Sister Sadie hit at the second light and I stopped being tired. Just like that.
That is basically the whole review. Here is the rest anyway.
Blowin' the Blues Away, Blue Note BLP 4017, 1959. Horace Silver on piano, Blue Mitchell on trumpet, Junior Cook on tenor, Gene Taylor on bass, Louis Hayes on drums. Cut at Rudy Van Gelder's studio in Englewood Cliffs over three days, August 29 and 30 and September 13. Alfred Lion produced it, and Reid Miles handled the cover design, with the drawing by Paula Donohue.
Silver said later that this group was one of the greatest bands he ever led, and he named all four of them when he said it. He led a lot of bands over fifty years. He picked this one.
You hear why in the first ten seconds. The title track opens fast and stays fast. Mitchell solos first, Silver comes in with that blocky rhythm and blues piano thing he does, and then Mitchell and Cook trade lines back and forth like they rehearsed it in a hallway. Four minutes and change. It does not sag anywhere.
Then The St. Vitus Dance, which is the trio. No horns, just Silver, Taylor and Hayes. Two of the seven tracks on the original LP are trio tracks, this one and Melancholy Mood, and both of them work as a breather. Smart sequencing: you get slammed, then you get a minute to sit.
Break City is the other flat out burner. Hayes gets a real solo on it. If you have ever wondered why drummers talk about Louis Hayes, that track answers it.
Peace is the ballad. Silver added lyrics to it years later and Norah Jones covered it twice, which tells you the melody was strong enough to survive being handed around. On a commute it is the one track I sometimes skip, and then feel bad about, and then go back for.
But Sister Sadie is the reason this record exists for me. Recorded August 30, 1959. It is a shuffle. It is funky before people used that word for jazz. The head is so simple you can hum it after one pass, and the band plays it like they know exactly how good it is. Cook and Mitchell sound loose on it. Silver sounds like he is grinning.
Here is what I will say about it as a headphone record. A lot of hard bop from this era is great and also kind of demanding. You have to pay attention or it turns into wallpaper. This one is not like that. It works at full attention and it works at forty percent attention while you are watching a merge lane. That is rare and it is not an accident. Silver wrote tunes with actual hooks. He talked about growing up with his Cape Verdean father and uncle playing the songs of their home at family gatherings, and that bounce is somewhere underneath a lot of his writing.
Most of the record moves quickly too. The title track and the two trio pieces and Break City all stay tight. Peace, Sister Sadie and Melancholy Mood run longer, so a thirty minute drive gets you most of the way through and not much more. Some records make you feel like you cheated them. This one does not.
The Penguin Guide put it in the core collection. AllMusic calls it one of his all time Blue Note classics. I do not usually care what the guides say, but they are right here.
Play Sister Sadie twice. It is Wednesday and you have earned it.