BLP 4017

Horace Silver - Blowin' The Blues Away

Released - October 1959

Recording and Session Information

Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, August 29, 1959
Blue Mitchell, trumpet; Junior Cook, tenor sax; Horace Silver, piano; Eugene Taylor, bass; Louis Hayes, drums.

tk.3 Blowin' The Blues Away
tk.18 The Baghdad Blues

Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, August 30, 1959
Blue Mitchell, trumpet; Junior Cook, tenor sax; Horace Silver, piano; Eugene Taylor, bass; Louis Hayes, drums.

tk.2 Sister Sadie
tk.8 Peace
tk.14 Break City

Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, September 13, 1959
Horace Silver, piano; Eugene Taylor, bass; Louis Hayes, drums.

tk.7 Melancholy Mood (new version)
tk.8 The St. Vitus Dance

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
Blowin' the Blues Away	Horace Silver	29/08/1959
The St. Vitus Dance	Horace Silver	13/09/1959
Break City	Horace Silver	30/08/1959
Peace	Horace Silver	30/08/1959
Side Two
Sister Sadie	Horace Silver	30/08/1959
The Baghdad Blues	Horace Silver	29/08/1959
Melancholy Mood	Horace Silver	13/09/1959

Liner Notes

Horace Silver not only projects a distinct, immediately recognizable talent with his playing but in the way he writes for and guides his group, he again affirmatively expresses his unique personality. In this day of conformity, when many groups are only concerned with "getting a sound," often through gimmickry, Silver's quintet has established their own identity without the aid of spurious musical devices.

Horace does not merely write beginnings and endings for the soloists to fill, he makes his compositions grow by introducing interludes and variations on the opening theses; his ballads have power and yet they are tender: these are some of the reasons that the Silver group does not paint in monochrome.

Then there is the spirit, the group's emblem which they wear most boldly on the "swingers."

"This group has a lot of fire and that's what I want." These words were spoken by leader Silver, one of the fieriest players in jazz. A mild-mannered, sincerely affable young man who dresses with a hip neatness, Horace becomes a perspiring demon when pouring out his musical soul at the piano. I remember Cannonball Adderley, newly arrived in New York, commenting on Horace's off-stand appearance: "How can a cat look one way and then play so funky?"

Apropos of all the talk about "soul" and "funk" recently, it is interesting to note that with Horace Silver, the one who has them in abundant amounts, they have always been natural qualities and never the result of self-conscious striving.

To build a harmony of feeling in a group, you must have musicians who really want to play but the spark must come from the leader. Horace has the unflagging zest which acts as a strong unifying force. In referring to the group's performance level on any given night, he says, "Sometimes we have it, sometimes we don't... but nobody ever lays down on the job." This esprit de corps gives the quintet a vitality and surging power. Most groups today do not have this necessary ingredient; in the end they sound like pale imitations of one another.

In Blue Mitchell the group has a trumpeter who, while playing within a generally idiomatic style (he has listened to Brownie), says things in his own way. Tenorman Junior Cook, whom I once described as being touched by John Coltrane, is in reality out of the Hank Mobley mold but in a much more muscular manner. Both Blue and Junior have this in common with Horace; they don't waste notes but speak boldly in lean, declarative sentences.

Drummer Louis Hayes, who joined Horace as a teenager, has developed into one of the most intelligent of the young, swinging drummers. Eugene Taylor's drive and apartment house-size sound are explained by Silver: "Gene never has to be coaxed to really work."

The music in this album is the best illustration of all the things I've said about the Horace Silver quintet. The seven numbers, all written by Horace, are excellent representations of his very large talent and the group plays them in the manner to which they have accustomed us.

"Blowin' The Blues Away" can only be described as a smoker. It has no connection with the number of the same name that Billy Eckstine's band used to play in the '40s.

As in his previous albums, Silver devotes space to his piano in a trio context. "The St. Vitus Dance" is the first of two trio tracks here. Horace picked the title for it humorously; I doubt if it will make anyone nervous. Spiritually it harkens back to some of his first trio offerings on Blue Note.

"Break City" is so called because of the Charleston-like breaks played by the rhythm section during the theme. This one is another high-caloric cooker.

"Peace" is for the peaceful mood that it embodies. Horace's titles are as forthright and uncluttered as his music. The writing and playing show the group at their balladic best.

"Sister Sadie" is from down home. Horace relates that Coltrane, when he heard the group play it in Philly, said to him, "What's the name of that 'amen' number you're playing?"

In "Baghdad Blues" Silver establishes a Middle Eastern setting. It is not really a blues as far as the changes go, but has much of the blues feeling in the minor mode.

The second trio track, "Melancholy Mood," was originally heard in a first version as part of Further Explorations By The Horace Silver Quintet (Blue Note 1 589). Its further exploration was brought about by pianist Gil Coggins's rendition of it played at Horace's house. 'The other version was out of tempo with Teddy Kotick bowing behind me. Gilly played it out of tempo too, but with some new voicings that inspired me to try a different interpretation of the tune and play it in tempo," explains Horace.

If this album doesn't succeed in blowing your blues away, then I doubt whether you ever really had them in the first place.

- IRA GITLER

Cover Drawing by PAULA DONOHUE
Cover Design by REID MILES
Recording by RUDY VAN GELDER

RVG CD Reissue Liner Notes

A NEW LOOK AT BLOWIN' THE BLUES AWAY

My oldest jazz souvenir is a program from a concert held on November 27, 1960 at the Kiel Opera House in St. Louis. This was my first live jazz experience, and what drew me to the event after three months of sampling jazz records at the local public library was the presence on the double-bill of the headlining Modern Jazz Quartet. I was not yet familiar with the music of the second group, "Horace Silver's Quintette" as my program has it, and was initially crushed when it was announced that the MJQ would not appear. Then Silver's band took the stage and opened with "Blowin' the Blues Away," and to say that this piece lived to its title is to put it mildly. The next day I was back at the library, which happened to have a copy of the present album with the Paula Donohue drawing that captures the focused intensity of a Silver performance so brilliantly.

I was hardly the only person to be touched by the music of the Horace Silver quintet in this period. To judge by the live broadcasts of the Albert King and Little Milton blues bands that I heard on local radio in the next few years, the musicians who populated these rough-and-tumble ensembles (and who would go on to everything from pop/rock fame to avant-garde innovation) were weaned in large part on Silver tunes and the economic yet rich style of arranging Silver applied to small groups. They loved to cover Silver in the instrumental portion of their performances, and while they knew many of his pieces, going back to the pianist's days with the Jazz Messengers, Blowin' the Blues Away was a particularly rich source of material. Why, the title track was only the third most popular tune on the album!

There are many reasons to celebrate this Classic 1959 collection, and Silver's writing tops the list. "Sister Sadie," the epitome of gospel-inflected soul jazz with its call-and-response melody and churning beat, was an instant hit that would soon be widely covered by Woody Herman and many others. "Peace" was the most beautiful of ballads, an ideal vehicle for Blue Mitchell's trumpet sound and at 10 bars both extremely compact and the most uncommon of melodic forms. "Blowin' The Blues Away" contained its own structural eccentricities while conforming to the dozen bars allotted a traditional blues, and it shouted like a big band flagwaver; while "The Blues" took to the desert and gave its melody a suspended tag that further inspired the soloists. "Melancholy Mood," originally heard on the Further Explorations album, was virtually a new composition in a version inspired by Silver's friend and fellow pianist Gil Coggins. While "The St. Vitus Dance" and "Break City" are less audacious in their use of song form, each features an indelible melody performed with brio, the former in a version confirming that leading a quintet had not diminished Silver's stature as a definitive trio pianist.

Horace Silver's band was a quintet, however, and the efficiency with which he deployed Mitchell's trumpet and Junior Cook's tenor sax remains a marvel. Here were two soloists who were brilliant band musicians, bringing complementary ideas to their solos and an attack to their parts that Silver never failed to exploit. As Martin Williams pointed out in his definitive The Jazz Tradition, Silver's quintet functioned like a compact version of the Count Basie band in its powerful amalgamation of riffs, dymanics, economy, swing and bluesy eloquence. The connection emerges quite clearly in the leader's piano work both as accompanist and soloist. The blunt, percussive and deceptively simple style is more modern than Basie's, yet it has the same galvanizing effect on the other musicians and the overall performance.

In Eugene Taylor and Louis Hayes, Silver could rely upon a magnificent rhythm section to propel the ensembles and solos. The bassist defines steadiness and power, and always sounded the tonic note at performance end (a practice Silver followed for the benefit of interested musicians). Hayes, soon to join Cannonball Adderley's quintet, was making the last of his five albums with Silver here, and his crisp flexibility made him Silver's ideal post-Blakey percussionist. Martin Williams considers this album and Silver's previous Finger Poppin' to represent the pinnacle of the Horace Silver quintet, and one reason may be that these are the two albums featuring this flawless lineup.

Silver liked to encourage other jazz composers and had a particular fondness for the work of Chicago pianist Don Newey, whose ballad '"Without You" appeared a year later on the Horace-Scope album. Newey also wrote '"How Did It Happen?," which from the sound of the main melodic phrase must have lyrics, and which was recorded during the August 1959 sessions that produced Blowin' The Blues Away. There was no room for the track on the original LP, and it initially appeared on a 1979 collection of odds and ends called Sterling Silver.

— Bob Blumenthal, 1999