His nearest neighbors were hillbillies, and his most important teacher was a white classical pianist. His father was recently from the island Cape Verde and his mother could pass for white. Horace also helped create a whole genre of music: hard bop, which was conscious effort to make bebop more bluesy.Īccording to Horace himself in his autobiography Let’s Get to the Nitty Gritty, Norwalk, Connecticut wasn’t a particularly soulful part of the African-American community. Horace was one of Miles Davis’s favorite pianists because of how Horace played the blues. (To start with, you can’t bend notes on a piano.)īecause the piano is a little distant, we are actually able to jump in pretty easily. Blues piano has always been a little more distant, a little more mechanical, a little more European. The first instruments of the blues are the human voice and the guitar. I’ve personally found that the more I go back to the blues, the more interesting my modern jazz performance becomes. When Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, and other later composers wanted to keep growing, they went back to Baroque counterpoint to deepen their music. But I also think that you can learn something about the blues no matter who you are or where you are from. I wouldn’t dare say that the blues isn’t first and foremost an Afro-American thing. There can be a kind of smokescreen or mystery to the blues: that it is a wholly ingrained or natural aesthetic, that you need to be poor, or black, or whatever. But for almost all the great jazz that made the history books, the blues was a vital component, as basic to the music as counterpoint was to the lasting European music of the baroque era. In some of the most important jazz today, the blues is kind of a lost aesthetic. In the original emails, complete transcriptions of Horace Silver and Albert Ammons were attached here I’ve included a sample page.) The following combines three pieces mostly written on airplanes. Since my touring schedule keeps me from being at the school every week, I also communicate with my students through email. (I have just started at NEC as a jazz piano teacher.
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