In his sleeve note for the audio restored Horace Silver album Live New York Revisited (ezz-thetics, 2022), British writer Brian Morton cut to the chase. "[Silver]'s only mistake," he wrote, "was to smile while he was playing... a challenge to the notion that jazz should be deadly serious and played with a pained rictus."

From a historical point of view, Silver's cheerful face—his natural, default expression on stage—has done him no favours. It has fostered a perception that he was a lightweight figure, more of an entertainer than an innovator. The truth is profoundly otherwise. As a pianist, a composer and a bandleader, Silver was a seminal force in the birth and development of hard bop and the soul jazz that emerged out of it. He was a radical and a pioneer and his work has legs. Any jazz library that does not include a solid chunk of his catalogue is deficient, and missing a whole lot of fun. (Spoiler alert: jazz can be fun). On entering the House of Silver, po-faces need to be checked at the door.

One could add that Silver's other mistake was to go public in the late 1960s with his disapproval of all drug taking. Weed smokers took issue with that, and would still today. But Silver had white powders at the front of his mind, and anyone who knows the damage done by heroin and cocaine would side with him there.

Ten of Silver's greatest albums are discussed below. But first, the back story...

The Quest For Meaningful Simplicity

Silver set out his artistic manifesto in the sleeve note for Serenade To A Soul Sister (Blue Note, 1968). With characteristic concision, he listed his "guide lines to musical composition." There were five of them. Melodic beauty; meaningful simplicity; harmonic beauty; rhythm; environmental, hereditary, regional and spiritual influences. If there was a single one that most defined Silver's work it would be meaningful simplicity.

Achieving meaningful simplicity, said Silver, was not easy. In Joe Goldberg's Jazz Masters of the 50s (Macmillan, 1965), he said: "I've found in composing that being simple and profound—having in-depthness in your music—is the most difficult thing to do. Anybody can write a whole lot of notes, which may or may not say something."