Billboard : 10/07/1957
Score of 78

Hard modern swinging is the prescription here. The straightforward yet emotionally penetrating Silver compositions, plus top drawer performances from. Art Farmer, H. Mobley, Silver, etc., make this an album of real substance. Strong rhythmic impact, general cohesiveness of whole venture should make strong impression on jazz buyer. Try The Back Beat as demo band.

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Cashbox : 10/05/1957

The frequent Blue Note performer offers further evidence of his jazz know-how in this fine presentation of Silver‘s able quintet on a six tune bill that with the exception of the durable My One And Only Love was penned by Silver. Generally reflecting a blues pattern, the material provides solid ground for highly welcomed work by the Silver combo. Pianist Silver’s co-artists here included Hank Mobley (tenor sax); Art Farmer (trumpet); Teddy Kotick (bass) and Louis Hayes (drums). Excellent jazz issue.

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Altoona Tribune
Willie Wax : 10/28/1957

Blue Note – and every week brings a couple more record companies to light that we’ve never heard of before – has brought out an interesting thing called The Stylings of Silver. Silver being Horace Silver, a pianist-composer-arranger. He doesn’t appear a bit overworked on this album and he’s in good company, too. Along with Silver are Art Farmer on trumpet, Hank Mobley on tenor sax, Teddy Kotick on bass and Louis Hayes on drums. We read somewhere that Silver plays reminiscent of the old Lunceford band and that’s quite all right with us. Try listening to his Soulville or his Metamorphosis for a beginning and you’ll be a Silver fan for life.

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San Francisco Examiner
C.H. Garrigues : 02/09/1958

There are those, including this writer, for whom Horace Silver is very nearly the most in jazz piano (excepting only John Lewis); for us it is enough to say that this set is up to his usual standard. His new drummer, Louis Hayes, sparkles.

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Down Beat : 12/12/1957
Dom Cerulli : 5 stars

With this collection, Silver the funky pianist must give way to Silver the composer, an equally virile and adventuresome musician. In the six tracks here Silver has gone deeper into explorations of form and structure.

Through Nat Hentoff’s literate and intelligent notes, Horace explains one of the secrets behind his musical success: “I don’t try to contrive something just to make it different… although it’s different in form, it feels natural the way it lays, and that’s what counts.”

Thus, we have in The Back Beat, a piece with two 16-bar phrases, followed by a bridge and ending of eight bars each. And in Metamorphosis a structure of two 15-bar phrases, a 16-measure bridge, and a final statement of 15 bars. There are also shifts in time, which help the various pieces to lie naturally.

All of this will not immediately change the course of jazz and open new schools of thought. But herein lies Silver’s strength as an influence. Because by forging new or relatively unorthodox forms in a natural manner, and in a logical progression, the accumulated impact of these variations, where they are subtle or sharp, will make their mark on today’s musical thought.

Long after Silver, the funky pianist, has faded from the scene, Silver the writer will be on hand. Listen to Metamorphosis, Soulville, or No Smokin’. Here is a melodic gift, well-conceived and firmly executed by the group with which he’s now working.

Undoubtedly some of the success of Silver’s stylings must be credited to Farmer, Mobley, Kotick, and Hayes who are a team worth writing for.

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Liner Notes by Nat Hentoff

Horace Silver is triply valuable. He is a pianist of unusually direct emotional power with roots that reach into times before jazz was called by that name. He is a leader since August, 1956, of one of the most consistently energizing, naturally funky modern jazz combos. Of the men on this recording, Farmer and Mobley had been with Horace since the beginning of the unit. Young Louis Hayes joined after the first week; and Teddy Kotick had been with Horace for several months. Since this recording, Hank Mobley left to join Max Roach; and Clifford Jordan, who had replaced Sonny Rollins with Max, had in turn enlisted with Silver.

The third dimension of Horace is as a writer. Although much has been written and speculated upon concerning the present and future of writing in jazz, there are still very few creators of jazz originals who have evolved a wholly individual, instantly identifiable style. Horace is one. A number of his works have become part of the modern jazz language and are in the books of several contemporary combos and even big bands – Doolin’, Opus De Funk, The Preacher, Split Kick, Room 608, Ecaroh (all available in originals versions on previous Blue Note LPs BLP 1518 and BLP 1520).

In his most recent Blue Note album, Six Pieces of Silver (1539), Horace contributed six more originals, including his first venture into 6/8 time, Senor Blues, and his first ballad, Shirl.

In this collection, Horace has emerged with five more, including a few other “firsts.” (The only standard is the Wood–Mellin, My One And Only Love). Horace grows constantly as a writer, partly because he’s innocent of complacency. “I try,” he emphasizes, “to write in a lot of different grooves. I wrote a waltz, for instance, that I’d like to do in the future as a piano solo. I get a kick out of doing different things, working in different veins. Another thing I’d like to do is really get done some more with some of the Latin beats like the samba. Those cats really swing. Whatever I write though, I just to try be natural, to be myself.”

No Smokin’ is described by Horace as “a kind of up tempo minor piece that gives everybody a chance to stretch out. There are also some written interludes. I’d had the title in mind for quite a while. ‘Smoke’ in slang means to cook, to wail. So that’s what it means.” For the benefit of etymologists who may still be confused, the title is also an example of the looking-glass form of communication that is occasionally prevalent in jazz argot. Just as “terrible” these days is apt to mean “wonderful”, so No Smokin’ means that a lot of cooking is going on.

The Back Beat represents the first time Horace has structured a song with two 16-measure phrases, followed by a channel of eight bars, and an eight-bar ending. “Although it’s different in form,” Horace says, “it feels natural the way it lays, and that’s what counts.” The title represents the fact that there are suggestions of a back beat in parts of the work. A back beat in the strict sense, Horace points out, is produced by the drums hitting on the second and fourth beats very heavily. In this case, the back beat is suggested by the rhythm playing a back beat figure against the melody with the bass, piano, drums being involved in a kind of vamp on the second and fourth beats in those places where the suggestion is stated.

Soulville is a minor blues of two 12-measure phrases, followed by a regular Bb7, and then back to the minor blues for 12 bars. It’s the first minor blues of this kind Horace has written, and he got the idea from Lester Young‘s D.B. Blues. The latter is not in minor but is structured the same way with an eight-bar I Got Rhythm channel. “The melody in mine,” Horace indicates, “is played in two-beat until the blowing section starts when it’s in four. After everybody blows, there’s an out chorus during which the horns play double time against the rhythm playing two-beat. Then they come back in the channel with the melody and into the last 12 with a tag on the end.” The title comes from the fact, Horace points out, that “this is a blues-type number, a soulful kind of number. Everybody has the kind of soul I mean here; only there are some people who have more of it than others. Everybody has some soul but some have so much that it reaches out and touches you.”

Home Cookin’, says Horace, “is another one of those nasty-type numbers. I mean ‘earthy’, I guess. You know what ‘down home’ and ‘cookin’ signify. Greens and grits and all that kind of stuff. Anyway, the first four measures are in two. On the next four, we swing. The same thing happens in the next eight. The channel is in straight 4/4 time; and in the last eight, it’s four in two and four in four again. After the blowing, there’s an out chorus for 16 measures after which we return to the melody by the channel and play a little tag on the end with Teddy Kotick walking it out by himself.”

“Metamorphosis is the first tune of its kind I’ve done. Structurally, it’s different. I didn’t sit down and intend for it to come out that way,” Horace declares, “but it did.” In contrast to the usual phrase-lengths of 8 or 16 bars or 12 in the blues, this song has two 15-measure phrases with a 16-bar channel and the last part 15 measures again. “Even though it’s not even, it sounds even,” says Horace, “and again, so long as it feels natural, it’s all right. I don’t try to contrive something just to make it different. This just happened. After the out chorus, we go back into the channel, play the last 15, and there’s a final tag. The channel is in beguine.”

“The reason for the title,” Horace went on, “is that the word indicates something changing from one thing to another, like when a caterpillar changes into a butterfly. Here, for example, the song begins with the rhythm playing ‘chops’, breaks. The beat is there, but it’s not moving. The horns are playing a figure and so is the rhythm. Then it goes into a beguine, back into chops, and finally breaks into tempo.”

Horace chose My One and Only Love simply because “it’s very beautiful and I like it. The horns play an intro into harmony, and then the piano comes in playing the melody in octaves with the horns in the background playing little figures. Then I take the channel by myself. The horns come in near the end of the channel with more background. There are solos by Art, Hank and myself. I take the least eight and the channel and they come back in. We end with the pattern of the intro, and go out. This, incidentally, is an instrumental version of Horace’s arrangement of this song for Dutch singer Rita Reyes.

How, was the final query to silver, do you compose? Is it a matter of diligent daily composing hours, or do you wait for the spark? “It has to just come to me,” was the answer. “I can’t force anything out of myself. I’ll sit down and mess around and try to compose and nothing will happen. I’ll search all over and can’t find an idea. Usually the ideas come when I don’t expect them. I’ll be sitting down doodling and playing something else, and all of a sudden by accident, I’ll hit on something that sounds good. I may get two or four or eight bars at first. Sometimes I get a fair amount and may I’ll get it all at one time. But a lot of times you get it in parts. And then too, an idea that sounds good one day doesn’t sound good at all the next day. Take Home Cookin’. I had it laying around for a long time. I didn’t think it good enough, but then I changed things around, and now I like it.”

So far, the originals that have finally been released by Horace have been muscular, head-shaking, nutritious additions to the mainstream of jazz writing. And all have that Silver signature-feeling – a spare, penetrating, rocking wholeness of emotion and idea. There is no wastage; no ormolu ornamentation. The language is basic, earthy, and very personal.