[.ca] Stylings Of Silver

From the Golden Years of Hard-Bop:
For this album, recorded in 1957, Horace Silver used two ideal horn players: Art Farmer and Hank Mobley. Both had tremendous harmonic skills and a perfect sense for rhythm and these two qualities are the quintessence of Horace Silver's music: tricky combinations of latin patterns and swing and the use of very rich and beautiful chord progressions. The first tune, "No Smoking", an up-tempo thing in B-flat minor is an ideal blowing vehicle for the soloists. Some years later, Bud Powell told Horace Silver, how much he liked that tune, he also played it and his version actually was the first time I heard it, so I was eager waiting for this reissue of a long time out of print album. Horace Silver's records always have been perfectly balanced and they are covering different moods, like the minor blues "Soulville", and that most happy feeling on "Home Cooking".A really beautiful thing is the ballad "My One And Only Love", with Silver playing the theme in a most lyrical manner and the horns playing a kind of arrangement behind him.

• No Smokin'
• The Back Beat
• Soulville
• Home Cookin'
• Metamorphosis
• My One And Only Love