Horace Silver

Horace Silver was born on September 2, 1928, in Norwalk, Connecticut, United States. he worked for a tire company. Horace had a much older half-brother, Eugene Fletcher, from his mother's first marriage, and was the third child for his parents, after John, who lived to six months, and Maria, who was stillborn. Silver began playing the piano in his childhood and had classical music lessons. His father taught him the folk music of Cape Verde. At the age of 11, Silver became interested in becoming a musician, after hearing the Jimmie Lunceford orchestra. His early piano influences included the styles of boogie-woogie and the blues, the pianists Nat King Cole, Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, Art Tatum, and Teddy Wilson, as well as some jazz horn players. Silver graduated from St. Mary's Grammar School in 1943. From ninth grade, he played Lester Young-influenced tenor saxophone in the Norwalk High School band and orchestra. Silver played gigs locally on both piano and tenor saxophone while still at school. He was rejected for military service by a draft board examination that concluded that he had an excessively curved spine, which also interfered with his saxophone playing. Around 1946, he moved to Hartford, Connecticut, to take up a regular job as pianist in a nightclub. ==Later life and career==

1950–55 Silver's break came in 1950, when his trio backed saxophonist Stan Getz at a club in Hartford – Getz liked Silver's band and recruited them to tour with him. Silver was also busy recording as a sideman. In 1953, he was pianist on sessions led by Sonny Stitt, Howard McGhee, and Al Cohn, and, the following year, he played on albums by Art Farmer, Miles Davis, Milt Jackson, and others. Silver won the DownBeat critics' New Star award for piano players in 1954 and appeared at the first Newport Jazz Festival, substituting for John Lewis in the Modern Jazz Quartet. Silver's early 1950s recordings demonstrate that Bud Powell was a major pianistic influence, but this had waned by the middle of the decade. In New York, Silver and Blakey co-founded the Jazz Messengers, a cooperatively-run group that initially recorded under various leaders and names. Their first two studio recordings, with tenor saxophonist Hank Mobley, trumpeter Kenny Dorham, and bassist Doug Watkins, were made in late 1954 and early 1955 and were released as two 10-inch albums under Silver's name, then soon thereafter as the 12-inch Horace Silver and the Jazz Messengers. Unusually in Silver's career, recordings of concert performances were also released at this time, involving quintets at Birdland (1954) and the Café Bohemia (1955). This set of studio and concert recordings was pivotal in the development and defining of hard bop, which combined elements of blues, gospel, and R&B, with bebop-based harmony and rhythm. in part because of the heroin use prevalent in the band, Soon after leaving, Silver formed his own long-term quintet after receiving offers of work from club owners who had heard his albums. The first line-up was Hank Mobley (tenor saxophone), Art Farmer (trumpet), Doug Watkins (bass), and Louis Hayes (drums). The quintet, with various line-ups, continued to record, helping Silver to build his reputation. In concert, Silver "won over the crowds through his affable personality and all-action approach. He crouched over the piano as the sweat poured out, with his forelock brushing the keys and his feet pounding." Silver's tour of Japan early in 1962 led to the album The Tokyo Blues, recorded later that year. By the early 1960s, Silver's quintet had influenced numerous bandleaders and was among the most popular performers at jazz clubs. This quintet's sixth and final album was ''Silver's Serenade'', in 1963. Around this time, Silver composed music for a television commercial for the drink Tab. an experience he credited with increasing his interest in his heritage. In the same year, he created a new quintet, featuring Joe Henderson on tenor saxophone and Carmell Jones on trumpet. which reached No. 95 on the Billboard 200 in 1965 In 1966, The Cape Verdean Blues charted at No. 130. They also recorded one of Silver's last quintet albums for Blue Note, You Gotta Take a Little Love. The Penguin Guide to Jazz's retrospective summary of Silver's main Blue Note recordings was that they were of a consistently high standard: "each album yields one or two themes that haunt the mind, each usually has a particularly pretty ballad, and they all lay back on a deep pile of solid riffs and workmanlike solos." 1970–80 , San Francisco, in 1978 At the end of 1970, Silver broke up his regular band to concentrate on composing and to spend more time with his wife. He had met Barbara Jean Dove in 1968 and married her two years later. They had a son, Gregory. Silver also became increasingly interested in spiritualism from the early 1970s., was commercially unsuccessful and Silver had to insist on the support of Blue Note executives to continue releasing music of the same, new style. Around this time, according to saxophonist Dave Liebman, Silver's reputation among aspiring young jazz musicians was that he was "a little – not commercial, but not quite the real deal [in jazz]". Silver and his family decided to move to California around 1974 after a burglary at their New York City apartment while they were in Europe. The couple divorced in the mid-1970s. In 1975, he recorded ''Silver 'n Brass, the first of five "Silver 'n''" albums, which had other instruments added to the quintet. The personnel in his band continued to change and continued to contain young musicians who made telling contributions. One of these was trumpeter Tom Harrell, who stayed from 1973 to 1977. Silver's pattern in the late 1970s was to tour for six months a year. His final Blue Note album was ''Silver 'n Strings'', recorded in 1978 and 1979. His stay was the longest in the label's history. By Silver's account, he left Blue Note after its parent company was sold and the new owners were not interested in promoting jazz. In 1980, he formed the record label Silveto, "dedicated to the spiritual, holistic, self-help elements in music", he commented. Silver stated in the same year that he had reduced his touring to four months a year so that he could spend more time with his son. This also meant that he had to audition for new band members on an annual basis. The song titles reflected his spiritual, self-help thinking; for example, Spiritualizing the Senses from 1983 included "Seeing with Perception" and "Moving Forward with Confidence". Douglas reported that Silver seldom gave direct verbal guidelines about the music, preferring to lead through playing. and his albums on Silveto were not critical successes. and his need to tour was limited, as he received steady royalties from his songbook. After a decade of trying to make his independent label work, Silver abandoned them in 1993 and signed to Columbia Records. This also signaled a return to mostly instrumental releases. Silver came close to dying soon after its release: he was hospitalized with a previously undiagnosed blood clot problem but went on to record ''Pencil Packin' Papa'', containing a six-piece brass section, in 1994. That year, he also played as a guest on Dee Dee Bridgewater's album Love and Peace: A Tribute to Horace Silver. in The Hague, 1985 Silver received a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Masters award in 1995, and received an Honorary Doctorate of Music from Berklee College of Music. He switched from Columbia to Impulse! Records, where he made the septet album The Hardbop Grandpop (1996) and the quintet A Prescription for the Blues (1997). The former was nominated for two Grammy Awards: as an album for Best Instrumental Performance, Individual or Group, and for Silver's solo on "Diggin' on Dexter". He was again unwell in 1997, so was unable to tour to promote his records. He was rarely seen in public after this. In 2005, the Recording Academy awarded him its President's Merit Award. In 2006, ''Let's Get to the Nitty Gritty: The Autobiography of Horace Silver, was published by the University of California Press. A 2008 release, Live at Newport '58'', from a Silver concert fifty years earlier, reached the top ten of 's jazz chart. In 2007, it was revealed that Silver had Alzheimer's disease. He died of natural causes in New Rochelle, New York, on June 18, 2014, aged 85. He was survived by his son. ==Playing style==

Silver's early recordings displayed "a crisp, chipper but slightly wayward style, idiosyncratic enough to take him out of the increasingly stratified realms of bebop". In contrast to the more elaborate bebop piano, he stressed straightforward melodies rather than complex harmonies and included short riffs and motifs that came and went over the course of a solo. While his right hand provided cleanly played lines, his left added bouncy, darker notes and chords in a near-perpetual rumble. Silver "always played percussively, rarely suggesting excessive force on the keys but mustering a crisp [...] sound." His fingering was idiosyncratic, but this added to the individuality of his pianism, particularly to the authenticity of the blues facets of his playing. The Penguin Guide to Jazz gave the overall assessment that "Blues and gospel-tinged devices and percussive attacks give his methods a more colourful style, and a generous good humour gives all his records an upbeat feel." Part of the humor was Silver's predilection for quoting other pieces of music in his own playing. Writer and academic Thomas Owens stated that characteristics of Silver's solos were "the short, simple phrases that all derive from the three-beat figure | , or a variant of it; the pianist's 'blue fifth' (those rapid slurs up to [... a flattened fifth]); and the low tone cluster used strictly as a rhythmic punctuation". He also employed blues and minor pentatonic scales. Music journalist Marc Myers observed that "Silver's advantage was pianistic grace and a keen awareness that by resolving dark, minor-passages in airy, ascending and descending major-key chord configurations, the result could produce an exciting and uplifting feeling." In his accompanying of a soloing saxophonist or trumpeter, Silver was also distinctive: "Rather than reacting to the soloist's melody and waiting for melodic holes to fill, he typically plays background patterns similar to the background riffs that saxes or brasses play behind soloists in big bands." ==Compositions==

Early in his career, Silver composed contrafacts and blues-based melodies, including "Doodlin' and "Opus de Funk". The latter was "a typical Silver creation: advanced in its harmonic structure and general approach but with a catchy tune and finger-snapping beat." Silver soon expanded the range and style of his writing, which grew to include "funky groove tunes, gentle mood pieces, vamp songs, outings in and time, Latin workouts of various stripes, up-tempo jam numbers, and examples of almost any and every other kind of approach congruent with the hard bop aesthetic." An unusual case is "Peace", a ballad that prioritizes a calm mood over melodic or harmonic effects. Owens observed that "Many of his compositions contain no folk blues or gospel music elements, but instead have highly chromatic melodies supported by richly dissonant harmonies". The compositions and arrangements were also designed to make Silver's typical line-up sound larger than a quintet. Silver himself commented that inspiration came from multiple sources: "I'm inspired by nature and by some of the people I meet and some of the events that take place in my life. I'm inspired by my mentors. I'm inspired by various religious doctrines. [...] Many of my songs are impressed on my mind just before I wake up. Others I get from just doodlin' around on the piano". He also wrote that, "when I wake up with a melody in my head, I jump right out of bed before I forget it and run to the piano and my tape recorder. I play the melody with my right hand and then harmonize it with my left. I put it down on my tape recorder, and then I work on getting a bridge or eight-bar release for the tune." ==Influence and legacy==

Silver was among the most influential jazz musicians of his lifetime. Grove Music Online describes his legacy as at least fourfold: as a pioneer of hard bop; as a user of what became the archetypal quintet instrumentation of tenor saxophone, trumpet, piano, bass, and drums; as a developer of young musicians who went on to become important players and bandleaders; and for his skill as a composer and arranger. As early as 1956, Silver's piano playing was described by DownBeat as "a key influence on a large segment of modern jazz pianists." and Cecil Taylor, who was impressed by Silver's aggressive style. Silver's legacy as a composer may be greater than as a pianist, because his works, many of which are jazz standards, continue to be performed and recorded worldwide. ==Discography==