Billboard : 05/19/1958
Two stars

This new set featuring Horace Silver, one of the best of the hard-bop school of swinging pianists, is an attempt to fit Silver’s driving style into a group of selections, mainly originals, with varied types of construction. Altho the group, consisting of Art Farmer, Cliff Jordan, Teddy Kotick and Louis Hayes, play them with skill and musicianship, Silver is not given full opportunity to show off the swinging style that is his forte.

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Cashbox : 05/24/1958

The Horace Silver quintet is one of the most popular groups in the jazz field. Silver’s driving piano is aided by Teddy Kotick on bass and Louis Hayes on drums, while blowing up front is Art Farmer on trumpet and Cliff Jordan on tenor sax. The program consists of five Silver originals and one standard. One tune, Silver’s Safari, really moves and everyone has a lot to say. Should be strong in sales.

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Down Beat : 07/24/1958
Martin Williams : 3.5 stars

Melancholy is a piano trio performance, and it is slow. Its theme is an adept borrowing from Debussy. Silver‘s playing soon becomes a disjointed, double-timing series of interpolations of everything from bugle calls to gospel motifs, bop figures to archaic blues riffs. Ill Wind is given a scoring and a tempo that makes it into something rather flip and does hardly anything with the implicit possibilities of its melody or mood.

The simplifications through which Silver’s solo style often has gone in the last year or so are still present. They involve less Powell; they have lots of implicit ideas; they involve a relaxation – they are, I think, a preparation for a change. But the change has not come. The writing often attempts to make the group sound like a much larger one instead of taking advantage of what it is – a fairly common practice in the east nowadays.

So much for the shortcomings of the set. In Outlaw (maybe “Bandit” might describe the quality of this one better) Latin rhythms weave in and out of the performance in an effective way, a way which avoids both the absurdity of dropping them after the opening chorus or of maintaining them only as a kind of tired gimmick.

Safari is a very bop thing in the writing in which Silver gets a bit too overbusy in his solo to take much rhythmic advantage of the fast tempo. The best piece of writing is, I think, a second countermelodic interlude in Moon Rays. It is really excellent, both “catchy” and sustaining, and, like an earlier success, Hippy, depends on the elaboration of fairly conventional and “mainstream” riff material into a longer rhythmic-melodic pattern.

That bit of writing, the successes involved, and the failures, give the key, I think, to the center of Silver’s talent. Essentially, his conception is a strong modernization and elaboration of the kind of riff-blues-jump-group music of the 1930s and very early 40s. He is best here, as he was with Blakey, when he explores and elaborates such a conception as that. He can enlarge it, has fresh things to say within it, and it is a conception which reaffirms an even asserts some very important and basic things about jazz. When he tries for other things (as in Melancholy), he does not succeed (or has not yet), but the attempts are, of course, praiseworthy even so.

Jordan is still working around with Rollins’ style with a glance at Coltrane (Outlaw).

The soloist of the record is Farmer. He is emphatically not a conventional eastern hard cooker, but a trumpeter of experience, range, real originality within his medium, taste, and cohesion. At his best, he knows what he wants to say and from his opening phrase he says it with solos of unity and purpose – one cannot say that of many persons. Except on Pyramid, he is generally at his best here – and certainly is on Outlaw.

The notes say something about the group becoming a “conveyor belt” for its kind of music. If the implication of that image is intended, it is pretty insulting and certainly untrue.

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San Francisco Chronicle
Ralph J. Gleason : 05/18/1958
Album of the Week

Titled Further Explorations of the Horace Silver Quintet, this LP offers the leader and soloists A. Farmer and C. Jordan in five exciting examples of the best of modern jazz.

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San Francisco Examiner
C.H. Garrigues : 08/10/1958

There is nothing particularly experimental here, unless it be found in the somewhat curious rhythmic relationship between rhythm and horn. These are complex and sometimes succeed in building a lot of tension but the lack of resolution – either emotionally or rhythmically – prompts the suspicion that they may be due less to intent than to the inability of drummer Louis Hayes to keep time. Art Farmer on trumpet and Cliff Jordan on tenor blow fine.

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Liner Notes by Leonard Feather

The explorer in jazz is faced with alternating problems. If his reputation has been gained through the establishment of new orchestral, instrumental or tonal horizons, he may feel free to explore horizontally – to reach out into new areas of composition and interpretation – without fear of losing any substantial segment of the group of camp-followers that constitutes his public. If, on the other hand, his success has been brought about largely on the strength of a highly personal solo style, then his explorations must be made vertically: that is, he must dig deeper and discover valuable new geological specimens within his own self-imposed territory.

Horace Silver belongs in the second category. If he were to branch out into the fields of polytonality or atonality, if his latest LP were the end-product of a series of experiments with the twelve-tone scale, one can safely assume that he would alienate the bulk of the true Horace Silver fans who respect him for what he is – a straight-down-the-line tonal swinger, functioning continuously, and with consistent success within the orbit of the small, bop-deprived jazz ensemble.

Aware of his place in the development of jazz, and conscious of the need to avoid settling in a rut, Horace has reconciled the need for retention of the qualities that brought him his reputation with the no less pressing need for new compositional concepts tailored to his style and setting. On these new sides there is an admirable blend of the old and familiar attributes of the Silver Quintet (and its related predecessors such as the Art Blakey group from which it stemmed) with a tendency toward experimentation in terms of construction.

The Outlaw, for example, is based on a twice-played thirteen-bar line, leading into what might be called a channel for ten bars, a sixteen-bar vamp, and a two-bar break, catapulting Cliff Jordan into the first of a series of ad lib solos. The use, but with discreet limitations, of Latin rhythm, and the conscious, but never self-conscious departure from the conventional 32 and twelve-bar forms, may not seem to have much more than mathematical interest (Latin rhythms are, after all, still mere methods of dividing the eight eighth notes in a bar, and even a 13-bar phrases has the usual four beats to each bar), but the overall effect, especially in context with less heterodox forms as heard on a couple of the other tracks, helps to bring to the record a sense of balance that it might otherwise lack.

Melancholy Mood offers a no less piquant defiance of symmetrical convention. “It’s kind of mysterious, I guess,” offers Horace, “two seven-bar phrases followed by a seven-bar channel – in other words, a ballad based entirely on seven-bar phrases. The first chorus is just me with Teddy bowing, then I blow some on it in the second chorus and we go back to the mood of the beginning.”

Pyramid, not related to a similarly titled old Ellington composition, is a minor-mode unison line to which the rhythm section’s sharp punctuations lend much of its character. The construction here is more conventional, but again there is an intermittent use of Latin rhythm, during the channels. Art Farmer, who takes the first solo, seems particularly well equipped to flex his ideas on these exotic, quasi-Asiatic themes.

Moon Rays is what Horace calls “a sort of walking ballad – a little faster than the typical ballad.” There is an ingenious use here of the two-part harmony offered by the group’s two horns, with pedal-point rhythm effects on the dominant. Horace’s solo is particularly, if we may use a word that is rapidly being driven into the ground, funky. “Do you notice what the drums played in there?” says Horace. “Have you ever dug Tito Puente or Machito when they play a ballad – that little tick-tick-tick-tick thing that they keep going on the timbales? I don’t know what you call it, but it’s a special Latin effect and we thought it would fit this number.’

Safari is a minor bop line written by Horace some eight or nine years ago, long before he came to New York. it’s played here at a tempo so agitated that only Sonny Rollins would call it slow. Cliff Jordan, standing out among a generally exciting sequence of solos, cooks up a banquet on this, and Louis Hayes also has a brief solo workout.

Harold Arlen‘s standard of the earl 1930s, Ill Wind, is swung moderato with Hayes’ double rhythm lending added pulsation during the piano solo.

The group that plays these six sensitively integrated performances has been intact for many months; in fact, during almost two years as a leader, Horace has rarely had occasion to change men. Art Farmer has been with him right form the start, though Donald Byrd took over the chair for a short period. Louis Hayes, too, has been a member almost from the combo’s inception in the late summer of 1956. “He’s always been great,” observes Horace, “but now he senses every nuance of the group and he’s playing with more polish, more taste than ever.”

Cliff Jordan joined Horace in the summer of 1957 on what was in effect a trade with Max Roach, as Max took over Horace’s previous tenor man, Hank Mobley. Teddy Kotick has been one of the five pieces of Silver for better than a year, replacing the original bassist Doug Watkins.

The group as you can hear it on these sides played an engagement at Birdland in February of 1958. Those of us who had followed Horace with interest from the first tentative months in New York with Stan Getz in 1950, from the earliest LPs for Blue Note a couple of years later, were encouraged not only by the firmly meshed performance of the group, but by the exceptionally sanguine reaction of a large and vociferous audience. It has taken Horace a little while to break through, but the new year should see his group firmly entrenched as one of the most dependable conveyor belts for the band of jazz he typifies. The explorations of the Silver Quintet are now ready to expand to any section of the United States, or any other territory, from pole to pole, where silver is recognized as legal tender.