Finger Poppin’ with The Horace Silver Quintet, An Appreciation
Jay Wilkinson, August 23, 2023
When eyes are closed, it is hard not to imagine that I am at a table in a club. Facing the stage. Thirteen feet away. The table in front of us is, miraculously, still unoccupied. There oughta be the clink of glasses twenty feet behind me and murmurs of drunks and lovers around us. Sax and drummer, Junior Cook and Louis Hayes, are to the left, bassist Eugene Taylor center and trumpeter Blue Mitchell stands to the left, behind pianist Horace Silver, who plays the 1954 Steinway that stretches across the front of the stage. When the snare or trumpet launches a variation or a solo, their sounds arise up. How is the cymbal sounding like it’s five feet higher than the piano? A sax solo on the left will not be echoed on the other side of the stage but is heard there organically. Silver vamps behind the horns - a trainer’s hands stimulating a horse’s shoulders just before the race is run. It’s his hands that take off across the keys with a bang of the starter’s pistol. Between solos the saxophone and trumpet advance the song in room-filling jazzy unison. The bass drum, bass and lowest piano notes spread across the stage and provide two or three layers of sound under the separated treble strikes by Silver and the fancy valve work of Cook and Mitchell. Each note of the piano and shake of a brush on high hat is distinctive in tone, timbre and placement across and, sometimes, back into the soundstage.
This recording was made at Rudy Van Gelder’s original studio at his parents’ home in Hackensack, N.J. on January 31, 1959. The stereo l.p. gives us the detail and sensitivity and warmth that makes records the preferred medium for many audiophiles. Even when at the same time we know that digital processing in streaming and on compact discs breaks each slur of a slowing Cook solo into more distinct pieces than we could count in a day and reassembles them perfectly. Sometimes, no, always, the best oil painting, the best bridge, the best feast, the best sprint and the best bebop is each much more than the sum of its parts. How that works with grooves on a record and tiny vibrations on the end of a stylus, I cannot tell you. A CD recording, however excellent, is only ever that mathematical summing of parts. However it happens, some recordings, like Finger Poppin’, take me, mind and body, to another place. A stimulated, entertained and joyful place.
Some day, I may be able to address the specific melodies, rhythms, instrumental adventures and the like of Finger Poppin’, but today it's just the sound. The sound.
Blue Note, BST 84008. 1959.
Dynavector 10x5 cartridge - Thorens TD 126 MARK III turntable, stock arm - Van Alstine Transcendence 8 preamp (tubes) - Van Alstine Synergy 240 amplifier (solid state) - Tannoy DC 4000 speakers x 2 + Unix Rocket UFM12 subwoofer.
Jay Wilkinson, August 23, 2023
When eyes are closed, it is hard not to imagine that I am at a table in a club. Facing the stage. Thirteen feet away. The table in front of us is, miraculously, still unoccupied. There oughta be the clink of glasses twenty feet behind me and murmurs of drunks and lovers around us. Sax and drummer, Junior Cook and Louis Hayes, are to the left, bassist Eugene Taylor center and trumpeter Blue Mitchell stands to the left, behind pianist Horace Silver, who plays the 1954 Steinway that stretches across the front of the stage. When the snare or trumpet launches a variation or a solo, their sounds arise up. How is the cymbal sounding like it’s five feet higher than the piano? A sax solo on the left will not be echoed on the other side of the stage but is heard there organically. Silver vamps behind the horns - a trainer’s hands stimulating a horse’s shoulders just before the race is run. It’s his hands that take off across the keys with a bang of the starter’s pistol. Between solos the saxophone and trumpet advance the song in room-filling jazzy unison. The bass drum, bass and lowest piano notes spread across the stage and provide two or three layers of sound under the separated treble strikes by Silver and the fancy valve work of Cook and Mitchell. Each note of the piano and shake of a brush on high hat is distinctive in tone, timbre and placement across and, sometimes, back into the soundstage.
This recording was made at Rudy Van Gelder’s original studio at his parents’ home in Hackensack, N.J. on January 31, 1959. The stereo l.p. gives us the detail and sensitivity and warmth that makes records the preferred medium for many audiophiles. Even when at the same time we know that digital processing in streaming and on compact discs breaks each slur of a slowing Cook solo into more distinct pieces than we could count in a day and reassembles them perfectly. Sometimes, no, always, the best oil painting, the best bridge, the best feast, the best sprint and the best bebop is each much more than the sum of its parts. How that works with grooves on a record and tiny vibrations on the end of a stylus, I cannot tell you. A CD recording, however excellent, is only ever that mathematical summing of parts. However it happens, some recordings, like Finger Poppin’, take me, mind and body, to another place. A stimulated, entertained and joyful place.
Some day, I may be able to address the specific melodies, rhythms, instrumental adventures and the like of Finger Poppin’, but today it's just the sound. The sound.
Blue Note, BST 84008. 1959.
Dynavector 10x5 cartridge - Thorens TD 126 MARK III turntable, stock arm - Van Alstine Transcendence 8 preamp (tubes) - Van Alstine Synergy 240 amplifier (solid state) - Tannoy DC 4000 speakers x 2 + Unix Rocket UFM12 subwoofer.
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