Audio
Charles A. Robertson : April, 1957

With the dispersal of the Jazz Messengers, Horace Silver has formed his own quintet to act as a vehicle for his distinctive compositions and imaginative piano. Its success in the clubs over the past few months indicates that it will be around for a while. Only one of the seven tunes is a standard, the other being the product of the gifted Silver pen. Cool Eyes, Virgo, and Camouflage are in direct swinging style. Enchantment and Senor Blues intrigue most as a mixture of the blues with a personalized Latin beat.

Louis Hayes, a talented eighteen-year-old drummer from Detroit, is introduced. With Doug Watkins, bass, he complements the piano in the tricky rhythms more effectively than might have been the case with some better-known musicians. Donald Byrd replaced Art Farmer on trumpet for this date and is heard with Hank Mobley, tenor, in articulate solos. Shirl is a relaxed piano solo as is the standard For Heaven’s Sake. One of the better Van Gelder recordings.

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Billboard : 02/02/1957
Score of 81

A lot of Horace Silver‘s work on piano is available on records. This LP of his, however, is something special, and it will be a shame if it gets lost in the shuffle. For the first time he is heard here with a permanently formed combo of which he is leader and which has already begun gigging here and there. The nucleus of the group (Don Byrd, Hank Mobley, Doug Watkins) has been playing with Silver since their Jazz Messenger days. All the material, with one exception, was quilled by Silver, and is consistently original. Beautifully crafted modern jazz that will appeal to any customer with taste.

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Cash Box : 02/02/1957

These two issues from Blue note feature Horace Silver (piano), his trio and quintet. The trio is heard on 1520 which includes 12 Silver efforts going back to 1952 and 1953 with drummer Art Blakey. Blakey is heard most effectively on the “primitive” selections (i.e. Safari, Message From Kenya) while Silver’s strong, but expressive keyboard attack, takes the kudos on the ballads (i.e. Day In Day Out and I Remember You. Silver’s newly formed Silver Quintet takes over on #1539 by delving into 6 Silver originals and 1 standard (For Heaven’s Sake) with wit and vitality. Solid tenor sax work from Hank Mobley. Powerful jazz performances. Silver is one of the top names in jazz today. Sales should be strong on both entries.

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Down Beat : 02/20/1957
Nat Hentoff : 4.5 stars

Except for Donald Byrd, this is the quintet with which Horace Silver has been working the clubs. (The regular trumpet player with Horace is Art Farmer, but Prestige wouldn’t give him permission to make this date.) All six originals in the album are by Horace; and in that area, there partly lies the particular Silver distinction that determines the high rating. Horace is one of the very, very few contemporary writers whose work, first of all, bears the unmistakable signature of an individual personality.

Secondly, he has a controlled gift for lining melodies that are relatively fresh and very often infectious. He also can write in different but equally convincing grooves like the angular buoyancy of Cool Eyes, Virgo, and Camouflage; the tender, delightful ballad Shirl; the semi-exotic and yet down home Enchantment and Senor Blues.

And within each general kind of expression, like the angular three, there is a variety of devices and of interlude-structuring, so that each of the three has its own way of swinging and its own stimulating profile. All that Horace writes is direct with not a trace of pretentiousness. It is admittedly a lean, not especially ambitious or adventurous (in the large-scale sense) approach to writing; but his pieces are an honest, creative reflection of Horace; and they are, I feel, an important contribution to contemporary jazz. Horace is his own man and a vital one.

His own playing is another part of the distinction of this collection. In this area too, he has assimilated his influences, and forged a style that has become essentially himself to the point that many others now imitate or pattern themselves in part after him. As in his writing, his playing is scoured clean of superfluity, is intensely to the point, and swings with a roaring depth of pulsation. It may be said about his playing too that it is “limited,” but it is self-limited to what Horace wants to do, and he fulfills his goals superbly. Note too how firmly and liftingly he comps. The others play well, and Byrd is to be congratulated for absorbing these pieces in a relatively short period of time. Mobley is growing; Watkins is thoroughly dependable; and 18-year-old Detroiter Louis Hayes gives sign of developing into an important drummer. Tracks two and seven are without horns.

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Liner Notes by Leonard Feather

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 born, 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.