Track Listing

1. Song for My Father
2. Natives Are Restless Tonight
3. Calcutta Cutie
4. Que Pasa?
5. Kicker
6. Lonely Woman
7. Sanctimonious Sam [*]
8. Que Pasa? [Trio Version][*]
9. Sighin' and Cryin' [*]
10. Silver Threads Among My Soul [*]

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #11212 in Music
• Released on: 1999-04-20
• Number of discs: 1
• Formats: Original recording reissued, Original recording remastered

Album Description
A visit to Brazil prompted Horace Silver's interest in his Portuguese roots and led to the magnificent "Song For My Father," his most enduring composition. This album also introduced his new band with Joe Henderson and Carmell Jones and features the classic band with Blue Mitchell and Junior Cook.

Amazon.com essential recording
Since its title track provided the inspiration for Steely Dan's "Rikki, Don't Lose That Number," Song for My Father has become known as the jazz recording that launched a thousand bad rock records. Yet whatever pretensions Steely Dan and their legion of desperately hip imitators had shouldn't be laid at pianist Horace Silver's door: this is one of Blue Note's warmest and most satisfying collections--and that's saying something. A pioneer of the hard-bop style, which combined gospel and R&B with jazz, Silver authored many outstanding compositions, including not just "Song for My Father," but "Opus de Funk," "Nica's Dream," "Senor Blues," and "The Preacher." His quintets, which featured tenor sax and trumpet, spotlighted such up-and-coming talents as trumpeters Woody Shaw, Art Farmer, and Donald Byrd. On Song for My Father, the band features tenorman Joe Henderson, who contributed one of his own signature tunes, "The Kicker." Along with the strong quintet work, the album includes a fine trio feature for the pianist in "Lonely Woman." --Fred Goodman

Customer Reviews

One of the Greatest Jazz Albums of All-Time
Long-time jazz pianist Horace Silver released this gem in 1964 on Blue Note. It is an unusual session as it is a split one. Part of the album contains Silver's classic quintet of Blue Mitchell on trumpet, Junior Cook on tenor sax, Gene Taylor on bass, Roy Brooks on drums, and of course, Silver on piano. The other part has Silver on piano, Carmell Jones on trumpet, Joe Henderson on tenor sax, Teddy Smith on bass, and Roger Humphries on drums. It is a "cut and paste" effort, but once you listen to the music, you can't tell a difference in their personnel. That is how flawless this album is. The remastered version by Rudy Van Gelder is awesome in its sound quality.

The title track is obviously one of jazz's all-time great pieces, but "Calcutta Cutie", "Que Pasa?", "The Kicker", and "Lonely Woman" are all outstanding, heck the whole album is great. Henderson, in particular, is at the top of his game and he absolutely gives the best tenor sax solo of all-time in the title track.

This is a perfect album to get into jazz and should be one of your first buys after "Kind of Blue" and "Blue Train". It is also a good introduction to Horace Silver, one of the great underrated artists in jazz history.

If you like this Silver album, check out "Blowin' the Blues Away" and "Horace Silver and the Jazz Messengers".

High quality jazz with enormous popular appeal...
Interesting... if one of the main reasons for the great space and vast praise garnered by the reviews for Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue" is that it combines brilliant musicianship with tunes that are "accessible" by a much wider audience than pure jazz aficionados then why such little comparative interest in a record with similarly good credentials ?

While the playing on "Song For My Father" may not rank up there with Davis' & Coltrane's quite exceptional virtuosity on "Kind of Blue", Joe Henderson's sax, Carmell Jones' trumpet and Horace Silver's piano breaks push the album into the same rarefied and rare league: high quality jazz with enormous popular appeal. The trick ?... catchy lead riffs and backing rhythms that drive the songs forward while allowing often highly complex instrumental breaks to emerge effortlessly from and back into strong underlying melodies. The result?... a suite of songs that will grab space on your CD player over and over again and, in "Song For My Father" itself one of the most unforgettable jazz tracks ever made.

A Jewel For His Father...And Anyone
Horace Silver was one of those postwar jazzmen who belied the idea that you had to blast off into nether-netherland to make jazz. But he also put the lie to the idea that making your music accessible was equal to making it somewhere between limp and listless. Not for nothing did Silver and his fellow hard boppers from the mid-1950s (Art Blakey in particular) make a conscious effort to yank the roots back into the music; these men knew what they were doing and damn near prevented jazz from getting too hip for its own britches, most likely because they seem to have made a fetish out of keeping it swinging.

Still, "Song For My Father" is a set for anyone's music library, even one who isn't disposed ordinarily to jazz. The critic who says the thousand and one subsequent bad rock albums trying to get hipped to the jazz that were inspired by this album and especially its warm title cut has an excellent point, but "Song For My Father" would stand out as Silver's unquestioned (almost; it's really hard to put "Horace Silver and the Jazz Messengers" in the back seat, after all) masterpiece even if no one had decided to rip off the title track's insinuating bass line or otherwise wring its clever leavening of Brazilian rhythm with harder Carribbean percussive. The group sounds so warm and probing yet so bloody danceable throughout that, when you're finished with it, you may have a hard time getting the people sharing it with you to stop dancing. No one wastes a note or a percussive; no one sees a space as an abomination; no one trips over another; and, there is a remarkable sympatico between the musicians that few enough ensembles achieve, never mind make into an art.

The album is, of course, far more than its luminous title track; the Silver group rollicks through a breezy set showing their usual meld of gospel and blues to the pure bop, playing steadily and not shrinking when lyricism pours through. Horace Silver was probably the most underrated jazz leader of his time. Here's the proof.