Horace Silver - The Ralph J. Gleason Interview

 © Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

Foreword

“DID RALPH GLEASON REALLY leave us forty years ago? It certainly doesn't feel that way. Even today, you will find Gleason's name on the masthead of each issue of Rolling Stone, the magazine he helped launch back in 1967. His trademark trench coat hangs in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, almost as if Gleason just stopped by a moment ago to check out the scene. The Monterey Jazz Festival, a bright idea Gleason had back in 1958, continues to thrive even as other music events and venues come and go. Every day, a music fan somewhere reads his liner notes to some classic album, whether Miles Davis's Bitches Brew or Frank Sinatra's No One Cares or Simon & Garfunkel's Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme. …

Yet Ralph Gleason will always be remembered, first and foremost, as a jazz writer. Jazz was his first love and, like many early attachments, remained the most passionate. And that sense of intimate attachment comes across again and again in these pages. …

You can call him a music critic, but he might be better described as an evangelist for cutting-edge artistry and social change. He praised the greatest artists, and usually before most of the public even knew who they were. Readers looked to him for guidance whenever anything new or controversial emerged —whether Elvis Presley's rock 'n' roll or John Coltrane's modal music, Bob Dylan's protest songs or Lenny Bruce's edgy comedy routines. Gleason knew all of these individuals, and was one of the very few cultural critics of his day who was equally at home in conversation with Duke Ellington, Joan Baez, Hunter Thompson, or Miles Davis.”

- Ted Gioia

Horace Silver APRIL 16,1961

“Pianist Horace Silver did more than anyone to create the hard bop sound that came to the forefront of the jazz world in the late 1950s and early 1960s. This music attracted audiences with its more soulful variant on modern jazz. Listeners could hear elements of gospel, funk, R & B, and Latin music in the work of Silver and the other leaders of the hard bop idiom. These artists never completely abandoned the experimentalism that had characterized jazz during the bebop era, but Silver & company also wanted fans to tap their toes and snap their fingers to the beat. Even as jazz lost much of its mainstream audience during the Cold War years, Silver could still attract a sizable following and generate radio airplay with his hard-grooving melodies.

Silver first came to prominence in 1950 as a member of Stan Getz's band, but a short while later he left to launch the Jazz Messengers, one of the defining hard bop bands of the period. While with this group, Silver enjoyed his first hit, "The Preacher." Alfred Lion, owner of Blue Note Records, had argued against releasing the track, but Silver insisted. "He may not have liked it," Silver later recounted in his autobiography, "but he made a lot of money from it." Silver never had another disagreement with the label over song choices, and soon other artists recording for Blue Note were imitating the Silver sound.

In 1956, Silver left the Jazz Messengers —which continued to thrive under the leadership of drummer Art Blakey—and began recording with a new quintet under his own name. Even as jazz styles evolved, with avant-garde and rock-oriented approaches capturing the attention of cutting-edge fans and critics, Silver enjoyed a string of successes, perhaps most notably his Song for My Father album (1964), which incorporated aspects of Cape Verdean music that the pianist had learned from his father. During this same period, Silver's band proved to be a Horace Silver training ground for future star jazz bandleaders, including Joe Henderson, Woody Shaw, and Michael Brecker.

Silver was 32 years old at the time of his conversation with Ralph Gleason. He still had many of his best-known works ahead of him— now classic albums such as Song for My Father (1964), The Cape Verdean Blues (1965), and The ]ody Grind (1966). This interview is one of the best sources of information about Silver's priorities as a composer and bandleader during the heyday of the hard bop movement.”

RJG:  What are your own favorites of the tunes you have written?

HS: I don't know, to tell you the truth, Ralph. It's kind of a hard question to answer —I try to write a varied type of thing. I know that I'm noted by the public for writing these bluesy-type tunes I guess are the most popular, most accepted out of the things I do. "Soulville," "Home Cooking," "Juicy Lucy," "Senior Blues," "Doodlin,"' "Sister Sadie," those things, but I don't limit myself to these things, this is a part of me, a very large part of me, but there's another part of me, too, which probably the real strict Horace Silver fan would dig, but the average person that might buy my records goes for the other part of me. I'm very strongly influenced by Latin rhythms as you probably know, I dig Latin rhythms, I think they swing. The Latin music itself doesn't carry a whole lot of depth to it, harmonically and everything like that, but the rhythms are something else, you can get into all kinds of stuff with Latin rhythms. And I like to write in that vein and ballad-wise I strive to do something a little different. My ballads so far haven't seemed to have caught on too much, but I'm not giving up because I think that I'm doing something a little different as far as ballads are concerned. I'm not speaking of radically different, but I'm just speaking of originality as far as ballads are concerned. I've always thought of it in this way. As far as writing is concerned I admire Monk, and the few things, of course Bud [Powell] hasn't written as much as Monk but I mean I admire these two guys pianistically as well as their writing, but the things that Bud wrote I like very much and Monk also — naturally Duke, that goes without saying—and John Lewis also. But outside of these guys I hear so many jazz ballads that seem trite to me—and have no particular style to them and I've strived to get a different style in my ballad writing than the regular run-of-the-mill stuff, jazz ballads, and I think I've done this. Hasn't seemed to get across too much to the people, as the bluesy things I do.

RJG: Of the ballads, which one do you dig the most?

HS:   I can't say.

RJG: There was no thing that you had a particular soft spot for?

HS: Well I like "Cheryl." Of course, I wrote that for somebody that I was very fond of, and it has a sentimental thing with me. I like "Melancholy Mood." "You Happened My Way," I like that one, I like "Peace." Incidentally, Blue Mitchell just recorded "Peace" with strings. Benny Golson wrote the arrangement of it.

RJG: How did you happen to write that song? How did that come about?

HS: "Peace"? I don't know, I just sat down and tried to write a ballad and it came about—when I say I sat down, I don't have any particular idea in mind, I just tried to search for something pretty. In a ballad, it should be beautiful but also I try to search for a pretty chord pattern in most of my writing, I mean aside from the blues things I do and maybe up-tempo blues, slow blues, medium blues, or "I Got Rhythm"-type tunes, the easy blowing-type things, but I mean getting away from those things with the ballads or with maybe some of the Latin things or some other type of things that I write I try to find a different chord sequence, and interesting chord sequences. The only way I can sort of explain it is like, say you're walking down a road from one point to another like from where are we now, in Oakland?

RJG:  Berkeley.

H S: We are going from Berkeley to San Francisco — well you can take the main route and this way, straight, right over the bridge, into S.F. and then you can deviate this way and twist around that way and still come out at the same point, and that's what I try to do.

RJG: When you're writing a ballad, do you start with any phrase or idea or little run or chord changes that you happen to be thinking about at the moment, or do you just sort of start it and—?

HS: Just start from scratch. I don't have anything in mind usually-well, this is true of mostly everything I write, when I sit down to do something I have nothing in mind. The only thing I might have in mind is that I'd like to try to write a new ballad and I'll try to do this, but I have no melody in mind to start off with or no chords in mind to start off with. That's true of mostly everything I write, with a few exceptions, like, say, "Juicy Lucy," that was based on the chord changes to "Confirmation," which I like to play on those chord changes, so I just thought I'd try to write a line on those changes. I've done that on a few things, but most of the things that I write have some original set of chord changes and original melody. I don't have anything in mind when I sit down. I just stumble around until I luck up on something. Sometimes it comes all at one sitting, but most times it comes a little at a time.

RJG: I should think that the tunes that you write should then be fun for you to play too, because they would fall into your natural conception, wouldn't they?

HS:    Yeah, they are. They're easiest for me to play.

RJG: Well, they're an extension of you in a very real sense, aren't they?

HS; Yeah, I get a big kick out of writing, because all of those tunes that any composer, the tunes they write are sort of like having children, sort of like your kids and you listen to other people. It gives you a big thrill when somebody else records or even plays one of your tunes, the fact that they play it means that they like it, and that pleases you. Plus you get a kick out of their conception of the tune, and I'm always anxious to hear some of my tunes done by somebody else to dig what kind of conception they put to it.

RJG: Has any particular version of one of your tunes by someone else knocked you out more than another?

HS: I like George Shearing's "Senor Blues." He's doing "The Outlaw," now too, incidentally.

RJG: Oh, he is?

HS: He recorded it, too. He told me, should be out pretty soon. I'm very anxious to hear something that JJ. [Johnson] wrote. This is not my composition, but JJ. wrote a tune and recorded it with his last group before they broke up; it had Clifford Jordan, Freddie Hub-bard, and he calls the tune "In Walked Horace," and I'm dying to hear that thing. I wish Columbia would hurry up and release it

RJG: I wonder what he did. That's going to be you.

HS: Well JJ., I love everything he does, he's long been one of my, rather, I've been one of his admirers. I admired his playing and his writing for a long time.

 RJG: This is going to be "In Walked Horace" as J.J. sees it. I notice more and more musicians today perform an increasing percentage of their repertoire from their own works. Now, is this just a natural thing or is this on purpose? Does this fall logically out of what you're doing? Is it more fun to do these than to take songs and do them?

HS: Well, with me, I can only speak for myself, it really, it comes easier to me to be frank. I like standards, we do a few standards, but we do "Round About Midnight," which is Monk's thing, that's a jazz standard. We do "I'll Remember April,” and "Darn That Dream," we do a few standards, but with the standards I would like to be able to do something very, very different with them — I mean we could just blow 'em like a lot of people do, I mean, a good solo is a good solo, a good feeling is a good feeling. But I would like to arrange it in a manner that had something different about it, and a lot of times it's much easier for me to write something myself than to do this. It comes easier to me than to write an arrangement on a standard because I feel that sometimes I write an arrangement, although it might be a good arrangement, it's not that much different. So I've done a few arrangements on the standards like "My One and Only Love," I thought that came off pretty well but on the whole I find that the originals flow better with me, they come easier to me. And I feel that they have much more originality to them.

RJG: What is the thing about your own playing in the group and the whole music scene that's the most kicks to you?

HS: On the nights that we're really popping, when we really get together as a unit, really swinging, that's the most kicks. I mean this group I have now is a pretty good group, musically. On the stand and off the stand we get along well together and we have a lot of fun playing and we've been together long enough to maintain some sort of a level every night, but there are special nights when we really hit that stride, get that peak thing going where you just swing all night long and you get the dynamics right, and the level is right, the acoustics in the club are right, and the audience is with you, and that's a heck of a feeling when you get that happening.

RJG; Easier to play then?

HS; Yeah, much easier. The ideas just flow out, everything flows. It's like you're sailing in space, floating.

RJG: That's an interesting sort of free form thing that happens then, isn't it?

HS: Yeah, the tighter a rhythm section is and the tighter a whole group is, when you, 'course a group can be tight but when you really hit that stride, on those certain nights when everything is cooking, the rhythm section is cohesive, everything is smooth, the horns are really wailing and I don't know, it's hard to put into words but everything seems to flow, it's like you're sailing, floating around in space, there's not no real effort to anything. It's when the rhythm is flowing your ideas seem to flow too, just everything comes out so much easier than ordinarily.

RJG:  It's almost as if you couldn't do anything wrong?

HS:    Yeah.

RJG:  Be hard to go against it?

HS:    That's right.

RJG:   That's fascinating. Those are the real kicks?

HS:    Yeah, really.

RJG:  How often does that happen?

HS: Well that's hard to say. Doesn't happen every night, though, I'll tell you that.

RJG:  Be a groove if it did.

HS: But when you do, when that happens and everything comes off like that, it gives you a heck of a sensation, it's almost like being high. It's a natural high!

RJG:   Better than being high?

HS:    Yeah, really—because you're elated.

RJG:   Is it hard to stop then?

HS:    Stop playing or stop the groove?

RJG:   Stop playing.

HS:    No, everything just seems to come naturally, everything just flows.

RJG:   What I mean is, like all of a sudden it's 2 o'clock—?

HS: Oh yeah, well I know what you mean, sometimes you don't want to stop.

RJG:  Do you guys rehearse much?

HS: Yeah, we do quite a bit of rehearsing. We do all our rehearsing out of town, because in New York one fellow lives in Brooklyn, one lives in the Bronx, and they're all spread out, and it's hard to get together. So, whenever we go out on the road we usually stay at the same hotel and we go down to the club during the day and rehearse. We had couple of rehearsals while we were in Los Angeles and we're going to have another one this week. Because I've written some new material which, we're playing some of it now and I've got some more of it to write out this week, and we're going to rehearse it and do some of it because we're planning on a new album,

RJG: Well, now when you write out new things for the group how much is actually written?

HS; There's usually an introduction that's written out and the melody, and if there's any interludes or an out chorus and an ending, that's it. I never write down drum parts. I don't think I've ever written a drum part for any of the drummers I've had. Because, I'd rather have them just cop it from listening, comes more natural, I think writing out drum parts kind of makes things a little stiff

RJG: For instance, if you work out a tune, you take this intro and the melody and your interludes and your chorus, which is a skeleton for your final performance, and you do it in rehearsal several times, do things fall into place that you hadn't written out that are worked out in your rehearsal that you 're then going to keep?

HS: Sometimes, it depends. I usually have everything in my mind, what I want to do. I know when I write it out what I want to be happening with the tune. But sometimes when we get to the rehearsal and rehearse it, I change things around or something might happen spontaneously that I say, yeah, keep that in or throw that out or something.

RJG: Do you try to think in terms of the guys that are working with you?

HS: Yeah, I do. I try to write in terms of the guys I have with me. On the whole I do, I'll say that. To be completely honest, most times when I sit down I think of the guys that are with me and I try to write something easy for them to play, but that has depth. This is a twofold thing because it's good for them, it's easy for them to play. The chord changes are easy, but they're saying something, that's the hard part. Simplicity is very hard, you know, being simple without being corny. To write a simple melody, easy for them to play, easy chord changes for them to play, and yet have it be saying something and have some depth to it, something that's going to be a good piece of music, that's very hard and this is what I have in mind I'll say 90 percent of the time, but sometimes I get tired of that, I don't know, sometimes I just say to myself, what the heck, this one's for me, I'm just going to do whatever I feel like doing here. If it's hard to play it's just hard to play, that's all. I'm going to write it anyway.

RJG:  Who are your favorite composers?

HS: Monk is one, Duke Ellington of course, John Lewis. Bud, he hasn't written as much as these other fellows have, but I like the things Bud wrote. Let's see, J.J., I like his stuff, Miles, of course, I like Sonny Rollins tunes—well I'm sure there's some more but I can't think of them right now, those are the things that come to my mind first of all.

RJG;  How about classical composers?

HS: Well, I haven't had that much classical training, to be honest, Ralph. I like classics, but I only studied them for a very short time. I had a good classical teacher. 'Course I've gone through a series of bad teachers back home in Connecticut on piano as I did on tenor. I was taught the wrong way on both instruments and I had to undo all that wrong training and start all over again on both instruments, but when I finally got a hold of a good classical teacher I did study with him for about a year, maybe a little more than a year, and then he died and I stopped taking lessons for awhile. This teacher I had was a very excellent teacher and he did more for me than the rest of the teachers, he undid all the wrong that was taught me and he had me doing the right things. He taught me the correct fingering, the correct way to hold my hands and all that. He had me doing the Hanon exercises and the Czerny exercises which the other teachers didn't even give me, scales, minor, major, and all these different scales, he really was a good teacher, but at that time I was playing a little jazz at that time, my first jazz influence on the piano was boogie-woogie and then from there I went on into Teddy Wilson and started to listen to Tatum and then Bud and Monk and different things like that.

But I was interested in harmony at that time and I could play a few little standard tunes on the piano and I knew a few chords but I didn't know too much and what used to bug me about these classical lessons is I'd practice these things like mad and I'd get them down and, I'd have a few pages per week and finally I'd get the whole thing down well and then he'd tell me I'd have to go over it again and do the whole thing for my next lesson, and what would happen, I didn't know no harmony, and I'd get in the middle of one of these things and I'd get hung up, get lost, and I'd have to stop and go back to the beginning and start all over again whereas I realize now, if this guy had taught me harmony and I'd really known what I was playing harmonically, maybe I'd have been able to fake where I goofed off at and continue, but I didn't know any harmony. It used to bug me because I played boogie-woogie at that time, and if I messed up playing boogie-woogie I could fake my way out and keep going but when I'd get into this classical things and I'd get lost I'd have to stop and start all over again and it used to bug me and sort of took my interest away from it for a while, because I wanted to know what I was doing. 

I don't believe in being over analytical but I was kind of analytical, specially in those days because I learned more from phonograph records, I think, than anything else because back in Connecticut, I'm from Norwalk, very few jazz musicians around there and maybe one or two good ones at that, and the record shops hardly carried any good jazz records, I had to go into New York to pick up some records and when I'd go into New York to pick up some records I'd be so thrilled to get these records, I'd go to maybe 10 record shops and buy one record from each place, whatever I could find and I thought I could learn from, I'd bring these things home and I'd put them on the little old-fashioned wind-up phonograph, slow them down and I'd figure out the chords from the record, and I'd try to analyze these things, where the piano player played. I'd listen to it and hear it and try to find it on the piano. Then I'd try to break it down and I said, now, what is this he played, let me analyze this, what do they call this chord, and I learned a lot like that.

RJG: Well, sure, with the blues thing, if you got hung up in the middle of the boogie-woogie thing you know the pattern on which it was based, you could go and do any darn thing and come out alright.

HS:    That's right.

RJG: How are your hands, have you had any more trouble with your hands?

HS: No, my hands have been doing very well, thanks to my doctor, I have a wonderful doctor. He's a chiropractic doctor and a physiotherapist, and I have a lot of faith in chiropractic doctors, specially this one anyway, a lot of people put him down, but this doctor's a very wonderful doctor and aside from being my doctor he's my friend too. He's from New Haven, Connecticut. His name is Dr. Dwight Hamilton. He's about 71 years old and he was born on the same day I was and we're both Virgos, September 2nd's our birthday, and he's a friend of mine as well as my doctor. I've learned a lot from him about health. I've become very health-conscious through him and reading health literature and I had this, they thought it was arthritis at first, in my right hand, but it turned out to be a thing called tendonitis. It's a sprained tendon and I had an over acid condition which was keeping it from getting well. I had about three times as much acid in my system than I was supposed to have and he got rid of that for me, and it took about eight months of treatments, little by little, to get rid of the thing, but I'm completely straight with it now, my hand is fine and I try to keep this acid thing down. But I have nothing but praise for him. He's a very wonderful person and for a man of his age a very studious man. I admire him so much, because I look at him at his age, he's so agile. He looks like he's about 49, and he's 71. Climbs the stairs two at a time. Rides downtown on his bike every morning for the paper and all of that and he's one doctor that's really interested in his patients, which most doctors today are not. They don't take an interest really, but he takes time with you and he's always studying something, he studies hypnosis, he studies graph analysis. He's a heck of a guy, a very interesting guy.

RJG: What things do you have now in your mind that you want to do in the next few years, what challenges are you setting yourself?

HS: I'll tell you, the things that I have record-wise, we have to do two albums a year, record-wise, what I have planned for this year is the things that we're rehearsing now. I've planned for a live date in a club in New York, I don't know which club, but some club in New York, we're going to record a live session, and secondly, a trio album which I haven't done in quite a few years, that's what I have planned for this year. And after that, maybe something with a big band or semi-big band or strings, I don't know exactly, something maybe a little different. Also I have something else in my mind for this year. I have been thinking in terms of trying to reach more people, a bigger audience with my music. I've been asking the booking agency to try to get us jobs in places that we haven't been before. We have no trouble playing all the major cities and all of that, but I'd like to get to some of these places that we've never played before. I mean foreign countries, we've been abroad, but there are some of the countries we haven't played before. Some of the smaller cities that we haven't played before, like Kansas City, we've never been, I think we're going to go there, and Milwaukee, Minneapolis, little places like that. Even if it means taking a little less money, I'd like to get to some of these places and present my music to a wider audience.

RJG: Well, you got a lot to experiment with there. If you want to get around to those smaller places. Because most of them don't get jazz groups,

HS: That's true. Rochester, New York, that's one, they have a club up there now. 'Fact, I think Jon Hendricks' brother is part owner in the club.

RJG:  Jimmy?

HS:    Yeah.

RJG:  Well, crazy, I look forward to hearing the trio album.

HS: Well, it's my continual aim to try to improve my playing and my writing. I stay pretty busy, especially in New York because I never realized before I became a leader what work is involved in it. A lot of people probably don't realize, certainly the side men don't realize because it's a heck of a lot of responsibility. Aside from trying to keep up my instrument and trying to do the writing, arranging, there's so much business details to be taken care of, you have to get your contracts in the office and publicity and all kinds of things, taxes, and it never stops. I'm always running around, never having enough time to complete anything. When I get back to New York now, I'll have been away for about three and a half weeks, and my mailbox will be bulging with stuff to attend to.”

Conversations in Jazz: The Ralph J. Gleason Interviews is available directly from Yale University Press and you can locate order information by going here.