Inside the Horace Silver Quintet by Barbara Gardner

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“Silver stayed with the 'old' Blue Note longer than any other artist, still recording with the company until well into the 70s, and he became the musician who was Alfred Lion's closest confidant.

Meanwhile, his working group - always two horns and a rhythm section - began to personify what would become the standard hard-bop small-band setting. Throughout a long career, he has almost exclusively used his own originals rather than relying on any standards, and his writing in the 50s soon established the blueprint for his idiom. It was a logical progression from the cooling of bop's original helter-skelter first phase: the rhythm section still played in a taut, bebop style, but the convoluted melodies of bop were traded for much simpler, almost motif-like tunes (one of his early successes, ‘The Preacher', was actually hated by Alfred Lion at first, and it took a bit of subterfuge by Horace - saying that if they abandoned it, it would mean more studio time spent -to get it past his producer). They added a melodious bounce to a sound that was still unimpeachably modern, and hip. Silver employed a procession of outstanding horn players for the next 20 years, including Carmell Jones, Hank Mobley, Kenny Dorham, Art Farmer, Blue Mitchell, Junior Cook, Joe Henderson, Woody Shaw, Clifford Jordan and Randy Brecker, and his Blue Note

albums were a remarkably consistent lot: the sequence he cut at the end of the 50s, in what was a glorious spell for jazz on record, included The Stylings Of Silver, Further Explorations, Finger Poppin' and the quite flawless Blowin' The Blues Away, and is still an enthrallingly fresh listen, even after some five decades of similar music-making by others following the formula.

Silver's own playing helped keep his groups on their toes, pushing and thrusting whether in solo or accompaniment and constantly varying the pace with a stock of ingenious licks. Aside from a break in the early 70s, he kept touring the group and, although some of his latter-day Blue Note sets have some modish and misconceived trappings, he was one of the few old-stagers who left the label with his honour intact, not tempted by fusion.”

• Richard Cook’s Jazz Encyclopedia

“Bravo, Barbara!

I want to congratulate Barbara Gardner for the splendid work she's done on articles interviewing jazz vocalists. So far I've read articles about Sarah Vaughan, Carmen McRae, Nancy Wilson, and Joe Williams, and all of them were great.

Miss Gardner is a sensitive, engrossing writer, with a beautiful fund of wittiness and charm and humor. I hope in the future, she will continue to write inspiring, warm-hearted articles on vocalists as she has so beautifully done in the past.

Roy E. Lott

St. Louis, Mo.”

• Chords and Discords, January 28, 1965, Down Beat