- Stunning Triple Plus (A+++) sound on both sides of this copy of The Horace Silver Quintet’s final album together
- Only the second copy of Silver Serenade to ever hit the site, it is incredibly hard to find Silver’s records in stereo with the right stampers and good sound
- Thanks to RVG, the sound here is wonderfully full-bodied, lively and musical with a relatively bottom end
- 4 stars: “The band had made five previous recordings for the label, all of them successful. The program here is comprised of Silver compositions. The blowing is a meld of relaxed, soulful, and swinging hard bop, as evidenced in the title track… This is another excellent recording by the greatest Silver quintet.”
Need a refresher course in Tubey Magic after playing too many modern recordings or remasterings? These records are overflowing with it. Rich, smooth, sweet, full of ambience, dead-on correct tonality — everything that we listen for in a great record is here.
What do the best Hot Stamper pressings like this one give you, the audiophile music lover?
- Energy for starters. What could be more important than the life of the music?
- The Big Sound comes next — wall to wall, lots of depth, huge space, three-dimensionality, all that sort of thing.
- Then transient information — fast, clear, sharp attacks on the piano, not the smear and thickness so common to most LPs.
- Tight, note-like bass with clear fingering — which ties in with good transient information, as well as the issue of frequency extension further down.
- Next: transparency — the quality that allows you to hear deep into the soundfield, showing you the space and air around all the players.
- Then: presence and immediacy. The musicians aren’t “back there” somewhere, way behind the speakers. They’re front and center where any recording engineer worth his salt — RVG in this case — would have put them.
- Extend the top and bottom and voila, you have The Real Thing — an honest to goodness Hot Stamper.
Horace Silver Is a Jazz Genius
We love his albums, but you can count on two hands all the Hot Stamper pressings of his records that have made it to our site. Good pressings in clean condition go for big bucks, and most of the ones we spring for have either bad sound or condition issues such as inner groove distortion that make them unsuitable for our customers.
TRACK LISTING
Side One
Silver’s Serenade
Let’s Get To The Nitty Gritty
Side Two
Sweet Sweetie Dee
The Dragon Lady
Nineteen Bars
AMG 4 Star Review
Horace Silver’s LP Silver’s Serenade is a swan song; it was the final recording with his most famous quintet, which included drummer Roy Brooks, bassist Gene Taylor, saxophonist Junior Cook, and trumpeter Blue Mitchell.
The band had made five previous recordings for the label, all of them successful. The program here is comprised of Silver compositions. The blowing is a meld of relaxed, soulful, and swinging hard bop, as evidenced in the title track… Cook’s blowing on his solo is matched by Silver’s comping, moving through octaves and key changes. The tune smokes from start to finish as the album comes to a close. This is another excellent recording by the greatest Silver quintet.
Horace Silver
From the perspective of the 21st century, it is clear that few jazz musicians had a greater impact on the contemporary mainstream than Horace Silver. The hard bop style that Silver pioneered in the ’50s is now dominant, played not only by holdovers from an earlier generation, but also by fuzzy-cheeked musicians who had yet to be born when the music fell out of critical favor in the ’60s and ’70s.
Silver’s piano style — terse, imaginative, and utterly funky — became a model for subsequent mainstream pianists to emulate. Some of the most influential horn players of the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s first attained a measure of prominence with Silver — musicians like Donald Byrd, Woody Shaw, Joe Henderson, Benny Golson, and the Brecker Brothers all played in Silver’s band at a point early in their careers. Silver has even affected members of the avant-garde; Cecil Taylor confesses a Silver influence, and trumpeter Dave Douglas played briefly in a Silver combo.
Certainly, no one ever contributed a larger and more vital body of original compositions to the jazz canon. Silver died in New York on June 18, 2014 at the age of 85.
Allmusic