Horace Silver – Acid, Pot or Pills
Horace Silver – Old Mother Nature Calls
Horace Silver – Total Response
I’m not sure where or when I heard of this album. Generally my memory is pretty exact with music, but not in this case. I feel like it was in Atlanta that at some point I’m pretty sure I heard “Acid, Pot or Pills,” maybe in a club or on a mix, but I’m strangely not sure. What is much more perplexing is that it took me all this time to actually track down a copy of the album. “Acid, Pot or Pills” should have been more than enough to get me searching for this one, but it wasn’t until a more recent listen that I started on the hunt. Total Response finds Silver playing in a funkier vein, though depending on how you define the term, there was certainly always a heavy amount of “funk” in his piano playing. But this album, along with the others in the United States Of Mind trilogy were still a bit of a departure, less so in the music, definitely in the lyrics.
I think that was what struck me most about this album, the music is pretty fantastic, as are the vocals of Andy and Salome Bey (aren’t they always?), but it’s the lyrical content that is really striking. “Old Mother Nature Calls” and “Big Business” are songs that would be completely in step with the current era, even though they’re over 40 years old. That seems less like a “more things change, the more they stay the same” kind of thing and instead really shows how far out ahead Silver was with this music.
Cheers,
Michael