Virgo

Hank Mobley (tenor sax), Donald Byrd (trumpet), Horace Silver (piano), Doug Watkins (bass) and Louis Hayes (drums). From the album 6 Pieces of Silver (1957).

In the mid-1960s, Donald Byrd became a teacher while continuing to record occasional albums. His interest in the civil rights movement and Miles Davis’s efforts to attract younger audiences led him to use electric piano and funk rhythms. He started playing jazz fusion and in 1972 he recorded Black Bird, a successful mix of jazz and rhythm and blues.

During the following years he continued to record albums of a similar style. He stopped playing in the mid-1980s due to health problems, but continued to teach. In the late 1980s and early 1990s he returned to the hard bop of his early days. He died in 2013 at the age of 80.

The theme starts right away at very fast tempo. The first one to make his solo is Byrd, which plays at a chilling speed, but doesn’t get lost for a moment. With his short sentences he creates a unusual solo. After a small arrangement, Mobley enters without wasting time, as if he were in a car race. The group plays the arrangement again to give way to Silver, who makes your whole body move and doesn’t stop even to breathe. The arrangement is repeated and Hayes comes in doing drumrolls and watermarks all over the place until the final re-exposition of the theme.