementioned ‘The Preacher,’ ‘Dufus Rufus’ and ‘Psychedelic Sally’ to name just a few. In lyrics that Silver would add in 1958 and first memorably sung by Bill Henderson with the pianist’s group, ‘Senor Blues’ comes from “Mexicali way.” He’s a ladies man who not only leaves behind a long trail of women he has spurned but also the fellas whom those who feel under his spell have been left emptyhanded and brokenhearted. Indeed, it’s the perspective of one of those unfortunate gents who narrates the vocal version of the song.

On Six Pieces of Silver, the focus is on Silver’s melody. It’s beyond catchy with an earworm riff that’s doubled by Silver and Watkins. Dynamics also define the composition. The first A section is played ultra-cool and far behind the beat. The second A section is emphatic and hugs the beat extra tight. The B section is a blues moan of earthy regret.

For the solos, it’s only the A section that is improvised upon. Mobley’s statement is alluring, especially his opening phrases that are pensive yet full of the soul of the blues. He and Byrd play a short interlude to introduce Silver’s statement which is played against an almost tango-like rhythm. His staccato phrasing contrasts with the frontline’s improvisations. By continuing to mirror Watkins’ bass line as opposed to comping with his left hand, Silver adds harmonic space to stretch his lines—another example of how his music’s accessibility made it seem more straightforward than it actually was.

Six Pieces of Silver was the beginning of a run of 18 albums on Blue Note in 16 years by Silver, a significant number of them rightly regarded as classics. It was also a recording that signified how Blue Note would be dedicated to creating albums with deep care—prioritizing time for paid rehearsals, encouraging the creation of original material and finding the sweet spot between tight ensemble playing and time for improvisation. In all this, Horace Silver was the master.