© 2024 St. Louis Public Radio
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Remembering Horace Silver

Please join me Sunday night, June 29 on Jazz Unlimited from nine to midnight for “Remembering Horace Silver.”  Pianist, composer, bandleader and jazz giant Horace Silver died at the age of 85 on June 28.  He was born in Norwalk, Connecticut in 1928,  Horace’s father was from the Cape Verdean islands and he had an affinity for those rhythms and Latin rhythms all his life.  He was one of the architects of the style known as hard bop and his major pianistic influence was Bud Powell.  Silver’s first major job was with Stan Getz in 1950.  He signed with Blue Note Records in 1952 and remained with them until 1980.  Many of his compositions have become jazz standards.  We will hear 22 of his composition’s on the show, played by his own groups, the Jazz Messengers, Tuck and Patti, Stan Getz, Art Pepper, the Keith Ellis Sessions Big Band, Phineas Newborn, Jr., the Buddy Rich band, the Woody Herman Orchestra, Lambert, Hendricks & Ross,  Pat Metheny, Dizzy Gillespie and Dee Dee Bridgewater.

The Slide Show contains my photograph of some of the artists heard on this show.

The Archive of the show will be avaiable until the morning of July 7, 2014.

Here is the Horace Silver Quintet of Blue Mitchell (tp) Junior Cook (ts) Horace Silver (p) Gene Taylor (b) and Louis Hayes (d) playing "Cool Eyes" in a Dutch TV Broadcast in 1959.

Dennis Owsley has broadcast a weekly jazz show for St. Louis Public Radio since April 1983. He holds a Ph.D. in organic chemistry and is a retired Monsanto Senior Science Fellow and college teacher. His show, Jazz Unlimited, airs every Sunday from 9:00 p.m. to midnight. The show has the largest jazz audience in St. Louis and was named Best Jazz Radio Show in St. Louis for the years 2005-2007 and 2009 by the Riverfront Times. In celebration of his 25 years on the air, January 24, 2008 was proclaimed Dennis Owsley Day" in the City of St. Louis. He is the 2010 winner of the St. Louis Public Radio Millard S. Cohen Lifetime Achievement Award. Dennis is also a noted photographer, and his exhibit, In the Moment: Photographs of Jazz Musicians, ran from September 23, 2005 to January 21, 2006 at the Sheldon Art Gallery. He is a lifetime student of jazz history and teaches short courses on the subject. Dennis is the author of the award-winning book City of Gabriels: The History of Jazz in St. Louis 1985-1973, published in 2006.