Song for My Father

Silver Quintet, The Horace

album cover

Rikki Don't Lose Your Father's Number

Walter Becker and Donald Fagan of Steely Dan knew what they were doing when they seized the groove of Horace Silver's 1964 "Song for My Father" as the backdrop for "Rikki Don't Lose That Number." The first single from Pretzel Logic (1974) isn't expressly "about" jazz. Instead, it seeks to portray the shady characters clustered in music clubs, unglamorous souls involved in elaborate between-set machinations to cop the next buzz. With its kicky broken bossa nova beat, Silver's tune serves Steely Dan as a kind of cultural marker, a last holdout on corner-bar jukeboxes during that changing of the guard moment in the 1960s when soul was ascending and jazz becoming esoterica.

"Song for My Father" endures because Silver, one of the most underappreciated composers in jazz, never let his music lapse into the theoretical. Just about everything on this hard-bop classic has an inviting pulse and an ethos of low-key island cool. The pianist's father was black, of Portuguese descent, from Cape Verde; his mother had both Irish and African ancestors. Much of Silver's writing is steeped in the looseness of African music. "Que pasa?" is a vaguely Afro-Cuban jaunt, while "The Natives Are Restless Tonight" alternates between a brisk samba and equally breakneck swing. It's one of many Silver tunes that travel intricate path-ways yet never sound cerebral.

Song contains music from three separate record dates, with differing personnel—it's one of the few Blue Note albums of the period that took more than a day to make. Silver outlines his tunes in a clean and spare manner, with a minimum of bluster; his rendering of Ornette Coleman's ballad "Lonely Woman" is a minor masterpiece in the key of disconsolate. Silver's grounded playing style connects potentially faddish rhythms to the pulse of the urban world, not just the jazz world—which is one reason people who have only a casual jazz jones, acquired from exposure to stuff like Steely Dan, seek this out.

Genre: Jazz
Released: 1964, Blue Note
Key Tracks: "Song for My Father," "The Natives Are Restless Tonight," "Que pasa?," "Lonely Woman."
Catalog Choice: Horace-Scope; In Pursuit of the Twenty-seventh Man.
Next Stop: Bobby Timmons: This Here Is Bobby Timmons
After That: Joe Henderson: Inner Urge.
Book Pages: 702–703