Horace Silver's Solo - Motifs & Forward Motion

Music Lesson: Playing "Song For My Father"

So now that you've played Song For My Father, those chords that I played the second time round are really like a backing figure.

• If you played this with another soloist in a duet, for instance, that would be a great thing to play the bass and chords in that rhythm.
• It's a standard way of accompanying somebody.

However, if you're doing your own solo, you might want to play those chords in the left hand. Use exactly the same shapes and some of the same rhythms as well.

PDF Resource

If you could download the PDF of Horace Silver's solo from the album Song For My Father, you'll find one of the classic piano solos of all time, featuring three choruses around this 24-bar sequence. I'm just going to cherry pick a few of the ideas in the solo.

Observations on C7 Breaks

One of the things that you'll notice is every time that C7 break comes around, he doesn't play anything in that break which relates to C7. Instead, he plays some kind of F minor lick.

• For instance, if you look at that C bar (bar six) in every single eight-bar section, it's never anything to do with C7.
• It could be F blues scale, for instance. He does this really clashy part of the blues scale with the B5 in it.
• He also plays this blues scale phrase in bar 22, very F minor-y.

Technique of Forward Motion

I would call this technique of playing to where you're going rather than where you are. In the case of C7, he's thinking, "Right, I'm going to play something that prefigures the next chord, F minor."

• It's a really important technique, which you could call forward motion.

Right Hand and Left Hand Coordination

Another place he uses forward motion is that the right hand is sometimes ahead of the left hand. For instance, phrases like:

[Demonstrate phrase here]

You can see he's using the top part of the chord there: E flat, F minor, E flat, and D flat.

• That corresponds to the seventh, the fifth, or the fifth seventh, and root of each of those three chords.

He's using that as a motif, but he isn't always playing the motif at the same time as the chords.

• You might get the F motif coming in before the chord change. Again, this is forward motion.
• The right hand is almost a bar ahead of the left hand here.
• The chord changes come halfway through that F phrase.

Sometimes it does follow the chords precisely, but often it's ahead. So that's another thing to bear in mind when you're doing your own solos.