Horace Silver -- young and old

With musicians, and artists generally, there's a tendency to think the best work is the earliest.

It's usually true. Paul McCartney was never better than when he recorded with the Beatles. Chuck Berry's best work was the early hits like "Johnny B. Goode" and "Roll Over Beethoven." Tom Wolfe hasn't written anything as good as "The Right Stuff" and "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test."

So it is, too, with jazz musicians. Dizzy Gillespie's seminal work came in the 1940s and the birth of bebop. Chick Corea, while still solid and dependable, did his best work with Return to Forever.

There are exceptions, of course. Miles Davis constantly reinvented himself over a long period of years. Duke Ellington was a terrific composer and leader until the day he died.

And so, consider Horace Silver.

Early in my jazz education, I found a 2-CD set called "A Night at Birdland." It was recorded in 1954 by a fabulous quintet led by Art Blakey. Horace Silver was the piano player, only 26 years old, and he wasn't even the best musician in the group, or even second-best, and maybe not even third-best. There was Blakey on drums, the sensational Clifford Brown on trumpet, and the underrated Lou Donaldson on sax.

This is the very definition of hard bop. It's a 5-star ensemble playing at the peak of its power. Every song is masterful. The ballads are tender and poignant. The bop is breakneck and invigorating. Every one of the musicians is at the top of his game. It's likely Blakely never recorded a better live set -- and that's saying something. It's not a Horace Silver record, per se. Silver was still young and on the cusp of fame. But he's brilliant. If you buy just one Horace Silver CD, this would be my pick.

Fast forward 42 years to 1996.

Horace Silver was 68 and past his prime. A critic tagged him "the hardbop grandpop." Silver liked the name so much, he used it as an album title. Following Blakey's lead, he surrounded himself with younger musicians, notably four horn players. And he wrote 10 new songs.

I won't pretend that "The Hardbop Grandpop" was the Jazz Messengers reincarnated. But it's very good. It's probably better than a 68-year-old has any right sounding. The mood is different. It's not hard bop exactly, despite the title. There's more soul. The brass really takes the forefront. Silver takes his solos, and they are very good, but he mostly lets the younger guys shine. (Though Silver wrote corny lyrics for half of the songs, he wisely decided against using a singer. The CD is entirely insrumental, though he included the lyrics in the liner notes, for anyone who wants to follow along.) It includes tributes to Coleman Hawkins and Dexter Gordon and even a tune based on a teapot whisle. All of it is wonderful and lyrical and soulful.

No, it's not vintage Silver. It's not as good as the Blakey/Jazz Messenger stuff. So maybe it's only 4-star CD. With legends in late-career, you adjust your pallette. This is enjoyable music. It's not fair to compare Paul McCartney in 2007 to Paul McCartney in 1968. It's the same in jazz. Even so, sometimes a lion in winter is still a majestic thing.

Can a box set be too big?

In a word: Yep.

I don’t say this lightly. There is something about a box set that makes me salivate. I’m Pavlov’s dog for a good box set. I love Springsteen’s “Tracks.” I can listen over and over to all 5 CDs in the Brubeck “For All Time” box set. (Which isn’t really a box set. It’s just five previously released CDs crammed into a box. I like it anyway.) I’m a sucker for box sets of label histories, like the 8-CD “80th Anniversary of RCA Victor.”

And yet…

I remember the early days of eMusic.com. For something like $15 a month, you got unlimited downloads. Yes, unlimited. We all knew that couldn't last forever, and it didn't. Anyway, at first I downloaded a CD a week and savored it. Then two a week.

Then I got greedy.

One day, I downloaded all 15 CDs of Monk’s “Complete Riverside Recordings.” It was pure gluttony. I couldn’t possibly digest it all. What’s worse, after a while it all started sounding the same. (And, of course, there were no liner notes, no booklet. I had no idea what I was listening to.)

Then I hit on a solution. Monk recorded a lot of single-LP albums for Riverside. What if I deconstructed the box set into its component parts? That is, what if I discarded the “rare and unreleased” tracks and the outtakes and simply kept the individual tracks together as they originally appeared on Monk’s albums?

Suddenly, I was enjoying my massive download. Suddenly, I had a whole bunch of Monk’s most classic albums, just as he had recorded them -- “Monk’s Music” and “5 By Monk By 5” and “Brilliant Corners,” etc. – instead of an indigestible box. I like that.

But did I lean my lesson? Not really.

Recently, I found a 10-CD Monk box at my local drugstore for exactly $10. How can you not buy a 10-CD set for $10? (How in the world can they even afford to offer a 10-CD set for $10? I don’t get it.) So I bought it. No liner note, no booklet, no idea in the world when the discs were recorded or with whom. And yes, I found myself choking on on Monk all over again.

I’ve learned my lesson this time. Really.

Then again, there’s this really neat 10-CD Duke Ellington set, "The Private Collection," and it only costs $40, and you can never have too much Duke…

In praise of fun

In the beginning, jazz was fun.

Check it out. Go back. Go way back.

Louis Armstrong was fun. Duke Ellington was fun. Fats Waller was fun.

I feel silly pointing this out, but I think some jazz artists forgot about this fun thing. They’re so caught up in being wonderful and precise and – God help us – fast. Nothing wrong with fast. Fast can be fun. But it isn’t always.

Wynton Marsalis is fast. He’s very fast. He’s a wonderful musician. He’s a great proselytizer for jazz. He is the face of jazz at a time when it desperately needs a face. But he ain’t fun. He’s so damn serious, and all the time!

Miles Davis was like that, too. He was moody and his music sounds moody. In a good way. Art doesn’t always have to be fun, but it’s nice when it is.

Now, Dizzy Gillespie was fun. He could throw a party just standing in a room alone with a trumpet, and that would be fun. You sensed it on all his records, and it was truer than ever in concert.

Fats Waller was maybe the funnest jazz musician of all. If anyone had more fun on the 88s, I haven’t heard it. And I don’t care if his records are older than Fred Flintstone. He was part-clown, yes, because he was having fun. He had fun without singing a word. Solo Fats is maybe the most fun you can have on a piano.

Suggested CD: “If You Got To Ask, You Ain’t Got It!” by Fats Waller

Tracks: “African Ripples” and “Viper’s Drag”