Good morning, Mr. Blues
Horace Silver Quintet at the Newport Jazz Festival, 1960
In 1958, Ralph Ellison wrote a letter to his good friend and fellow jazz enthusiast Albert Murray about that year’s Newport Jazz Festival. Ellison, who expressed ambivalence toward bebop and hard bop publicly but strongly condemned both forms privately, accused relative newcomers Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Chico Hamilton of “fucking up the blues” during their performances. But, in Ellison’s opinion, that night’s most obnoxious performer was Horace Silver, who, during his set, “went wanging away like a slightly drunken gospel group [sic] after announcing a blues.” Ellison, a man of somewhat patrician tastes who, like many black Americans of his generation, favored maintaining rigid distinctions between religious and secular black musical styles, was witnessing up close the revolution that Silver had begun in 1955 with his seminal composition “The Preacher.” It’s unclear what song Ellison was referring to specifically when he made those remarks, but it is unlikely that the song revealed Silver’s inability to tell “the difference between a blues and a spiritual.” Silver knew exactly what he was doing when he injected gospel phrasing, which, thanks to the work of Thomas A. Dorsey, has its roots in boogie-woogie piano, into bop. He was showing folks that bop could swing. It could swing hard.
For whatever reason—perhaps it has something to do with being brought up Baptist in the South or all those R&B and blues records that have nestled themselves in my subconscious from childhood onwards—I am an absolute sucker for blue notes. Music that is not saturated with the blues does nothing for me. I don’t get it. I’m sorry. I realize that this is my problem and has nothing to do with, say, The Ramones. But it don’t mean a thing… Anyway, for the longest time Horace Silver was my favorite pianist because practically everything he plays is a perfectly articulated blues statement. With Silver every note counts. His playing typically lacks excess, shows sensitivity to space, and possesses a wonderful jocularity. Yet Silver on record always seems to leave you wanting more. He never seems to say enough. That’s why his performance at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1960 is so startling. He really catches the spirit.
The song is “Señor Blues,” a strange, Latin-flavored blues that appears on the album Six Pieces of Silver (1956). The album version clocks in at seven minutes, with an alternate take that is a little less than that. Silver’s solo is 48 bars long. In contrast, the live version is nearly twice as long. It is in fact the longest Silver solo I’ve ever heard. His playing is at its most percussive. He articulates countless versions of the song’s chorus and Afro-Latin rhythms, referencing gospel, blues, and classical in the process. There are the usual stops and starts. Often Silver will introduce a phrase, sometimes repeating it over and over, only to stop suddenly as if to let the notes sink in before moving on to another idea. This creates a rhythmic emphasis that makes the solo seem like some sort of fitful pentecostal dance. Each time he strikes the keys it’s like a bolt of lightning.
Come to think of it, Ellison’s characterization isn’t all that wrong, though the tone is one of mockery. Silver does give the impression of being intoxicated. But the tension he is able to build with each chopped and fragmented phrase is extremely artful. The crowd loves it and eggs him on. The shouts and moans resemble those you might hear from an excited congregation. They’re right there with him as he searches for the next shattering statement. Watching this makes me wish Silver had been more adventurous in his solos on record. Listening to him on Song for My Father I get the sense that too often he knew where he wanted to go and thus prevented himself from cooking up something truly electrifying and wild like this Newport performance. To be sure, there are those gems like “Lonely Woman” and “St. Vitus Dance” (see Blowin’ the Blues Away), both marvelous solo performances. For all his gospel-ese, however, Silver never managed to get this Holy Ghost feeling onto record. It took Bobby Timmons, the only piano player funkier than Horace Silver, to do that. Not surprisingly both players used Blue Mitchell, whose solo here is phenomenal and manages to upstage Donald Byrd, the trumpet player on the original album version. Byrd is probably my favorite trumpet player, but his sound is too Boppish and tasteful for Silver. Mitchell has the right amount of soul, that ability to make the horn really moan and wail. Mitchell always seems to be on the verge of some epic, mournful expression. I love his loud, unapologetic bluesiness. I go for that sort of thing.
Comments
The infusion of gospel and swing into the blues is of course of paramount importance, but as you point out Horace wasn’t the only one who saw the power of that all important blood transfusion that gave birth to bop. I would argue that what is more distinctive, strange even, in Horace Silver in particular, is the influence of his Cape Verdean ancestry, which you don’t mention. This complicated inheritance, which he addresses directly in Song for My Father is for historical reasons I think more aptly described as Afro-Brazilian than Afro-Latin. In any case, what I love about Horace Silver is precisely this cosmopolitan blackness, a musical texture that is soaked in the American experience of displacement and migration—an experimental and unprecedented mulatto expression that uneasily but confidently intertwines European classical allusions with Afro-Brazilian rhythms and Southern soul, gospel and blues phrasing. I think there is no question, for instance, that Horace Silver saw his music in relation to that of Carlos Jobim. This is also the era of Black Orpheus. I think it’s too often overlooked, that to be an avant guard musician in the late fifties and early sixties was to be a part of the great meeting of the music of the Americas – North and South, which were just then entering into real dialogue for the first time, giving birth to Salsa, Bossa Nova, Latin-Jazz, etc etc. It’s a nerve complex that can’t be reduced to any single tradition or pinned to any one place. (Though it quite obviously reflects the triangle of black slavery). As for the lack of punch in the studio recordings, I completely agree that they are held back by the deliberate search for a single effect—they feel too thought out, alienated from the roots. There’s no question that the real fire, the jocularity, the wittiness and the joy only come out in the live performances.
Certainly the influence of Cape Verdean music on Silver’s work distinguishes him from other pianists, such as Ray Charles or Bobby Timmons, whose work also incorporated gospel. Silver, however, deserves credit for popularizing the use of gospel in jazz, and that’s what I find interesting. James P. Johnson had done it long before Silver with “Yamekraw,” as had Duke Ellington, but “The Preacher,” which does not reflect, as far as I can tell, much Cape Verdean influence at all, became synonymous with a new style in jazz—hard bop.
The mixing of the sacred and the profane in the American context is socially more significant than mixing jazz with Afro-Brazilian music, as Ellison’s comment suggests. It’s controversial territory. Most jazz artists who had done something similar, such as Johnson, took care to present such an experiment in reverential (i.e. classical) terms. Silver, on the other hand, makes it clear that his music is straight-ahead jazz. This is sacrilegious.
The “cosmopolitan blackness” you locate in Silver is part of a long-standing tradition in jazz, a distinctly American music produced through the intermingling of southern blacks, the descendants of Haitian Creoles, Spaniards, and Frenchman in the rich cultural cauldron of Louisiana and neighboring parts of the American South at the turn of the twentieth century. What Jelly Roll Morton called “The Spanish Tinge,” transported to American soil through the migration of blacks from other parts of the Americas, is central to jazz, always has been. In other words, the dialogue between the Americas did not begin in the fifties and sixties. The dialogue is at least as old as jazz itself.