Artist: Horace Silver
Genre(s):
Jazz
Discography:
A Night at Birdland, Vol. 2
Year: 1954
Tracks: 7
A Night at Birdland, Vol. 1
Year: 1954
Tracks: 8
From the perspective of the former 2000s, it is clear that few jazz musicians own had a greater wallop on the modern-day mainstream than Horace Silver. The looker boP style that Silver pioneered in the '50s is immediately dominant, played not only by holdovers from an to begin with generation, only as well by fuzzy-cheeked musicians world Health Organization had even so to be born when the music fell out of critical favour in the '60s and '70s.
Silver's earlier musical influence was the Cape Verdean ethnic music music he heard from his Portuguese-born don. Later, after he had begun playing forte-piano and sax as a high schooler, Silver came under the spell of blues singers and boogie 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 three. Silver had been deliverance his money to move to New York in any event; his hiring by Getz sealed the deal.
Silver worked with Getz for a year, so began to freelance just about the metropolis with such big time players as Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, and Oscar Pettiford. In 1952, he recorded with Lou Donaldson for the Blue Note mark; this date light-emitting diode him to his first recordings as a leader. In 1953, he united forces with Art Blakey to form a conjunct under their joint leadership. The band's first-class honours degree album, Horace Silver and the Jazz Messengers, was a milepost in the development of the genre that came to be known as hard federal Bureau of Prisons. Many of the tunes penned by Silver for that record -- "The Preacher," "Doodlin'," "Room 608" -- became idle words classics. By 1956, Silver had left wing 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 supporting players.
Silver's forte-piano trend -- laconic, imaginative, and dead foul-smelling -- became a theoretical account for subsequent mainstream pianists to emulate. Some of the most influential horn players of the '50s, '60s, and '70s first attained a metre of excrescence with Silver -- musicians like Donald Byrd, Woody Shaw, Joe Henderson, Benny Golson, and the Brecker Brothers all played in Silver's stripe at a point early in their careers. Silver has regular affected members of the van; Cecil Taylor confesses a Silver influence, and trumpeter Dave Douglas played in brief in a Silver combo.
Silver recorded solely for Blue Note until that label's eclipse in the late '70s, whereupon he started his own label, Silveto. Silver's '80s turn was unwell distributed. During that time he began authorship lyrics to his compositions; his work began to display a worry with music's metaphysical powers, as exemplified by record album titles like Music to Ease Your Disease and Spiritualizing the Senses. In the '90s, Silver deserted his label venture and began recording for Columbia. With his re-emergence on a major label, Silver is once once again receiving a bill of the attention his contribution deserves. Certainly, no one has of all time contributed a bigger and more vital body of original compositions to the jazz canon.
