The birthplace of hard bop may be a military medical room in 1940s Connecticut, where a draft board examiner rejected a teenager for a severely curved spine. That physical limitation made the heavy tenor saxophone agonizing to play and pushed Horace Silver to the piano bench, where he brought a horn player's lungs and percussive mindset to the keyboard. This episode traces how that accident of anatomy, combined with a Cape Verdean father and a gospel-singing mother, produced the architect of a new jazz subgenre.

We follow Silver from Norwalk, Connecticut, to Stan Getz's national tour in 1950, to co-founding the Jazz Messengers with Art Blakey in 1954 and the live club recordings that the press called hard bop. The conversation explains why bebop had become music for musicians, how Silver reinjected blues scales and church call-and-response, ...