How old is horace silver

Alongside playing with noted jazz musicians such as bassist Oscar Pettiford and drummer Art Blakey, Silver, who played piano and saxophone, recorded exclusively for Blue Note Records over three decades before founding his own label, Silveto Records.

Silver composed music featuring percussive, hard-driving beats that was inspired by his philosophy of holistic self-help, according to jazz critic Leonard Feather writing in his Encyclopedia of Jazz.

After a high-profile apprenticeship with some of the biggest names in jazz, Silver began leading his own group in the mids and quickly became a big name himself, celebrated for his clever compositions and his infectious, bluesy playing.

At a time when the refined, quiet and, to some, bloodless style known as cool jazz was all the rage, he was hailed as a leader of the back-to-basics movement that came to be called hard bop. Hard bop and cool jazz shared a pedigree: They were both variations on bebop, the challenging, harmonically intricate music that changed the face of jazz in the s.

The jazz press tended to portray the adherents of cool jazz most of them west coast-based and white and hard bop mostly east coast-based and black as warring factions. But Silver made an unlikely warrior. That approach was reflected in the titles he gave to songs, like Sister Sadie, Filthy McNasty and The Preacher, all of which became jazz standards. His piano playing, like his compositions, was not that easily characterised. Deftly improvising ingenious figures with his right hand while punching out rumbling bass lines with his left, he managed to evoke boogie-woogie pianists like Meade Lux Lewis and beboppers like Bud Powell simultaneously.

Unlike many bebop pianists, however, Silver emphasised melodic simplicity over harmonic complexity; his improvisations, while sophisticated, were never so intricate as to be inaccessible. Although he studied piano as a child, Silver began his professional career as a saxophonist. But he had returned to the piano, and was becoming well known as a jazz pianist in Connecticut, by the time the saxophonist Stan Getz - soon to be celebrated as one of the leading lights of the cool school - heard and hired him in But a couple of weeks later he called and said he wanted the whole trio to join him.

Silver worked briefly with Getz before moving to New York in He was soon in demand as an accompanist, working with leading jazz musicians like the saxophonists Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young. In , Silver and the drummer Art Blakey formed a co-operative group, the Jazz Messengers, whose aggressive style helped define hard bop and whose lineup of trumpet, tenor saxophone, piano, bass and drums became the standard hard-bop instrumentation.

After two and a half years, during which Silver began his long and prolific association with Blue Note, he left the Jazz Messengers, which carried on with Blakey as the sole leader, and formed his own quintet. It became a showcase for his compositions.

As interest in jazz declined in the s, Silver disbanded his quintet and began concentrating on writing lyrics as well as music, notably on a three-album series called The United States of Mind, his first album to feature vocalists extensively.

He later resumed touring, but only for a few months each year, essentially assembling a new group each time he went on the road. For many years, he played with his right wrist arched high over the keys, useless for fast fingering but effective for making each note ring out. Whereas frontline soloists expected pianists to feed them appropriate chords, Silver laid down more intrusive patterns, closer to riffs from a swing band.

At Club Sundown in Hartford, Connecticut, where Silver's trio often backed visiting artists, the saxophonist Stan Getz was so impressed that in he hired all three unknowns as his touring rhythm section. With his silky skills presented in relatively restrained settings, Getz had personified cool jazz but he now seemed to relish Silver's insistent accompaniment.

At their first recording session, Getz loosened up, chucked quotes around and matched Silver for uninhibited swing: no other contemporary pianist could have got that from him.

Silver performed a similar service for Miles Davis , appearing on many classic tracks in , taking a splendid blues solo on Weirdo and offering the trumpeter fresh rhythmic impetus.

The avant-garde pianist Cecil Taylor has since acknowledged Silver's gutsy attack as a vital influence. Having moved to New York, Silver was in demand for live gigs and records. On sessions under his name for Blue Note in , he led trios including the label's favourite drummer, Art Blakey. In another portent of the future, nine of the 14 pieces were Silver's own.

They soon recorded again under Silver's leadership, with the trumpeter Kenny Dorham and the tenor saxophonist Hank Mobley. The tracks were later combined on the album Horace Silver and the Jazz Messengers ; by then, this outfit was a cooperative quintet, and hard bop had been born.

Vinyl albums running 15 minutes per side encouraged groups to develop extended solos. On the live version of Soft Winds , the tension escalates behind Mobley; Blakey and Silver switch off when the trumpet takes over, then build inexorably until the performance reaches its emotional peak. Some of the Messengers were heroin users, and the difficulties this caused led Silver to break out and launch what became the most tightly organised of the hard bop quintets.

He composed virtually all the material and won over the crowds through his affable personality and all-action approach. He crouched over the piano as the sweat poured out, with his forelock brushing the keys and his feet pounding. A former teenage admirer of the highly drilled Jimmie Lunceford orchestra of the s, he knew the easy-sounding bits were the hardest to write and he devised methods, some almost subliminal, to give the round of solos an overall cohesiveness.

Also from that period, the uncharacteristic slow ballad Peace has regularly attracted younger musicians and has been recorded by Norah Jones.

The tenor saxophone star Joe Henderson joined in time for the bossa nova classic Song for My Father, part of a million-selling album of the same name. A tour of Japan inspired the album The Tokyo Blues , gong sounds and all.