Conrad Herwig’s Latin Approach to Horace Silver

Jazz pianist Horace Silver (1989 photograph by Dmitri Savitski, from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic, 2.0 Generic and 1.0 Generic license)

I first became aware of Conrad Herwig’s “Latin Side of” series of recordings when The Latin Side of Joe Henderson was included among the nominations for the 57th annual GRAMMY awards, which were announced in December of 2014. However, it was only after I learned about his latest release, The Latin Side of Horace Silver, that I had the time to listen to one of these albums. The series was launched in 1996 with The Latin Side of John Coltrane and has since cast a wide net in its treatment of jazz masters, which now includes the likes of Miles Davis and Wayne Shorter.

Silver’s father was born on the Cape Verde island of Maio, off the West Coast of Africa; but the future jazz pianist was born in Norwalk, Connecticut. Regardless of his ancestry, he was a major figure in the history of American jazz during the second half of the twentieth century. Through his work as a member of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, Silver was instrumental in the rise of the hard bop movement, eventually leading his own groups for recordings on labels such as Blue Note Records. To this day he is probably best known for his Blue Note release Song for My Father, which owes more to Blakey’s influence than to his father’s ancestry.

Herwig himself is a trombonist, so his arrangements do not necessarily reflect Silver’s keyboard style. However, for this particular album, Michel Camilo, born in the Dominican Republic, makes a “guest appearance” on three of the tracks, one of which is “Song for My Father.” Of the eight selections on The Latin Side of Horace Silver, that is the only one taken from the Song for My Father album. I must confess that my own familiarity with Silver’s works is slimmer than I would like it to be, meaning that the only other tracks that resonated with that familiarity were “The Cape Verdean Blues” and “Filthy McNasty.”

That said, I found it easy to enjoy Herwig’s arrangements, which, as might be expected, frequently involve some impressive trombone work. Personally, I rather enjoy his efforts to revive interest in all the innovative jazz work that was taking place, particularly in the Fifties. Herwig’s approach to the Latin style is solid and consistently well articulated, but it also serves as a unique mirror to reflect a time when both playing and composing jazz was prodigiously inventive. The Latin Side of Horace Silver is not so much a time machine as it is an opportunity to experience two periods at the same time, the past of Silver himself and the present of Herwig’s style. I should probably check out more of these retrospective efforts.