BLP 1539

 Horace Silver - 6 Pieces of Silver

Released - November 1956

Recording and Session Information

Van Gelder Studio, Hackensack, NJ, November 10, 1956
Donald Byrd, trumpet #1,2,4-6; Hank Mobley, tenor sax #1,2,4-6; Horace Silver, piano; Doug Watkins, bass; Louis Hayes, drums.

tk.3 Enchantment
tk.7 Virgo
tk.10 Shirl
tk.12 Senor Blues
tk.14 Camouflage
tk.15 Cool Eyes
tk.18 For Heaven's Sake

Session Photos

Photos: Francis Wolff

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
Cool Eyes	Horace Silver	10/11/1956
Shirl	Horace Silver	10/11/1956
Camouflage	Horace Silver	10/11/1956
Enchantment	Horace Silver	10/11/1956
Side Two
Señor Blues	Horace Silver	10/11/1956
Virgo	Horace Silver	10/11/1956
For Heaven's Sake	Elise Bretton, Sherman Edwards, Donald Meyer	10/11/1956

Credits

Cover Photo:	FRANCIS WOLFF
Cover Design:	REID MILES
Engineer:	RUDY VAN GELDER
Producer:	ALFRED LION
Liner Notes:	LEONARD FEATHER

Liner Notes

The release of this LP by the Horace Silver quintet has more significance than might appear on the surface; for although Horace’s career on records in general and on Blue Note in particular has covered a broad area of styles, performances and groups, this is the first time he has ever been able to present, and present with pride, a permanently-formed combo of his own.

There are many of us who felt that this step was long overdue, not only in terms of his talent, but also on the strength of his personality. His mild manner, pleasant speaking voice and clean living habits seemed to equip Horace for the role of leader, and if the reaction of night club owners in recent months is any yardstick, he didn't start a moment too soon.

Since this is, then, a milestone in the Silver career, it might be advisable to pause and recapitulate briefly the biographical backgrounds of each member of the quintet as it is heard on these sides, since the writers of liner notes tend too often to take for granted a knowledge of all these facts on the part of the fan.

The leader was born Horace Ward Martin Tavares Silver in 1928 in Norwalk, Conn. After saxophone studies in high school and private piano lessons, he played gigs around Connecticut on both tenor and piano. It was after Stan Getz heard him in Hartford that he was hired to tour with the Getz quartet, staying with the group for a year in 1950-51. Settling in New York City, he worked frequently during the next year with Art Blakey, as well as with combos led by Terry Gibbs, Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Bill Harris and others. From then until he formed his own group, he was most frequently a part of the Jazz Messengers.

Hank Mobley, Horace's tenor man, was born in Eastman, Georgia in 1930, but was raised in New Jersey. After working with rhythm and blues groups until 1950, he jobbed mostly with Max Roach from 1951-53, spent several months with the Gillespie group in '54, and since then has been with Horace, first in the Jazz Messengers and now in the Silver quintet.

Donald Byrd, Horace’s trumpeter on this date, was born in Detroit in 1932, the son of a Methodist minister who was also a musician. He studied at Cass Tech High, Wayne University and Manhattan School of Music. After serving in the Air Force from 1951-53 and then working with local groups, he came to New York and played with George Wallington's group and Blakey's Messengers in 1955.

Twenty-two-year-old Doug Watkins, also a Cass Tech man from Detroit, was a schoolmate of Byrd and of bassist Paul Chambers, who is his cousin by marriage. Leaving home with James Moody in '53, he settled in New York in August, 1954 and gigged mostly with the men in and around the Messengers.

Louis Hayes, Horace's talented young drummer, is only eighteen years old and is also a Detroiter; he replaced Art Taylor on very short notice in this group, and according to those of us who have heard him at Birdland and on other gigs, he shows signs of becoming a big name before too long.

With the exception of one standard tune, the music heard on the first session by Horace’s new group consisted entirely of Silver originals. Cool Eyes is a swinging opener; notice the interesting use of the double augmented effect at the twenty-third bar of the theme. The performances lend an extra sense of construction in that the solos are tied together by eight-bar unison interludes. Mobley, Byrd and Horace have extended solo space and Watkins walks a while. After the closing ensemble, in which the piano plays unison along with the horns, the last phrase is repeated effectively in descending keys.

Shirl, named for a young feminine friend, is a piano solo with rhythm, pensive and delicate, striking a sort of Stella By Starlight mood.

Camouflage has an unusual device in the rhythm pauses during the solos, as a result of which it seems to swing as much as anything in the album, yet in a slightly different way. Hank, Horace and Donald are featured in that order.

Enchantment is an exotic theme that demonstrates how much can be extracted from the use of two-part harmony. Notice the use of an unorthodox Latin beat in which the third eighth note is left open; Louis Hayes' use of mallets; Horace’s employment of octaves and other devices not typical of him.

Senor Blues is, for this listener at least, the most exciting of the seven performances on these sides. Set in a minor key, with the horns voiced, it is in a triple time, which Horace describes as 6/8, though I would be inclined to call it 12/8. The performance is full of tricky rhythmic and counter-rhythmic effects. When piano solo time arrives, the rhythm changes again, and of this time signature Horace confesses, “I don’t know what you call that!" (We call it Fine and Funky.) Both in its solos and in the ensemble approach, this is a striking demonstration of the degree of originality to which the twelve-bar motif can be stretched.

Virgo, named for the sign under which Horace was barn, is a fast unison theme in which the solos again are spelled by eight measure interludes. Horace, on his solo here, is as fluent as a pianistic Charlie Parker. Louis Hayes, after trading fours with the horns, has a long solo, and there is a sudden bop-style ending.

For Heaven’s Sake, a popular song of a few years ago, is given the same brand of treatment as Shirl, a piano solo in a pleasantly-relaxed ballad mood.

It need hardly be pointed out in conclusion that this record debut by the new Silver quintet augurs a successful future for Horace as a leader. Assuming the main ingredients of success are talent, ambition and luck, it can safely be said that Horace is already two-thirds of the way there.

- LEONARD FEATHER
(Author of The Encyclopedia Yearbook of Jazz)

Cover Photo by FRANCIS WOLFF
Cover Design by REID MILES
Recording by RUDY VAN GELDER

RVG CD Reissue Liner Notes

A NEW LQOK AT SIX PIECES OF SILVER

To judge from the personnel and Leonard Feather's original liner notes on this album and Horace Silver's previous effort, the Silver's Blue LP recorded for Epic four months earlier, the launching of Silver's working quintet was a simple matter of what had been four/fifths of the Jazz Messengers cooperative group parting ways with Art Blakey in the Spring of 1956. Matters are rarely this simple when a new band is trying to establish some level of permanence, and they were not so in this case. The Jazz Messengers had been dissolved shortly after Silver, Blakey, Donald Byrd, Hank Mobley and Doug Watkins accompanied Dutch vocalist Rita Reys and finished their self-titled Columbia LP in May; then Silver did his best to land gigs, and used a variety of available musicians. The Epic album, his sole date as a leader for a label other than Blue Note prior to his formation of Silveto in the 1980s, appears to have been owed CBS under the contract the Messengers signed earlier in '56 (Blakey in turn recorded two more albums for Columbia). Byrd, Mobley and Watkins appeared under the pianist's leadership on the Epic LP, as did trumpeter Joe Gordon and drummers Kenny Clarke and Art Taylor.

There had been some work for Silver as a leader during the Summer and Autumn of 1956, but the ongoing health of his bandleading career was hardly guaranteed when he returned to Blue Note and Rudy Van Gelder's studio in November. Once again he looked to his former Messenger mates in assembling a recording unit. Silver's regular trumpeter of the time, Art Farmer, was unavailable due to his contract with another label, so Byrd — who was about to launch the Jazz Lab Quintet with Gigi Gryce, and had some exposure to Silver's new compositions as an occasional sub for Farmer on live dates — was the obvious backup choice to fill the trumpet chair. Mobley and Watkins were members of the original Jazz Messengers (Byrd had replaced Kenny Dorham at the end of the 1955) and still regular playing companions of the pianist, although Teddy Kotick became Si Iver's bassist once the jobs started coming in behind the success of this album. Mobley, one of the great interpreters of Silver's music, stayed on until late in 1957. Louis Hayes, who had worked with Yusef Lateef and Curtis Fuller in Detroit before arriving in New York in August 1956, would prove to be the sideman with the longest tenure, working for three years with Silver before leaving to join Cannonball Adderley in the fall of 1959. "I used to just admire looking at [Silver], watching all the energy that he would put in every tune, like rehearsals, like it was his last time every time he played a tune," the drummer told Ira Gitler in 1977.

Silver made some historic contributions to recorded jazz on Blue Note both before and after this album, though none proved as critical to the ongoing health of his career. Clearly he had been touched by brilliance, not just as a piano soloist and a composer but also as an organizer of men and musical materials. He wrote tunes of high melodic and structural quality in a range of moods. "Cool Eyes, " which became the working quintet's closing theme, is one of his hip shouts a la "Room 608," as is the bonus track Enchantment" revels in a lyricism that "Tippin". "Enchantmment" hints at international flavors, while "Camouflage" manages to be knotty and naturally propulsive all at once. The haunting "Shirl" is one of two trio tracks, a practice that was employed on subsequent quintet albums. Silver first gained acclaim for his kinetic trio recordings featuring Blakey, and with horns now available for his more fire-breathing efforts, these rhythm section interludes tended to emphasize his more introspective side, "Virgo" moves, and allows the teenaged Hayes to flex his precocious chops.

And then there is "Senor Blues," the album's hit and the impetus behind the Horace Silver Quintet's initial success. In addition to the longer version that appeared on the original LP, this reissue includes a different instrumental take that was released in two parts on a 45, plus a vocal version also recorded for 45 release 19 months later with Bill Henderson and what was almost the classic Horace Silver Quintet (Byrd is on trumpet again, in the chair soon to be occupied by Blue Mitchell). The 1956 LP version is clearly the best, though Henderson, then an unknown just arrived in New York, does a nice job with Silver's lyrics. All three versions reveal the command of Silver the arranger, who turned compositions into dramatic vignettes through his voicing of the two horns and shifts in rhythm. The analogy has frequently been made between Silver's Quintet and the Count Basie Band, though a track like "Senor Blues," which recalls nothing so much as the 1941 Ellington classic "Ko-Ko," argues that Silver had learned his Ducal lessons as well.

—Bob Blumenthal