Wendell Marshall

In 1958, the same year Coleman Hawkins cut his own showcase album The Genius of Coleman Hawkins, he also backed a blues record titled after the hit Broadway character from South Pacific — a founding father of jazz tenor sax turning up on session work far outside his usual world.

Deciphering the Message

Makaya McCraven · 2021

Gigi Gryce · Thelonious Monk · Percy Heath · Art Blakey · Horace Silver · Art Farmer · Kenny Clarke · Cecil Payne · Jimmy Cleveland · Oscar Pettiford · Julius Watkins

Gigi Gryce Orchestra, The, Gigi Gryce Quartet, The · 1956

Bohemia After Dark

Cannonball Adderley With Horace Silver, Paul Chambers, Donald Byrd, Nat Adderley, Jerome Richardson, Kenny Clarke · 1955

The Jazz Message Of

Donald Byrd, Hank Mobley, Horace Silver, Doug Watkins, John LaPorta, Ronnie Ball, Wendell Marshall, Kenny Clarke · 1956

In the 1960s, as a sideman in Horace Silver's band, Joe Henderson said he didn't want to make Silver's music into something other than what Silver had envisioned — he wanted to make it even more exactly what Silver had envisioned. Long before he became known for his own singular voice as a leader, Henderson framed the sideman's job as service, not self-assertion.

— Statement stmt-joe-henderson-on-horace-silver

The 1958 second volume of Ella Fitzgerald's Duke Ellington Song Book ends with "Portrait of Ella Fitzgerald," a four-part piece written for her rather than drawn from the existing catalogue. It is an instrumental: the orchestra plays it, and the singer whose name is on the cover sits it out.