Billboard : 04/27/1959
Three Stars

Horace Silver and his quintet have come thru with a real funky album here, one that will appeal to those hard bop fans who like their jazz played with solid earthiness. Along with Silver, who comes thru with some good piano work, B. Mitchell, J. Cook, G. Taylor and L. Hayes are on the date. Title tune and Cookin’ at the Continental are strong sides.

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Audio
Charles A. Robertson : June, 1959

The title tune is Horace Silver‘s current display piece and it is just as well to have it preserved in this recording as the fast-moving intricacies can scarcely be absorbed in a club performance. The pianist’s slower compositions are equally memorable, especially a smoky blues, Come On Home, and a moody ballad, You Happened My Way, which calls out for a set of lyrics. They are played by his present quintet, now touring France, with new member Blue Mitchell, trumpet, and Junior Cook, tenor sax.

A reminder that too long an interval has passed since Silver’s last solo album is contained in Sweet Stuff, a trio number with bassist Gene Taylor and drummer Louis Hayes. Strongly lyrical, it expresses another aspect of his talent in the best moments of the set. His other originals are a medium blues, a samba, and a fast jump tune to end it all.

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New York Age
Chollie Herndon : 05/19/1959

Somewhere between the extremes of rhythm and blues and ‘far out jazz’ is the nesting ground of Horace Silver. It’s a happy place when the young pianist and his quintet cut loose they do at the slightest provocation.

The Silver Quintet’s latest LP, Finger Poppin’, is a case in point. Released by Blue Note Records it’s a swinger from side one, track one. Most of the stuff is blues or blues-oriented material, with a samba thrown in for good measure.

That samba, incidentally, is something special. Besides Silver’s rough, throbbing piano, there’s fine trumpet work by Blue Mitchell. Titled Swinging the Samba, the tune sends the message.

Another neat item, Sweet Stuff, features Silver working only with bassist Gene Taylor and drummer Louis Hayes. Like other items on the LP, this is a Silver composition.

Throughout the LP, the Silver Quintet plays crisply and cleanly. Each member contributes something useful, and, like the boys on the corner say, it’s a ball from new tenorman Junior Cook right up to old, young mater Silver.

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Down Beat : 07/09/1959
John A. Tynan : 4 stars

This is hard-swinging jazz from New York, blessed by good soloists and a rhythm section as effective as the drummer is dynamic.

Although trumpeter Mitchell has recorded previously, this appears to be the tenor man Cook‘s debut on record. The latter shows himself to be an intense, thoughtful, and constructive soloist, not in a hurry to say his piece and making his contributions mean something.

Finger is a frantic opener with the speed of the tempo vanquishing the overall effect. In short, its effect is largely lost. Juicy is a more moderate-tempoed lope based on a simple modern line with meaningful solos.

The Samba is an absorbing excursion of unusual construction into Afro-Cuban lore. The chorus runs 16 bars, 16 bars, and a six-bar bridge followed by a final 16 bars. It’s an adventuresome outing for the collective and the individual.

After the fast blues, Cookin’, there’s a laconic journey into funk on Home with some typically spare Silver piano. You Happened is a fine showcase for Mitchell’s full trumpet in slow, balladic manner, and the concluding Mellow is up and stomping with Cook flexing his muscles.

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Liner Notes by Leonard Feather

Horace Silver has been directing his own combo for a 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 he 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 from 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 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 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 expressing it in rapid-fire unison. “We got a rhythmic contrast going,” Horace points out, “by having the bass play in two on the final 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 simpler 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 solos. 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 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 solos 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 are 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.