Horace Silver Quotes

Someday, I hope to do a jazz club tour.

When I heard Monk in person in 1955, he was playing with a quartet in a small club. The place was full of musicians, but there was no public at all.

Bobby Troup and I have been working together for about a year in clubs. We work in the same club.

I wasn't a trained Mickey Mouse club performer. I played in jazz clubs and restaurants.

I've been invited to do a trio with a fantastic jazz guitarist and a harmonica player.

There's no substitute for live work to keep a band together.

I had listened to Joe Turner. When they'd book Joe there, I'd play the blues behind him.

I skipped school one day to see Dizzy Gillespie, and that's where I met Coltrane. Coltrane and Jimmy Heath just joined the band, and I brought my trumpet, and he was sitting at the piano downstairs waiting to join Dizzy's band. He had his saxophone across his lap, and he looked at me and he said, 'You want to play?'

I worked with a guy, I can't think of his name, him and his wife, and one of them had a saxophone and the other played drums. It wasn't a regular job but I did a few gigs around home with them.

When I came out of the conservatory, the first thing I did was to go see Thelonious Monk.

'Black Radio' was pretty much a jam session.

Jazz onstage is a very intimate exchange between everybody that's onstage.

My aunt Ruth Brown was a jazz musician. I got hooked on it at a young age, understanding what John Coltrane was doing playing two notes on the saxophone at the same time, which is impossible.

I studied jazz at home with my grandparents. They always had jazz dudes at the house, but I didn't study formally. I just hung around a lot of musicians.

We really put together a great band, and have a great time.

It was probably when I met Jeff Hamilton, the drummer I've been working with for the last 20 years. He's the one who brought Ray Brown to hear me sing at a restaurant in my hometown.

You don't rehearse jazz to death to get the camera angles.

In some ways, jazz is the most precise of art forms and the loosest in the sense that it's all about improvisation, but the musicianship required is kind of insane. To actually play with real jazz musicians is a different level of musicianship that almost has no equal in any other form of music in the world.

I love to play smaller crowds with the Rhythm Kings.

I saw Al Foster with Miles Davis the other week. It was beautiful. But, the whole thing was, Al Foster played as well as everybody else, but all of them were quite brilliant under Miles Davis' direction.

I'm a trumpet player, and I sing jazz.

So I went into jazz and performed in jazz clubs all over the country.

'Even Flow' is the best to play live because of the long solos. It starts out slow and builds, and, depending on what the audience does, I can reflect that in the solo.

What about that Dave Brubeck live album, with a version of 'Like Someone in Love' on it, and long sax solos by Paul Desmond? That's what got me hooked on jazz.

There's nothing better than live music, I think.