Horace Silver

Looking back from our current vantage point, Horace Silver emerges as one of the jazz artists whose reach into today's popular currents has proven most substantial. The hard bop idiom he originated during the 1950s now serves as the prevailing language, performed alike by survivors of prior eras and by youthful players born long after the style had lost critical esteem in the 1960s and 1970s.

Cape Verdean folk traditions heard from his Portuguese-born father supplied Silver's first musical spark. Once he took up piano and saxophone during high school, he fell under the sway of blues vocalists and boogie-woogie keyboardists, along with bop figures such as Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell. In 1950 a pickup rhythm section featuring Silver, drummer Walter Bolden, and bassist Joe Calloway backed Stan Getz at a concert in Hartford, Connecticut. Getz was sufficiently impressed to engage the entire group, an opportunity that coincided with Silver's own plans to relocate to New York.

After a year with Getz, Silver began working as a freelance pianist alongside Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, and Oscar Pettiford. His 1952 Blue Note session with Lou Donaldson opened the door to his debut recordings under his own name. In 1953 he and Art Blakey launched a cooperative band whose inaugural album, Horace Silver and the Jazz Messengers, marked a pivotal step in the evolution of hard bop. Several Silver originals from that release, including "The Preacher," "Doodlin'," and "Room 608," quickly entered the jazz repertoire. By 1956 he had departed the Messengers to concentrate on his own projects. The subsequent Blue Note LPs, among them Blowin' the Blues Away and Song for My Father, both featuring longtime associates Blue Mitchell and Junior Cook, showcased Silver's harmonically rich and structurally distinctive writing for small groups.

His own keyboard approach, compact, inventive, and deeply rooted in funk, supplied a template that later mainstream pianists readily adopted. Numerous prominent horn players of the 1950s through the 1970s, among them Donald Byrd, Woody Shaw, Joe Henderson, Benny Golson, and the Brecker Brothers, gained early visibility in Silver's ensembles. Even members of the avant-garde registered his influence; Cecil Taylor has acknowledged it, and trumpeter Dave Douglas spent a brief period in one of Silver's groups.

Silver remained with Blue Note until the label's decline in the late 1970s, after which he established his own imprint, Silveto. His 1980s recordings suffered from limited distribution. During that decade he began adding lyrics to his compositions and turned increasingly toward the spiritual dimensions of music, reflected in titles such as Music to Ease Your Disease and Spiritualizing the Senses. In the 1990s he left Silveto behind and signed with Columbia. The move to a major label restored a measure of the recognition his body of work merits. Few figures have contributed a larger or more enduring catalog of original pieces to the jazz canon. Silver died in New York on June 18, 2014, at the age of 85.