BLP 4131

Horace Silver - Silver's Serenade

Released - July 1963

Recording and Session Information

Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, May 7, 1963
Blue Mitchell, trumpet; Junior Cook, tenor sax; Horace Silver, piano; Gene Taylor, bass; Roy Brooks, drums.

tk.7 Silver's Serenade
tk.10 Nineteen Bars

Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, May 8, 1963
Blue Mitchell, trumpet; Junior Cook, tenor sax; Horace Silver, piano; Gene Taylor, bass; Roy Brooks, drums.

tk.16 Let's Get To The Nitty Gritty
tk.21 The Dragon Lady
tk.25 Sweet Sweetie Dee

Session Photos

Photos: © Francis Wolff/Mosaic Images 
https://www.mosaicrecordsimages.com/

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
Silver's Serenade	Horace Silver	07 May 1963
Let's Get to the Nitty Gritty	Horace Silver	08 May 1963
Side Two
Sweet Sweetie Dee	Horace Silver	08 May 1963
The Dragon Lady	Horace Silver	08 May 1963
Nineteen Bars	Horace Silver	07 May 1963

Liner Notes

If one wanted to compare Horace Silver to anything, it could well be that beetle-shaped import from Germany, the Volkswagen: First of all, they both caught the public's fancy in the early-fifties. Next is the fact that they are both, in their respective fields, trendsetters. And, though both are often imitated, neither has been, or ever will be, matched. Finally, and most important in the comparison, is the fact that their evolution and development has been logical and entirely functional. The Volkswagen has no useless gaudy fins or gargantuan amounts of horse-power. And Horace's music is never a shuck nor is it ever contrived.

In a recent article in Down Beat, the distaff side of jazz criticism, Barbara Gardner, wrote an especially lucid article on Horace. She pointed out that contrary to what Leo Durocher thinks, nice guys, like Horace, can, instead of finishing last, stay out ahead of the rest of the pack. But as shy and unassuming as Horace is personally, when it comes to his quintet and his music, he is a taskmaster, benevolent, but nonetheless, a taskmaster.

The success of Horace and his quintets through the years is directly traceable to Horace's "takin' care of business" attitude. For, in reality, a leader of a group of musicians is a merchant who presents to the public a product for consumption. Bakeries don't stay in business if they have only stale bread to sell, and quintets don't stay in business either if there is a staleness in their music.

With Horace's group, the chances of it going stale are nigh well nil. There are regularly scheduled rehearsals which the entire group must attend. New material, as well as old, is rehearsed and re-rehearsed so that on the bandstand or on record, what is heard by the listener is the finished product, and not an enthusiastic first attempt. Just think back, if you can, to the last time you read anywhere that Horace's group didn't show up for a gig. You can't, because it never happened. Or try, if you will, to remember if you ever saw Horace in person and the group wasn't impeccably dressed or Horace didn't stand up and announce each one of the guys individually. Although an almost impossible task, Horace's on-stage presentation is part of the quality product he sells and it is a fully finished product.

Through the years, there have been many Horace Silver quintets. Still, though the personnel has differed, the Silver "sound" has remained the same. After just a few bars, even the casual jazz devotee can identify a Horace Silver record. This is once again due entirely to Horace. When he selects personnel for the group, he never hires anyone for name value. Rather, he selects a musician on the basis of his adaptability to the Silver "sound" and the group format.

To many, the current group is the Horace Silver quintet. They have been together for a few years now and have achieved a rapport and cohesiveness as a group that is practically unparalleled. On each of Horace's Blue Note albums it seems that the group is as tight as it can possibly be. Yet, with each ensuing recording, the group is tighter and tighter. This album is no exception, since it represents the most cohesive Horace Silver recording yet released.

With this album something else is rather apparent, and that is the coming of age of Junior Cook. Long a solid middle-weight, with this recording Junior enters the light heavyweight category. Should his musical poundage increase as it has been doing, in no time he will be a full fledged heavyweight.

Blue Mitchell has the same maturity musically that an elder statesman has politically. Yet Blue is young and constantly growing, though for a long time he has been, along with Kenny Dorham, one of the most underrated trumpet players in jazz.

With Roy Brooks constantly prodding the group rhythmically, and Gene Taylor laying a solid bottom, the group is a natural reagent to the catalytic piano playing and composing of Horace Silver.

Before discussing the selections on this album, I take the privilege of a godfather and announce the birth of two more of Horace's children, "Sweet Sweetie Dee" and "The Dragon Lady." They join "Sister Sadie," "Juicy Lucy," "The Preacher," "Hippy," "The Outlaw," and "Filthy McNasty" as members of Horace's fictitious family. Note the word "fictitious" since, contrary to popular belief, none of Horace's musical characters are based on real-life people.

The title tune, "Silver's Serenade," is a 16-bar minor blues that is best described as a strolling tune. This is the type of tune you find yourself whistling the whole next day after you've first heard it. It builds in a very gradual, subtle manner, Blue's solo is very tasty and economical, and Junior's solo gives an excellent example of the high degree of perfection he has developed tonewise. Horace once again achieves a maximum impact with a minimum of notes.

"Let's Get to the Nitty Gritty" is a prime example of Horace in his funky bag. Immediately after the line is stated, everybody is into just that — the nitty gritty.

The other soul tune is tagged "Sweet Sweetie Dee." Horace starts his solo off on a note of light whimsey with a hint of "One Mint Julep." It's amazing how Horace gets so funky, yet doesn't sound like a carry home from a church supper.

Roy Brooks's cymbal, along with Horace's voicing of horns and piano, conjures up a very hip oriental image on "The Dragon Lady." This tune is part of his current love affair with Japan, and is reminiscent of Horace's last Blue Note album, The Tokyo Blues (4110).

The final selection, "Nineteen Bars," is evidence of the fact that as a composer Horace creates some of the most complex structures on the contemporary scene. It reminds us of his earlier "Where Y'all At" structurally, and melodically there is a hint of "Swingin' the Samba." At one point, Blue's solo has a haunting Middle Eastern quality. This track also showcases Roy Brooks's great technical ability

So, like a Volkswagen on the open road, the fine-tuned, five-cylinder Horace Silver creatively machine rolls along. Each Monday night I play an hour of Horace's music on my radio program. For my listeners, as well as for myself, it is a most enjoyable sixty-minute excursion.

- Joel Dorn, WHAT-FM, Philadelphia, PA

RVG CD Reissue Liner Notes

A NEW LOOK AT SILVER'S SERENADE

In 1977, Radio Free Jazz, the predecessor of the current JazzTimes magazine, published a supplement honoring Horace Silver's silver anniversary as a Blue Note recording artist. A host of the musicians who collaborated with the pianist/composer over those 25 years testified with rare unanimity to how making music with Silver taught invaluable lessons in artistry and craft and conduct, and set professional and personal examples both rare and exalted. All four members of what remained the Horace Silver quintet (both 15 years after Joel Dorn wrote this set's original liner notes and to this day) added personal testimonials to their former leader's achievement. Two of the comments by bassist Gene Taylor and tenor saxophonist Junior Cook stood out then and bear repeating more than another quarter-century on.

Taylor, after echoing a common theme of how Silver would spend time with both the entire quintet and individual members to make sure the music was interpreted correctly, noted that "Horace is like Duke Ellington in that he knew what he could get out of each individual...When he wrote he kept each individual in mind. He wouldn't just write something for no reason. He wouldn't overwrite for anybody."

Cook spoke of the consistency and variety of Silver's music. "He had some music for the audience, like 'Filthy McNasty' and 'Sister Sadie,' but [also) things like 'Enchantment,' 'The Outlaw,' 'Nineteen Bars,' all kinds of things in all kinds of keys. It was really a hell of a school musically...This was another thing that was unique about him, almost everything he wrote was worthwhile...Almost all of Horace's things were good and he would write different moods... All his music was a source of knowledge..."

Both perspectives are illustrated on Silver's Serenade, which turned out to be the last complete album produced by this most complete edition of the quintet. Cook, Taylor, and Blue Mitchell made their first studio session with Silver and drummer Louis Hayes early in 1959 on Finger Poppin'. After taping Blowin' the Blues Away later that year, Roy Brooks replaced Hayes and the band fell into a schedule of annual releases that included Horace-Scope, the live Doin' the Thing, and The Tokyo Blues. While the band stayed together for an additional year after the present music was recorded, the majority of Silver's classic next LP Song for My Father features the debut of the successor unit the pianist assembled after Mitchell et al. left to form what would ultimately become known as the trumpeter's quintet with Cook, Taylor, pianist Chick Corea, and drummer Al Foster.

The present music, recorded five years into the Mitchell/Cook era of Horace Silver's music, offers a particularly sublime example of the interpersonal sensitivity Taylor acknowledged in his Radio Free Jazz encomium. The mesh of this particular trumpet and tenor sax had reached both a deep expansiveness and a precise shading at this point that conjured the definitive texture for each mood Silver expressed, and the melodic power of the writing in turn seemed to emerge from the very core of Mitchell's and Cook's timbres. Dorn's special praise for Cook, a vastly undervalued player for much of his career, was no doubt appreciated by the saxophonist, but if any Silver album is a showcase for Mitchell, it is this one, in the hyper-lyrical realms of the title track, the snap of "Sweet Sweetie Dee," and the bustle of "Nineteen Bars."

Cook's celebration of Silver the composer's extreme musicality is also confirmed by this program, of which only "Silver's Serenade" contains what strikes this listener as a predictable form. Three of the other compositions are A-A-B schemes, with "Let's Get to the Nitty Gritty" in three six-bar and "Sweetie" in three eight-bar units. Both are titles Cook might have considered "for the audience," but they are hardly commonplace. "The Dragon Lady" covers 24 bars as well, though a more accurate diagram of the form might be 8-8-6+2. The shape of "Nineteen," 7+8+4, is perfectly logical given the melodic ideas. All five pieces employ vamps, pickups, and other devices with strong rhythmic character, and several incorporate at one point or another the harmonic ideas Miles Davis and Bill Evans had introduced in recent years without diluting their unmistakable character as Horace Silver tunes. These are some of the reasons why musicians loved and still love to play Silver's music, and why the rest of us continue to listen.

This exemplary quintet album was originally planned as a tentet session, with three brass and two saxophones added to the working personnel. Silver assembled such a group in the studio a month before the present recording, and attempted all five of the compositions included here, as well as "Next Time I Fall in Love," which was ultimately cut in a trio version and included in the album Serenade to a Soul Sister, Poor ensemble execution led Silver to scrap the project, thereby providing the Mitchell/Cook edition of his band with the opportunity to record one final classic session. - Bob Blumenthal, 2005