"Call together twelve fans or critics - that's a properly constituted jury in some countries, though not mine - and ask them to write down the ten most important jazz musicians since, say, 1940. We can all agree on at least some of the names that would figure prominently, but how many will make a strong case for Horace Silver? Long before his death in 2014, Silver's reputation had become occluded, or tarnished with the notion that he was a relatively slight figure, more of an entertainer than an innovator.

As we head for a decade since his passing, that's a situation and a view well worth challenging. Silver must stand as one of the most significant figures not just in jazz but in modern music. He was, of course, a commercial and critical cornerstone of Blue Note, perhaps the definitive modern jazz label. He was a pioneer of the style known as hard bop and of the distinctive instrumentation that best expressed it. He moved jazz piano on beyond the prevailing Bud Powell style, weaving in rhythms from his Cape Verdean heritage previously unheard in north American music. He was a formidable composer: this, very few are prepared to deny, citing "Song For My Father", heard in wonderful live form on the disc you're holding, "Peace", the other famous "Lonely Woman" and a dozen more that have entered the repertory. But it doesn't stop there. Silver later tried to build new bridges between jazz and the popular music that had displaced it. His United States Of Mind projects were not a success, but they deserve to be revisited. His spirituality and environmentalism were ahead of their time. His habit of quoting other songs in his solos, often dismissed as a shallow, crowd-pleasing trick, is a forerunner of sampling culture and hip-hop. It's also an acknowledgement of profoundly knowledgeable Silver was about the canon and its evolution. Here's a line of mine, he might say, and here's where it came from, but also here and here. His only mistake in this regard was to smile while he was playing. Silver's other great contribution was a challenge to the really rather recent notion that jazz should be deadly serious and played with a pained rictus.

Only listening to him at some length will confirm any of these hasty generalisations, but here is a chance to discover him at the peak of his performing career. Between 1962 and 1964, Silver made eye- and ear-opening visits to Japan and to Brazil. Though he never attempted anything that could be marketed as "world music", he came to the recognition that jazz was a world music, a creative Esperanto that could absorb different accents and dialects. His own creole nature, Irish, African, Portuguese, became the focus of his writing. Travel made a profound impact on his own practice and led, quite directly, to the making of his two most important LPs, Song For My Father, released in late January 1965, and The Cape Verdean Blues, exactly one year later. These records, the former especially, account for much of the repertoire Silver was playing with his group at the time.

In June 1964, with some of Song For My Father in the can, Silver's group was at the "The Cork & Bib" in Westbury, Long Island, New York. It was a relatively new line-up. Blue Mitchell and Junior Cook had left and were replaced by Carmell Jones and Joe Henderson, a change that either reflected or inspired a change of direction and tone in the leader's music. "Tokyo Blues" and "Señor Blues", were still mainstays of the set. Somewhat like Miles Davis, Horace didn't see the merit of live releases and he probably wouldn't have thanked you for a copy of Live 1964, which saw release twenty years later, when Horace was absorbed in his own label and the self-help imperatives of his Spiritualizing The Senses project. He might have found his own earlier music to be raw and unsophisticated, except the 1964 band was fronted by two soloists who were virtually incapable of unsubtle playing. The enigmatic Carmell Jones left the US for Germany right after his stint with Silver and was, for a time, "lost" to American jazz. Joe Henderson had already made a splash with his early Blue Notes, Page One, Our Thing, In'n'Out and the driving Inner Urge was establishing himself as a player who always seemed to be in the middle of an absorbing solo, like a storyteller who picked up the narrative every time you encountered him.

Less than a year further on, Silver and the group were playing mostly material off Song For My Father, a record which, partly because of its affectionate, late-sunshine cover portrait of the dedicatee, had established the idea that jazz could make such fond personal statements and still swing. The band's appearance at The Half Note, in April 1965 perfoming Song Of My Father, The Natives Are Restless Tonight and Que Pasa and on February 11 & 16, 1966, two versions of "African Queen" are also included on this Revisited release. Almost sixty years on, and with the piano lid now closed, it's possible to see all the work as of a piece and a process of evolution. At no point, though, was Silver more completely on point and exuberantly creative as in the period documented here. There is far more to the Silver story than these live performances, but they stand on their own terms as gently chiding reminders of Silver's role in jazz history. If the jury really is still out, this reissue should provide the clinching evidence."-Brian Morton, July 2022