Horace Silver Quintet

Song for My Father became the signature album of Horace Silver's long Blue Note career, which had begun a decade earlier. It is a hard bop classic built around one of the best known tunes in modern jazz. The title piece is dedicated to his father, John Tavares Silver, whose photograph is on the cover. In the original notes Silver recalls that his father was of Portuguese origin, born on Maio in the Cape Verde Islands. The music draws on that heritage and on a recent trip to Brazil.

The album documents the pianist's quintet in transition. Two tracks come from an October 1963 session with his long-standing group, featuring Blue Mitchell on trumpet and Junior Cook on tenor saxophone. The other four were cut at Van Gelder Studio on 26 October 1964. The new line-up had Carmell Jones on trumpet, Joe Henderson on tenor saxophone, Teddy Smith on bass and Roger Humphries on drums.

The title track rests on a hypnotic bass figure and a bossa-tinged rhythm, and it became Silver's best known composition. Henderson wrote The Kicker, a punchy feature for the new front line, and the 1964 band also plays Que Pasa and The Natives Are Restless Tonight. From the 1963 date come Calcutta Cutie, at over eight minutes the longest piece on the record, and Lonely Woman. The latter is a Silver ballad played by the trio alone, with Gene Taylor and Roy Brooks. The original LP held these six tracks, while later CD editions added four more from the same period.

Reviewing it for AllMusic, Steve Huey called it "one of Blue Note's greatest mainstream hard bop dates", and noted that, although it comes from two different bands, it hangs together remarkably well. In his AllMusic essay on the style, Scott Yanow listed it among the seventeen essential hard bop recordings.

This edition belongs to the Blue Note Essentials line and is mastered from high-resolution digital masters on 140g vinyl.