Horace Silver

The jazz world owes a lot to a little girl called Dorothy from Norwalk, Connecticut. She lived next door to Horace Silver, and was about his age. Silver liked her, and used to copy what she did: “Whenever Dorothy got a bike or a sled or a pair of skates, I’d ask my dad to get the same for me.” One day she started having piano lessons, so Silver also asked his father for lessons, though he’d previously had little interest in learning an instrument.

The family got hold of an old piano ‘some rich white folks’ were chucking out, and Silver began lessons. The boy got bored of practicing, but his father wouldn’t let him quit, saying: “No, you’re not going to quit. You asked for this, and you got it, and now you’re going to stick with it. One day you’ll thank me for this”.

Silver only realised he wanted to be a musician years later, at age 11. He saw a band playing at an amusement park, and thought ‘that’s for me’. He later wrote: ‘I made a vow that night that music would be my life’.

He kept the vow, and is still performing, aged 83. Though he recorded from 1950 to 1998, he’s best known for his string of fantastic albums on the Blue Note label, including Finger Poppin, Blowin the Blues Away, and Song for my Father. It was in these recordings that he helped create ‘hard bop’, the jazz style which uses influences from blues, gospel and RnB.

Silver was born on September 2, 1928, the son of John T. Silva, a Cape Verdean who had ‘worked his way to the United States on a boat’. His mother was a half-Irish half-black woman who worked as a domestic servant to local rich people, including Boris Karloff and Bette Davis. She used to come back from work with food ‘left over from some white lady’s bridge party’.

Silver’s mother died suddenly of a stroke when he was nine. Raised by his father and great-aunt, he had a difficult childhood. His house had rats all year round, and bats during the summer: ‘I often woke up in the middle of the night after they had bitten me and sucked my blood’. Perhaps because of this, he was often unwell: “I was a skinny, rather weak kid, and I caught all the childhood diseases – chicken pox, mumps, measles, you name it.”

While his mother was still alive, two of Silver’s uncles illegally migrated from Cape Verde, and came to live in the family’s attic. One night, ‘in the wee hours, there came a knock on our kitchen door’. A voice said: ‘this is the FBI – open up’. They did open the door, and the two uncles were caught and deported.

As well as these bizarre experiences, he suffered a more common problem: racism. Once he bumped into some friends who were due to play a club gig that night, and said he could join in. He practiced all day, but when he got to the club, he was kicked out by a policeman before he could start playing. The club didn’t allow black people.

New York was more accepting, and when Silver moved there around 1951, he got to play with established artists, and was quickly picked up by Blue Note. He recorded over 40 albums for them, and many more on other labels; he’s also ‘one of very few jazz musicians to record almost exclusively original material’. In short, he’s written a lot of music. Asked about this, he said:

“I wake up in the morning with music in my head a lot of times. I won't say every morning, but I wake up in the morning sometimes with eight bars in my head and I just go to the piano. It's almost like taking dictation.”

What to hear: Song for my Father, Blowin the Blues Away, Six Pieces of Silver, Finger Poppin

Why: Known as ‘the grandpop of hard bop’, Silver is one of the key jazz innovators.