Horace Silver discusses his early musical influences

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Horace Silver discusses his influence on jazz

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Horace Silver discusses musical inspiration

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Q: “You brought quite a different thing to the music in the early part of the fifties. I don’t know what the critics called it, I guess a ‘hard bop’ kind of sound but you really seemed to fuse a lot of the interesting harmonies and that of bop music to a very basic, driving blues feeling and I think probably as much your efforts as the others like Art Blakey really brought a new thing to the music with Bobby Timmins and some of the gospel based taking-it-back-to-the-roots kind of thing…”

A: “Well, I tell you, Ted, looking back at it, my whole life in a sense has been one of synthesis, you know. I guess, I didn't consciously do this, but as I look back at it now, I've always taken a bit of this and a bit of that and bundled it together, you know. I mean, not only in music like, you know, in the beginning and I still do dig the blues, gospel music. You know, I was into boogie wee when I was a teenager. That was prevalent at that time. Blues gospel, I love Latin music, Latin rhythms and I love Broadway show music, you know, standard tunes, classical music. I guess I've always, you know, been a person that liked many things and I pick something out of that if I can use it and making it into my thing, you know.”