BLP 4008

Horace Silver - Finger Poppin'

Released - February 1959

Recording and Session Information

Van Gelder Studio, Hackensack, NJ, January 31, 1959
Blue Mitchell, trumpet #1,2,4,5,7,8; Junior Cook, tenor sax #1,2,4,5,7,8; Horace Silver, piano; Eugene Taylor, bass; Louis Hayes, drums.

tk.11 Cookin' At The Continental
tk.24 Mellow D
tk.29 You Happened My Way
tk.30 Swingin' The Samba
tk.32 Finger Poppin'
tk.34 Sweet Stuff
tk.37 Come On Home
tk.39 Juicy Lucy

Session Photos

Photos: Francis Wolff

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
Finger Poppin'	Horace Silver	31/01/1959
Juicy Lucy	Horace Silver	31/01/1959
Swingin' the Samba	Horace Silver	31/01/1959
Sweet Stuff	Horace Silver	31/01/1959
Side Two
Cookin' at the Continental	Horace Silver	31/01/1959
Come on Home	Horace Silver	31/01/1959
You Happened My Way	Horace Silver	31/01/1959
Mellow D	Horace Silver	31/01/1959

Liner Notes

HORACE SILVER has been directing his own combo for little over two and a half years at this writing. In the period since he broke away from the Jazz Messengers to express his own ideas as a pianist-composer leader, he has made considerable progress on both the musical and the commercial level. His discovery of new approaches to old forms, as demonstrated in such themes as The Preacher and Senor Blues, has led to a sudden access of recognition in the role of songwriter as his works have been played — and sung — by artists far from his own particular field of jazz.

Meanwhile, in his own quintet, there have been changes of personnel but no changes of direction. The Silver group has as its motivating force the concept that jazz can swing hard, remain true to its blues roots, regain and retain the pristine essence of “funk”, and simultaneously plough ahead with compositional concepts, thematic structures that are new to this idiom.

Not long after this LP was recorded, Horace and his men took off for France, where the brand of jazz he has come to represent is perhaps even more thoroughly appreciated and supported than on home grounds. By now the French fans, among the world’s most extrovert in their enthusiasm, will have been exposed to Horace’s surrounding group of comparative newcomers and will doubtless have subjected them to the minute and microscopic scrutiny of which they are so uniquely capable.

Among these recent arrivals are Horace’s two horn men, Junior Cook and Blue Mitchell. Speaking of them just before be left on the tour, Horace said: “Junior came as a great surprise to me when I first heard him. I met him when I was working a gig in Baltimore and went to Washington on my night off to hear Lou Donaldson working in a club there. Junior was at the Howard Theatre in Washington, playing in some rock ‘n’ roll show. He and I both sat in with Lou, and that was the first time I heard him play. Well, later on Cliff Jordan had to leave for California because of illness in his family, so I used Junior to fill in for a week.

“Junior worked for a while with a combo led by the girl bassist Gloria Bell. Then he joined Dizzy Gillespie and was with him for a few weeks, until Diz went overseas, and then I grabbed him, and he’s been with us since then — almost a year now.

“Blue Mitchell, of course, I knew front way back, when we did a recording session for Blue Note, the date with Lou Donaldson when we made Down Home and if I Love Again. He’d played around with a lot of rhythm and blues bands, but he always showed a lot of promise and was always a modern musician.

Blue always plays like crazy in a club, but at first he had a lot of difficulty relaxing in a recording studio. He would get real tensed up in a studio, but he got better as we went along with the rehearsal, and by the time we made the first actual okay take he was in good shape. And before long we’d be well under way and we’d all have forgotten that we were recording.

"I first met Gene Taylor, the bass player, at Smalls’, where he sat in with us. I believe we have a rhythm section that really cooks now; Louis Hayes, I think, is playing better all the time, and he was remarkable even when he first came with us.”

Finger Poppin’, the title tune of the album, denotes a process that is mandatory when the Silver group is within earshot. The number is a jump theme with regular construction in eight-bar blocks, the horns exposing it in rapid-fire unison. “We got a rhythmic contrast going,” Horace points out, “by having the bass play in two on the first sixteen measures, then by breaking up the rhythm on the channel — and when it goes into the blowing chorus the rhythm cooks in four.” To those for whom this may be their introduction to Blue, a surprise is in store; even fans already acquainted with his earlier work will be struck by the Clifford-like confidence and the Navarroesque smoothness of the phrasing.

Juicy Lucy was described by Horace as “a blues-y number in moderate tempo, based on a blues feeling but not the blues changes. The title? Just something I say when I see a big juicy chick. This is one of them nasty tunes, you know?” Notice how Junior settles into a simplier and more blues-based groove after the multi-noted ending of Blue’s chorus.

Swingin’ the Samba, as Horace points out, is “a legitimate samba all the way through, on a minor theme. I was particularly happy with the way this came out and hope something happens with it. The melody is very simple and it swings nicely, I think, with good solos. We have a little eight-bar thing going with the drums that’s used before and after the opening theme and again after the solo,. This may seem a little tricky to follow at first, because the release, between the two 16-bar passages, is just six bars long; so the chorus runs 16-6.16.”

What impressed me about the samba, above and beyond any details of construction, was its sense of structural unity; one is aware less of individual contributions than of the overall impact of the work, the maintenance of the mood and of the constant, bright-tempoed beat that gives it, as Horace says, a legitimate samba quality throughout. This is one of the Silver Quintet’s most cohesive works to date.

Sweet Stuff, which closes the first side, is “Just a trio number, me and Louis and Gene, playing a ballad I wrote.” The lyrical nature of the minor theme is stressed by the ingenious weaving of bass and drums into the pattern of its exposition.

Of Cookin’ at the Continental, Horace recalls, “We used to play that out at the Continental in Brooklyn. It’s a fast blues — a three-chorus melody actually, with the first two choruses the same, then something a little different on the third twelve, with the horns playing melody and the rhythm playing breaks.” The horns live up to their appropriate names through this track; Junior cooks and Mitchell’s blue. Horace delivers himself of some of his funkiest thoughts in a solo that makes intensifying use of a repeated phrase toward the end. A unison-horn ending is accentuated by the effective use of Louis’ press-roll.

Come on Home is a minor blues, played with a two-beat insinuation that inevitably launches a series of stark and soaring solos by Blue, Junior and Horace. That Junior has heard Rollins is often evident at certain points in this album; that he also acknowledges the contributions of Wardell Gray and Sonny Stitt may be discerned at other moments.

You Happened My Way is, to quote the composer again, “a very, very slow ballad. I guess I’ll have lyrics set to this. The construction is a little unusual. The main phrase is twelve bars long, but the second time it’s played, the last bar overlaps into the first bar of the channel, so in effect the chorus is 12, 12, 7 and 12. It’s written in the key of B, but the second eight ends on a C chord, so the channel starts in C.” This harmonic explanation aside, there is nothing melodically complex here, the basic mood being attractively simple. As for the odd bar-structure, Horace says “I don’t stop to think about measures until after I’m finished writing. As long as they feel even and comfortable, that’s all that counts.”

Mellow D is “a fast jump number, a 24-bar theme; actually the channel turns out to be not the channel but the last eight. The first passage is like honeysuckle Rose except for the half-step change in the third and fourth bars. It took the cats a little while to figure out just where they were on this, but we played it for a while to get the hang of it and finally everybody had a ball blowing on it.” The driving comping of Horace behind Junior’s solo and the relative calm that accompanies Blue’s flight, building again in passion as Hayes underlines with a series of sharp accents, are among the virtues of this performance, culminating in a relentlessly dynamic solo by Horace that has moments reminiscent of Bud Powell’s up-tempo work. Junior and Blue trade eights with Louis Hayes before the ensemble returns.

The eight performances presented here are as much the voice of one man as they arc the multiple voice of the group that interprets his ideas. Horace has found, in his current quintet, an outlet that gives him the ideal medium for the expression of his melodic creativity — a window, rather than a door, opening onto his particularly dynamic world of modern jazz.

— LEONARD FEATHER (Author of The Book of Jazz, Meridian Books)

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

Blue Mitchell performs by courtesy of Riverside Records.

RVG CD Reissue Liner Notes

A NEW LOOK AT FINGER POPPIN'

Selecting the most significant Horace Silver Quintet albums is a tricky business. Silver was simply too consistent as pianist, composer and bandleader, particularly during the years when he maintained a permanent touring ensemble. Still, there are obvious benchmarks in the Silver Quintet story. The initial Jazz Messenger sessions (1954-5) that defined his style; Six Pieces of Silver (1956), by his own first working band and with his hit "Senor Blues"; and Song For My Father (1963-4), when he introduced a totally revamped personnel and enjoyed his greatest commercial success, are obviously on the list. So is this album, wherein three members of what came to be considered the classic Horace Silver Quintet made their debut.

Trumpeter Blue Mitchell, tenor saxophonist Junior Cook and bassist Eugene Taylor were either little known or basically unknown to the wider jazz world when they became part of Silver's enterprise. True, Mitchell had made a Blue Note appearance with Lou Donaldson and Silver in 1952, and had recorded two of his own sessions for Riverside in the latter part of 1958 before cutting the present album; but at the time he had nowhere near the profile of such previous Silver brass associates as Kenny Dorham, Donald Byrd and Art Farmer. On the contrary, like Cook and Taylor, he had spent much of his professional career in the more commercial realms of rhythm and blues and rock and roll. Yet these three proved to be ideal sidemen for Silver's music, and went on to enjoy a run with the pianist that lasted over five years. Taylor provided the kind of solid, reliable foundation that added greatly to the overall propulsion of the music, and that can be better felt than analyzed. As for the hornmen, they shared two specific traits that, singly and together, made them so right for the job.

The first involves the focused, lyrical attitude they brought to their solos. The idea that improvisations should tell a story is as old as jazz itself, even if the concept is too often an honored in the breach. Mitchell and Cook, however, had a gift for phrase-making that ensured they always told not just stories, but stories within the context of the mood created by Silver's compositions. They made it easy for a vocalese lyricist like Jon Hendricks to set words to such performances as "Cookin' At The Continental" and "Come On Home," each of which became part of the Lambert, Hendricks & Ross book.

Cook and Mitchell were also magnificent ensemble players, perfectly matched with each other and with Silver's music. Their years on the R&B circuit had taught them all they needed to know about phrasing, dynamics and getting a personal band sound, skills that were particularly valuable when confronting the efficient yet demanding scores Silver created for the quintet. It takes nothing away from Silver's previous hornmen, who were without question excellent all-around musicians as well, to say that this trumpeter and this tenor player in tandem were special. Only Dorham and Hank Mobley in the original Jazz Messengers conveyed anything like the singularity of the Mitchell/Cook front line.

Beyond the new faces, Finger Poppin' was a tour de force for Silver the pianist/composer. All eight tracks were originals, and they run a gamut that encompasses hard swinging, soulful loping, and down-tempo tenderness, Details such as the interlude that introduces soloists on the title track, the up-front shout chorus before the solos on "Cookin' At The Continental," and the conjunction of half-time walking and double-time horns on the way out of "Come On Home" all work brilliantly. As for the piano solos, Silver sounds especially inspired by the band, and digs in with some of his most memorable work.

Louis Hayes deserves special mention for his contributions throughout, and for "Swingin' The Samba" in particular. From start to finish, that track is as energized as any Latin jazz of the period, and Hayes does it all by his lonesome, without added conga drummers or timbales players or cowbell support from other members of the band. There is a clarity and ideal weight to Hayes's drum sound on every track here, and on the subsequent Blowin' The Blues Away album, his last with Silver, that perfectly reinforces what the rest of the band is doing, and that Hayes's successors never duplicated. The drummer went on to make impressive contributions to other prominent bands, including those of Cannonball Adderley and Oscar Peterson, but he never found a better fit than he experienced with his first boss in the 1959 edition of the Horace Silver Quintet.

— Bob Blumenthal, 2002