Level
Intermediate/Advanced
Description
The Horace Silver Combo Collection by David Heywood
A new and invaluable addition to your school’s jazz library! This monumental work will become a staple of every music department in the world. Here for the first time, you will find a treasure trove of many unpublished works by one of Jazz’s greatest genius composers, Horace Silver. Includes rhythmic figures, melodies, harmonies, and chord changes. Available in books for C, Bb, Eb, Bass Clef, and Piano/Score.
"My journey into the music of Horace Silver began in 1983 in Fort Worth, Texas, when I went with some college buddies of mine to hear a piano player I had never heard of. The music in that club reached right out and grabbed your soul, and even though it was all new to me, it felt familiar and comfortable. I went home and looked up all the Horace Silver tunes I could find, but there were only a few in my fake books, so I learned the few I could, and listened to as many others as I could get my hands on.
Fast forward to the Covid-19 Pandemic of 2020: I had a lot of time on my hands, and it seemed like this would be a good time to pick up a few more Horace Silver tunes, so I got a copy of his discography, logged onto YouTube, and transcribed one tune a day for about two and half months, and ended up with this collection. I was astonished at the sheer volume of creative output that this man had – the actual number of his tunes is closer to 400 - but I chose the ones that I thought I could use on the gig, and tried to put them all in a format that would let one pass out the chart and go in a live setting. I also tried to only include tunes that I could not find in any other books and collections (with one exception, Summer in Central Park, which is my favorite Silver tune and I had to put it in there), and tried to make it easier to pick a tune from a list you may not know with the inclusion of an index that breaks down the tunes by groove, meter, instrumentation, key and tempo. I also included the original album information that I used to make the chart for each tunes, and would strongly recommend listening to these tunes before you play them – even the very best transcription does not always capture the heart of the performance. My hope is that you can use this book to spice up your next set or concert, and that you can help the jazz public remember the music of this jazz giant. One small technical point I wanted to make was that the bass lines are sometimes notated an octave down for the purpose of making more room for the notation above it."