Horace Ward Martin Tavares Silver[note 1] (September 2, 1928 – June 18, 2014) was an American jazz pianist, composer, and arranger, particularly in the hard bop style that he helped pioneer in the 1950s.

Frequent sideman recordings in the mid-1950s helped further, but it was his work with the Jazz Messengers, co-led by Art Blakey, that brought both his writing and playing most attention.

After leaving Blakey in 1956, Silver formed his own quintet, with what became the standard small group line-up of tenor saxophone, trumpet, piano, bass, and drums.

Several changes occurred in the early 1970s: Silver disbanded his group to spend more time with his wife and to concentrate on composing; he included lyrics in his recordings; and his interest in spiritualism developed.

Silver left Blue Note after 28 years, founded his own record label, and scaled back his touring in the 1980s, relying in part on royalties from his compositions for income.

As a player, Silver transitioned from bebop to hard bop by stressing melody rather than complex harmony, and combined clean and often humorous right-hand lines with darker notes and chords in a near-perpetual left-hand rumble.

[2] His mother, Gertrude, was from Connecticut; his father, John Tavares Silver, was born on the island of Maio, Cape Verde, and emigrated to the United States as a young man.

[6] Horace had a much older half-brother, Eugene Fletcher, from his mother's first marriage, and was the third child for his parents, after John, who lived to six months, and Maria, who was stillborn.

[10] His early piano influences included the styles of boogie-woogie and the blues, the pianists Nat King Cole, Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, Art Tatum, and Teddy Wilson, as well as some jazz horn players.

[20][21] He worked for short periods with tenor saxophonists Lester Young and Coleman Hawkins,[22] before meeting altoist Lou Donaldson, with whom he developed his bebop understanding.

[23] Later that year, another Blue Note quartet session was booked for Donaldson, with Art Blakey replacing Taylor, but the saxophonist withdrew and producer–owner Alfred Lion offered Silver the studio time for a trio recording.

In 1953, he was pianist on sessions led by Sonny Stitt, Howard McGhee, and Al Cohn, and, the following year, he played on albums by Art Farmer, Miles Davis, Milt Jackson and others.

[32] This set of studio and concert recordings was pivotal in the development and defining of hard bop,[33] which combined elements of blues, gospel, and R&B, with bebop-based harmony and rhythm.

[41] He wrote almost all of the material the band played;[41] one of these, "Señor Blues", "officially put Horace Silver on the map", in the view of critic Scott Yanow.

[22][43] For several years from the late 1950s, this contained Junior Cook (tenor saxophone), Blue Mitchell (trumpet), Gene Taylor (bass), and either Hayes or Roy Brooks (drums).

[56] His quintet, by then including saxophonist Bennie Maupin, trumpeter Randy Brecker, bassist John Williams, and drummer Billy Cobham, toured parts of Europe in October and November 1968, sponsored by the U.S.

[59] The Penguin Guide to Jazz's retrospective summary of Silver's main Blue Note recordings was that they were of a consistently high standard: "each album yields one or two themes that haunt the mind, each usually has a particularly pretty ballad, and they all lay back on a deep pile of solid riffs and workmanlike solos.

[2][34] The first album to contain vocals, That Healin' Feelin' (1970[64]), was commercially unsuccessful and Silver had to insist on the support of Blue Note executives to continue releasing music of the same, new style.

[34] They agreed to a further two albums that contained vocals and Silver on an RMI electric keyboard; the three were later compiled as The United States of Mind, but were soon dropped from the catalog.

[22] Rockin' with Rachmaninoff, a musical work featuring dancers and narration, written by Silver and choreographed and directed by Donald McKayle, was staged in Los Angeles in 1991.

[92][93] Silver came close to dying soon after its release: he was hospitalized with a previously undiagnosed blood clot problem,[94] but went on to record Pencil Packin' Papa, containing a six-piece brass section, in 1994.

[105] A 2008 release, Live at Newport '58, from a Silver concert fifty years earlier, reached the top ten of Billboard's jazz chart.

[9] Silver's early recordings displayed "a crisp, chipper but slightly wayward style, idiosyncratic enough to take him out of the increasingly stratified realms of bebop".

[109] In contrast to the more elaborate bebop piano, he stressed straightforward melodies rather than complex harmonies, and included short riffs and motifs that came and went over the course of a solo.

[112] Writer and academic Thomas Owens stated that characteristics of Silver's solos were: "the short, simple phrases that all derive from the three-beat figure ♩ ♩ | ♩, or a variant of it; the pianist's 'blue fifth' (those rapid slurs up to [... a flattened fifth]); and the low tone cluster used strictly as a rhythmic punctuation".

[113] Music journalist Marc Myers observed that "Silver's advantage was pianistic grace and a keen awareness that by resolving dark, minor-passages in airy, ascending and descending major-key chord configurations, the result could produce an exciting and uplifting feeling.

[114] Silver soon expanded the range and style of his writing,[102] which grew to include "funky groove tunes, gentle mood pieces, vamp songs, outings in 3/4 and 6/8 time, Latin workouts of various stripes, up-tempo jam numbers, and examples of almost any and every other kind of approach congruent with the hard bop aesthetic.

[116] Owens observed that "Many of his compositions contain no folk blues or gospel music elements, but instead have highly chromatic melodies supported by richly dissonant harmonies".

[101] Grove Music Online describes his legacy as at least fourfold: as a pioneer of hard bop; as a user of what became the archetypal quintet instrumentation of tenor saxophone, trumpet, piano, bass, and drums; as a developer of young musicians who went on to become important players and bandleaders; and for his skill as a composer and arranger.

[120] Silver was also an influence as a pianist: his first Blue Note recording as leader "redefined the jazz piano, which up until then was largely modeled on the dexterity and relentless attack of Bud Powell", in Myers' words.