BLP 1518

Horace Silver And The Jazz Messengers

Released - July 1956

Recording and Session Information

Van Gelder Studio, Hackensack, NJ, November 13, 1954
Kenny Dorham, trumpet; Hank Mobley, tenor sax; Horace Silver, piano; Doug Watkins, bass; Art Blakey, drums.

tk.3 Room 608
tk.6 Creepin' In
tk.8 Doodlin'
tk.10 Stop Time

Van Gelder Studio, Hackensack, NJ, February 6, 1955
Kenny Dorham, trumpet; Hank Mobley, tenor sax; Horace Silver, piano; Doug Watkins, bass; Art Blakey, drums.

tk.3 Hippy
tk.5 To Whom It May Concern
tk.9 Hankerin'
tk.13 The Preacher

Session Photos 

Photos: Francis Wolff

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
Room 608	Horace Silver	13/11/1954
Creepin' In	Horace Silver	13/11/1954
Stop Time	Horace Silver	13/11/1954
To Whom It May Concern	Horace Silver	06/02/1955
Side Two
Hippy	Horace Silver	06/02/1955
The Preacher	Horace Silver	06/02/1955
Hankerin'	Hank Mobley	06/02/1955
Doodlin'	Horace Silver	13/11/1954

Credits

Cover Photo:	FRANCIS WOLFF
Cover Design:	REID K. MILES
Engineer:	RUDY VAN GELDER
Producer:	ALFRED LION
Liner Notes:	IRA GITTLER

Liner Notes

LATE in 1954 a quartet under the leadership of Horace Silver was playing at Minton’s Playhouse. As a result of earlier successes on the Blue Note label, (hear BLP 1520 for these first trio dates) Horace’s star was in the ascendancy and Alfred Lion was anxious to record more of his brilliant, hard driving piano.

It was decided that this date would present Horace as a combo leader for the first time. He responded by getting Kenny Dorham and Art Blakey to join himself and two of the members of his Minton’s quartet, Hank Mobley and Doug Watkins. Thus the Messengers were born, or reborn. Actually the name had been used before by Art Blakey when he led a 17 piece band on occasional gigs, and a septet on Blue Note, both in the late Forties. The present Messengers have laid permanent claim to the name by their length of existence and their musical excellence. In most informed, aware jazz circles they are considered to be the most muscular, spiritually rewording group to come along in the past two years.

In this LP, which represents the first and the second sessions recorded by the Messengers, Horace has supplied seven of the eight originals. Proceedings start with a fast unison theme, Room 608, named for Horace’s hotel room (Horace is hewing to the correct jazz line here, for hotel rooms hove made jazz tune titles ever since Benny Goodman cut Room 1411 in 1928). The ensemble is followed by two choruses of trumpet that will serve to convince you of Kenny Dorham’s true ability. Seldom has he played with such fluency and assurance, in a style that seems to blend the best elements of both Gillespie and Davis. After two typically well-constructed choruses by Horace there is a series of cute unison breaks and piano fill-ins before Mobley takes over for a swinging solo. A rousing drum chorus precedes the return to the theme.

Creepin’ In sets a wonderful minor mood—slow slinky and funky. It is better listened to than described. Listen to it.

Stop Time contains only 16 bars of fast unison theme and gives everybody o chance to accomplish what seems to me to be their best work on the entire session: Dorham, Mobley. Silver and Blakey all sit in the spotlight successively and successfully.

The open letter, To Whom It May Concern. has scriveners Silver, Mobley and Dorham spreading the word to one and all on the merits of getting to the heart of the matter and what it is all about.

Art Blakey knocks on the door and everyone fails in: Kenny Dorham and his pungent, “running style” trumpet, Hank Mobley's sinuous. sinewy tenor, the constantly building ideas of Horace’s piano and Art Blakey's talking drums. Enough to satisfy any Hippy.

Once when Horace was being interviewed in reference to the group he said, “We can reach way back and get that old time gutbucket barroom feeling with just a taste of the back-beat.” He was referring, of course, to The Preacher, an earthy swinger somewhat reminiscent of I've Been Working On The Railroad in its melody line. In keeping with the title, everyone “preaches” in their solos. First Kenny exhorts and then Honk follows with o bluesy sermon. Rev. Silver gives the benediction and the congregation answers him. Another version of this tune can be heard as played by organist Jimmy Smith on Blue Note 1512.

Hank Mobley shines on his original Hankerin with a pace-setting opening solo that Kenny picks up beautifully before handing to over to the “Silver fingered orator” to expound on. Art has a characteristically telling solo before the close.

Doodlin is a 12-bar blues in which the tenor creeps below the trumpet at whole-tone intervals in the first 8 bars. Note, too, the humorous use of staccato notes in bars 8 and 9. Note more particularly Horace’s superb comping behind the Dorham and Mobley solos, in which he sometimes gets a 12-to-the-bar feel.

This record proves again that the strength of jazz recording lies with the honest independents who first to recognize and record real talent.

Blue Note’s records have made Blue Note’s record one to be admired. More often than not they hove blazed a trail in jazz which is then travelled by other settlers. As the old adage says, “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.”

— IRA GITLER

RVG CD Reissue Liner Notes

A NEW LOOK AT AND THE JAZZ MESSENGERS

This album (or more accurately, the two 10-inch Horace Silver Quintet albums that were quickly reissued in the expanded 12-inch format) provided the first occasion on which Horace Silver could display the full range of his talents. His skills as a piano soloist and a writer of indelible tunes had been apparent on his earlier trio dates, and his propulsive style of accompaniment had been extensively displayed behind such prominent figures as Stan Getz, Lester Young, and Miles Davis. Six recording sessions from earlier in 1954 on which Silver worked under Davis's leadership had given an added boost to the young pianist, and included performances such as "Walkin'" and "Doxy" that proved to be as critical as the present titles in establishing the new funky, hard-bop order. All that was missing from these earlier efforts was an opportunity for Silver to create his own music in a setting including horns. The possibilities had been obvious when Art Blakey reprised two early Silver tunes, "Split Kick" and "Quicksilver," on the drummer's seminal A Night at Birdland quintet albums. The present studio sessions, featuring seven new Silver compositions, left no doubt that an ensemble of trumpet, tenor sax, piano, bass, and drums was Silver's ideal setting.

With horns aboard, Silver was able to give full play to the introductions, interludes, background riffs, shout choruses, and codas that made his already-special melodies even more so. As Martin Williams points out in The Jazz Tradition, Silver created an atmosphere in which the horns and piano could work both with and against each other like sections in a big band. Williams argues persuasively that Silver's conception made his arrangements for quintet in effect some of the best big-band writing of the period. Yet it took the right horn players to realize the full potential of these scores and in Kenny Dorham and Hank Mobley, Silver had a brilliantly-matched pair that provided the template for what by late 1956 became the Horace Silver Quintet. "That horn section was so hip, you know, they were super hip," Silver himself has acknowledged. "The way they phrased, and the lines they played, their harmonic knowledge was so beautiful."

These recordings were also the occasion to revive, at Silver's suggestion, the Messengers name that Blakey had employed nearly a decade earlier. This initial edition of the Jazz Messengers, while long described as a cooperative, often worked under the name of whoever in the group obtained employment, and may not have called itself the Jazz Messengers in public until the quintet's November 1955 engagement at New York's Café Bohemia. The five did record, together and with others, in a variety of configurations during 1955: on Dorham's two Afro-Cuban sessions (minus Watkins and with added starters) and Mobley's debut as a leader (minus Dorham), both on Blue Note, as well as on Donald Byrd's Transition album Byrd's Eye View(with Byrd and Joe Gordon in place of Dorham). This last date is the point at which Edition 1 morphed into Edition IA of the band, for when they recorded for Columbia in the Spring of 1956 as The Jazz Messengers (with no leader credited on the initial release), Byrd was the trumpeter.

Cooperatives are hard to sustain, and this one fell apart, as most do, over questions of money. Blakey, the senior and most publicly prominent member, collected the fee for the Columbia recordings but failed to pay the others, which prompted Silver, Mobley, and Watkins to follow Dorham's lead and become ex-Messengers. At that point, the musical style heard on the present performances was already creating a sensation, a point driven home when Dorham christened his new band the Jazz Prophets, and both Savoy and Prestige found ways to work the word message into the titles of albums featuring Mobley. Not all great musicians are born to lead, of course. Dorham's Prophets were short-lived, and Mobley became a charter member of Silver's post-Messengers quintet. Blakey kept the band name and (at least for the moment) Byrd, and was back in the Columbia studios with a new group of Messengers a month after Silver et al had departed.

While all of the music here has become classic, both "The Preacher" and "Doodlin"' were the primary hits. Each had obtained standard status by the end of 1956, thanks to recordings in that year by Jimmy Smith of the former, and by Dizzy Gillespie and Ray Charles of the latter. Contrary to Ira Gitler's original liner notes, the source for "The Preacher" is "Show Me the Way to Go Home." Silver had composed the piece as a sign-off for the end of performances, but ended up creating one of the first soul-music classics.

— Bob Blumenthal, 2004