In this new Summer 2014 edition of this website, I had planned to pay tribute to jazz master Horace Silver while he was still living among us and honor the rich legacy of his work in modern music. But in my race to meet the deadline, Silver beat me to the finish line.

As I was preparing to launch this new website edition with my tribute to Silver, I opened the pages of my morning paper, the international edition of the New York Times, over breakfast yesterday and was hit with this obituary of Horace Silver on page 2 of the paper. Although many fans and followers had been expecting such sad news about the aging and ailing Silver for quite a while now, his passing at age 85 in New York still came as something of a shock to me.