Blowin' The Blues Away Horace Silver Quintet & Trio

Cover Blowin' The Blues Away

Album info

Album-Release:
1959

HRA-Release:
04.01.2014

Label: Blue Note Records

Genre: Jazz

Subgenre: Hard Bop

Artist: Horace Silver Quintet & Trio

Composer: Don Newey, Horace Silver

Album including Album cover Booklet (PDF)

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  • 1Blowin' The Blues Away04:42
  • 2The St. Vitus Dance04:08
  • 3Break City04:55
  • 4Peace06:01
  • 5Sister Sadie06:20
  • 6Baghdad Blues04:51
  • 7Melancholy Mood07:07
  • Total Runtime38:04

Info for Blowin' The Blues Away

Everyone's favorite Horace Silver record featured the classic quintet with Blue Mitchell and Junior Cook. The title tune, the beautiful ballad 'Peace' and the soulful 'Sister Sadie' are now standards in the jazz canon. Even given Silver's astonishing track record, this one stands out.

Horace Silver not only projects a distinct, immediately recognizable talent with his playing but in the way he writes for and guides his group, he again affirmatively expresses his unique personality. In this day of conformity, when many groups are only concerned with “getting a sound,” often through gimmickry, Silver’s quintet has established their own identity without the aid of spurious musical devices.

Horace does not merely write beginnings and endings for the soloists to fill; he makes his compositions grow by introducing interludes and variations on the opening themes; these are some of the reasons that the Silver group does not paint in a monochrome. Then there is the spirit, the group’s emblem which they wear most boldly on the “swingers.” “This group has a lot of fire and that’s what I want.” These words were spoken by leader Silver, one of the fieriest players in jazz. A mild-mannered, sincerely affable young man who dresses with a hip neatness, Horace becomes a perspiring demon when pouring out his musical soul at the piano. I remember Cannonball Adderly, newly arrived in New York, commenting on Horace’s off-stand appearance: “How can a cat look one way and play so funky?” Apropos of all the talk about “soul” and “funk” recently, it is interesting to note that with Horace Silver, the one who has them in abundant amounts, they have always been natural qualities and never the result of self conscious striving.

To build a harmony of feeling in a group, you must have musicians who really want to play but the spark must come from the leader. Horace has the unflagging zest which acts as a strong unifying force. In referring to the group’s performance level on any given night, he says, “Sometimes we have it, sometimes we don’t... but nobody ever lays down on the job.” This esprit de corps gives the quintet a vitality and surging power. Most groups today do not have this necessary ingredient; in the end they sound like pale imitations of one another.

In Blue Mitchell the group has a trumpeter who, while playing within a generally idiomatic style (he has listened to Brownie), says things in his own way. Tenorman Junior Cook, whom I once described as being touched by John Coltrane, is in reality out of the Hank Mobley mold but in a much more muscular manner. Both Blue and Junior have this in common with Horace; they don’t waste notes but speak boldly in lean, declarative sentences. Drummer Louis Hayes, who joined Horace as a teen-ager, has developed into one of the most intelligent of the young, swinging drummers. Eugene Taylor’s drive and apartment house-size sound are explained by Silver: “Gene never has to be coaxed to really work.”

'...a lovely album, full of fire and brimstone....We're going to be playing this one for a long time...' (Down Beat)

Horace Silver, piano
Gene Taylor, upright bass
Louis Hayes, drums
Junior Cook, tenor saxophone (on tracks 1, 3 to 6, 8)
Blue Mitchell, trumpet (on tracks 1, 3 to 6, 8)

Recorded at the Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey on August 29 & 30 and September 13, 1959
Produced by Alfred Lion
Recorded and remastered by Rudy Van Gelder
All transfers from analog to digital were made at 24-bit resolution

No biography found.

Booklet for Blowin' The Blues Away

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