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Alan Silva

From HitStory, the pop encyclopedia of School of Rock · Artist

Alan Silva is an American free jazz musician, best known as a double bassist. He was born in 1939 in Bermuda as a British subject, with an Azorean-Portuguese mother and a Black Bermudian father. At five he emigrated with his mother to the United States and grew up in Harlem in New York. He began on trumpet and switched to the upright bass. He took his stage name in his twenties. In 1988 he said that he had always continued to feel Bermudian.

Music and breakthrough

Silva is regarded as one of the most inventive bassists in jazz. He played with well-known names from the avant-garde, such as Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra, Albert Ayler, Sunny Murray and Archie Shepp. In 1964 he took part in October Revolution in Jazz, a pioneering gathering of free jazz, and in 1967 in the live album Albert Ayler in Greenwich Village. Since the early 1970s he has lived mainly in Paris. There he founded the Celestrial Communication Orchestra, a group for free jazz in changing line-ups. In the 1980s he started a music school with two others, the I.A.C.P., which was intended as a jazz conservatoire.

Influence

In the 1990s he began playing electronic keyboards, because his bass playing no longer surprised him. He also used electric violin and electric sarangi. Around 2000 he again performed more often as a bassist and bandleader, including at the Vision Festival in New York. His albums include Skilfullness from 1969 and The Ongoing Strings from 1981.

Listening

Listening tip. Listen to Albert Ayler in Greenwich Village and notice how the double bass there does not merely keep time, but improvises along in the free interplay.

Discography

Studio albums

In School of Rock

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Categories: Artists