Horace Silver Quintet – live at The BBC – 1966 – Past Daily Downbeat.
The Horace Silver Quintet this weekend, featuring Woody Shaw on Trumpet, Tyrone Washington on Tenor sax, Larry Ridley on bass and Lex Humphries on drums. All recorded in performance at the BBC in 1966.
After more than a dozen sideman recording sessions in 1955 and a similar number in 1956–57, Silver’s appearance on Sonny Rollins, Vol. 2 in April 1957 was his last for another leader, as he opted to concentrate on his own band. For several years from the late 1950s, this contained Junior Cook (tenor saxophone), Blue Mitchell (trumpet), Gene Taylor (bass), and either Hayes or Roy Brooks (drums). Their first album was Finger Poppin’, in 1959. Silver’s tour of Japan early in 1962 led to the album The Tokyo Blues, recorded later that year. By the early 1960s, Silver’s quintet had influenced numerous bandleaders and was among the most popular performers at jazz clubs. They also released singles, including “Blowin’ the Blues Away”, “Juicy Lucy”, and “Sister Sadie”, for jukebox and radio play. This quintet’s sixth and final album was Silver’s Serenade, in 1963.
Around this time, Silver composed music for a television commercial for the drink Tab. Early in 1964, Silver visited Brazil for three weeks, an experience he credited with increasing his interest in his heritage. In the same year, he created a new quintet, featuring Joe Henderson on tenor saxophone and Carmell Jones on trumpet. This band recorded most of Silver’s best-known album, Song for My Father, which reached No. 95 on the Billboard 200 in 1965, and was added to the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1999. Recordings and personnel changes – sometimes expanding the band to a sextet – continued in the mid-1960s. In 1966, The Cape Verdean Blues charted at No. 130. The liner notes to the album Serenade to a Soul Sister (1968) included lyrics (written but not sung), indicating a new interest for Silver. His quintet, by then including saxophonist Bennie Maupin, trumpeter Randy Brecker, bassist John Williams, and drummer Billy Cobham, toured parts of Europe in October and November 1968, sponsored by the U.S. government. They also recorded one of Silver’s last quintet albums for Blue Note, You Gotta Take a Little Love. The Penguin Guide to Jazz’s retrospective summary of Silver’s main Blue Note recordings was that they were of a consistently high standard: “each album yields one or two themes that haunt the mind, each usually has a particularly pretty ballad, and they all lay back on a deep pile of solid riffs and workmanlike solos.”
And for a taste of the band in 1966, here is the Horace Silver Quintet, live at The BBC in 1966.
Relax and press Play – the vibes will do the rest.
(thanks Wikipedia for the bio material – always appreciated).
