On August 29, 1959, the Horace Silver Quintet set up at Rudy Van Gelder's studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Silver on piano, Blue Mitchell on trumpet, Junior Cook on tenor saxophone, Gene Taylor on bass and Louis Hayes on drums. They came back the next day, and on September 13 Silver returned with only Taylor and Hayes to record two trio pieces. Alfred Lion produced, and Blue Note put the seven Silver compositions out in early November 1959 as Blowin' the Blues Away, BLP 4017, in a Reid Miles design with cover art by Paula Donohue and photographs by Francis Wolff.
Silver was thirty that summer and already one of the most influential musicians on the label. He was born in Norwalk, Connecticut, on September 2, 1928. His father, John Tavares Silver, came from the island of Maio in Cape Verde. In 1950 Stan Getz heard Silver's trio at a club in Hartford, hired it to tour, and gave him his first recording date that December. In New York, Silver and Art Blakey founded the Jazz Messengers as a cooperative band, and the records they made in late 1954 and early 1955, gathered as Horace Silver and the Jazz Messengers, gave him his first hit, The Preacher. He left Blakey in 1956, partly because of the heroin use around him in the band, and club owners who knew his records gave him enough work to start a quintet of his own.
The first version had Hank Mobley, Art Farmer, Doug Watkins and Hayes, who had moved to New York in August 1956 to take Art Taylor's chair. By 1959 Mitchell and Cook were in the front line and Taylor was on bass, and this lineup had already made Finger Poppin', released that year, which Blue Note itself calls the first album by the most celebrated version of Silver's quintet. Blowin' the Blues Away was the second, and it is the last Silver album in Hayes's discography. He left in 1959 for Cannonball Adderley's quintet and stayed with Adderley until 1965. When Dan Ouellette interviewed Silver at his home in Malibu in 1997 and asked about the musicians he had liked best, Silver named this group: "One of the greatest bands I ever led was the Junior Cook-Blue Mitchell band."
The music they played was also good business. Hard bop as Silver wrote it took blues, gospel and rhythm and blues and set them inside bebop harmony, and that funky style sold well enough to help make Blue Note a viable company. Blue Note issued Silver's tunes as singles for jukebox and radio play, and the title track was one of them. Billboard's review of the single said the combo played a bright, swinging riff, with Silver driving on piano and Mitchell soloing well, and called it good for jukeboxes. When Billboard reviewed the LP on November 23, 1959, it heard funky progressive jazz in a down-home vein and picked the title track, Sister Sadie and Break City as the best cuts. Ira Gitler, who wrote the liner notes, offered his own guarantee: "If this album doesn't succeed in blowing your blues away, I doubt if you ever really had them in the first place."
The title track opens the album at a fast tempo and holds it. Mitchell takes a trumpet solo, Silver comes in with the blocky, rhythm and blues piano that was his signature, and then Mitchell and Cook trade phrases in a call and response so tight it sounds worked out in advance. It is under five minutes long and it does not sag anywhere. Blue Note's own account of the band credits its chemistry and its tight arrangements, and notes that Silver kept the solos concise and rhythmic, which is exactly how this track is built: nobody stays a chorus longer than the tune can carry.
The St. Vitus Dance, which follows, is the first of the two trio tracks from September 13, and Melancholy Mood, the album's closer, is the other. Placing them where they are gives the LP a rhythm of its own: the quintet comes at you hard, and then the horns drop out and you hear Silver alone with his rhythm section. Break City is the other flat-out burner, a full quintet track with a real drum solo from Hayes. The Baghdad Blues, on side two, is a quintet cooker with a light Middle Eastern flavor in the line.
Peace is the ballad, and Mitchell plays it with real sensitivity. Sources disagree on the date: the album's session listing places it on August 30, while the page on the song itself gives August 29. Silver later wrote lyrics and recorded the tune with the singer Andy Bey on That Healin' Feelin' in 1970, and Norah Jones recorded it twice, on her 2001 EP First Sessions and again on Day Breaks in 2016. That tells you the melody was strong enough to survive being handed around.
Then there is Sister Sadie, recorded on August 30. It became a standard almost at once. Hank Crawford recorded it in 1960, Gil Evans put it on Out of the Cool the same year, and Ray Charles recorded it on Genius + Soul = Jazz in 1961. Woody Herman, Buddy Rich and Maceo Parker all came to it later. Silver, asked about the title, said he did not know a girl named Sadie: "I just wrote it, and that title came to mind." Of Crawford's version, he said, "They did this a little faster than I intended, but then that's their interpretation." The head is simple enough to hum after one pass, and the band plays it as if it knows exactly how good it is, with Cook and Mitchell loose over Silver's accompaniment. Blue Note's writer calls it a funky soul number, and uDiscover's treats it as a foundation of soul jazz; both descriptions fit a tune that was funky before many people used that word about jazz.
Silver talked about where some of that bounce came from. In the 1997 interview he said that many of his songs recalled family gatherings in Connecticut, where his father and uncle played the music of Cape Verde on stringed instruments. He was talking about his writing in general rather than about this record, but it is worth keeping in mind when you hear how lightly the rhythms of these tunes sit, even at fast tempos.
The album has kept its reputation. The Penguin Guide to Jazz put it in its Core Collection, saying it exemplifies Silver's virtues as pianist, composer and leader, and Steve Huey at AllMusic called it one of Silver's finest albums and "virtually impossible to dislike." The 1999 CD added one more track from the August 30 session, How Did It Happen, by Don Newey, which was not part of the original LP.
For me this is a driving record. I had Sister Sadie come on at the second light one morning and stopped feeling tired, which is as good a review as I can give anything. A lot of hard bop from this period asks for your full attention and turns to wallpaper without it. This one works at full attention and also at forty percent, while you are watching a merge lane, and that is not an accident: Silver wrote tunes with real hooks and kept most of them short. The title track, The St. Vitus Dance, Break City and The Baghdad Blues all run under five minutes, while Peace, Sister Sadie and Melancholy Mood run longer, so a thirty-minute drive gets you most of the way through. Peace is the one I sometimes skip, and then I feel bad about it and go back for it. On a Wednesday I play Sister Sadie twice.