Horace Ward Martin Tavares Silver was born September 2, 1928, in Norwalk, Connecticut, the third of his parents' children and the only one to survive infancy alongside an older half-brother, Eugene Fletcher. His mother, Gertrude, worked as a maid and sang in a church choir; his father, John Tavares Silver, had emigrated from the island of Maio in Cape Verde and worked for a tire company, teaching young Horace Cape Verdean folk melodies that would surface decades later in his compositions. Silver began classical piano lessons as a boy and, after hearing Jimmie Lunceford's orchestra at age eleven, resolved to make music his career. He studied tenor saxophone alongside piano at Norwalk High School, drawing on Lester Young as a saxophone model while absorbing pianists Nat King Cole, Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, Art Tatum, and Teddy Wilson from records. In 1946 he moved to Hartford, Connecticut, to work as a nightclub pianist.

Silver's break came in 1950, when Stan Getz heard his trio backing him at a Hartford club, hired the group on the spot, and gave Silver his recording debut that December. After roughly a year on the road with Getz, Silver settled in New York and built a reputation fast as both composer and bluesy accompanist, deepening his bebop vocabulary in the process of working with altoist Lou Donaldson. A 1952 session as a sideman on one of Donaldson's dates became his first Blue Note recording, opening a 28-year relationship with the label that would run longer than any other artist's. Through 1953-1957 he worked constantly as a freelance sideman, recording with Sonny Stitt, Howard McGhee, Al Cohn, Art Farmer, and Miles Davis, including Davis's storied 1954 Prestige session Walkin' alongside J.J. Johnson and Lucky Thompson. In 1954 he won DownBeat's New Star award for piano and performed at the first Newport Jazz Festival.

In the mid-1950s Silver and drummer Art Blakey co-founded the Jazz Messengers, a cooperative group whose first two studio sessions (November 13, 1954, and February 6, 1955) paired Silver and Blakey with tenor saxophonist Hank Mobley, trumpeter Kenny Dorham, and bassist Doug Watkins. Those sessions, along with concert recordings from Birdland and Café Bohemia, were compiled as Horace Silver and the Jazz Messengers (Blue Note, 1956) and included "The Preacher," Silver's first major hit and a piece built openly on blues and gospel changes at a moment when hard bop had barely been named as a style. Silver left the Messengers in May 1956 after about eighteen months, citing the heroin use common in the band as incompatible with his own habits, and Blakey carried the group's name forward alone. Silver's final appearance as a hired sideman came in April 1957, on saxophonist Sonny Rollins's Volume 2 for Blue Note, where he shared the piano chair on different tracks with Thelonious Monk alongside J.J. Johnson, Paul Chambers, and Blakey.

Silver spent the rest of his career leading his own quintets. The first, formed immediately after leaving the Messengers, paired Hank Mobley and Art Farmer with Doug Watkins and drummer Louis Hayes; "Señor Blues," cut with this band on 6 Pieces of Silver (1957), was, in critic Scott Yanow's phrase, the piece that "officially put Horace Silver on the map." By the end of the decade Silver had settled into the lineup that defined his classic period: tenor saxophonist Junior Cook, trumpeter Blue Mitchell, bassist Gene Taylor, and drummer Louis Hayes or Roy Brooks, debuting on Finger Poppin' (1959) and running through Blowin' the Blues Away (1959, home to "Sister Sadie" and the ballad "Peace"), Horace-Scope (1960), the live Doin' the Thing (1961), The Tokyo Blues (1962), and Silver's Serenade (1963). Silver wrote nearly everything his bands played, and by the mid-1960s his catalog of blues- and gospel-inflected originals, "Doodlin'," "Opus de Funk," "Nica's Dream" among them, was already entering the jazz repertoire played by other leaders.

A 1964 trip to Brazil sharpened Silver's interest in his father's Cape Verdean roots, and that year's Song for My Father, cut with Joe Henderson on tenor and Carmell Jones on trumpet, became his best-known record: the title track, built on a bossa-adjacent vamp dedicated to John Tavares Silver, reached the Billboard 200 in 1965 and entered the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1999. The Cape Verdean Blues (1965), with trombonist J.J. Johnson sitting in on three tracks alongside trumpeter Woody Shaw, extended the same vein. The band kept turning over through the late 1960s: Woody Shaw and tenor saxophonist Tyrone Washington powered 1966's The Jody Grind; Stanley Turrentine fronted half of Serenade to a Soul Sister (1968) opposite a younger group with Bennie Maupin and Billy Cobham; and by 1969's You Gotta Take a Little Love the front line was Maupin and a young Randy Brecker on trumpet.

At the end of 1970 Silver disbanded his working group to spend more time composing and with his family; he had married Barbara Jean Dove that year and the couple had a son, Gregory, before divorcing in the mid-1970s. Increasingly drawn to spiritualism, Silver began writing lyrics and concept material for a series he called "The United States of Mind," starting with That Healin' Feelin' (1970) and continuing through Total Response (1971) and All (1972); the records sold modestly at the time. He re-formed a touring band in 1973 with trumpeter Tom Harrell, who stayed through 1977, and by decade's end had settled into the "Silver 'n" series pairing his working quintet, by then featuring Harrell and tenor saxophonist Bob Berg, with expanded instrumentation: Silver 'n Brass (1975), Silver 'n Wood (1976), Silver 'n Voices (1977), Silver 'n Percussion (1978), and, closing out his Blue Note tenure, Silver 'n Strings Play the Music of the Spheres (1979-1980).

After leaving Blue Note in 1980, Silver founded his own label, Silveto Records, devoted to spiritually themed and self-help material, releasing Guides to Growing Up (1981, with recitations by Bill Cosby), Spiritualizing the Senses (1983), There's No Need to Struggle (1983), and The Continuity of Spirit (1985) before the label wound down in 1988. He drew increasingly on composition royalties through the early 1990s as touring income thinned, choreographing the 1991 Los Angeles theatrical piece Rockin' with Rachmaninoff. In 1993 he signed with Columbia Records and returned to straight instrumental jazz on the big-band date It's Got to Be Funky and 1994's Pencil Packin' Papa, which brought in guest tenors Eddie Harris, James Moody, and Red Holloway. He then moved to Impulse! for The Hardbop Grandpop (1996), a septet date with Michael Brecker, trombonist Steve Turre, baritone saxophonist Ronnie Cuber, and trumpeter Claudio Roditi that earned two Grammy nominations, and A Prescription for the Blues (1997), which reunited him with Ron Carter and both Brecker brothers. His final studio album, Jazz Has a Sense of Humor, appeared on Verve in 1999 with a young front line of trumpeter Ryan Kisor and saxophonist Jimmy Greene.

Silver was hospitalized with a blood clot shortly after It's Got to Be Funky's 1993 release, and in 2007 it was disclosed that he had Alzheimer's disease; he made a rare return to the stage at the Blue Note Jazz Club in New York in 2004 before withdrawing from public performance. He passed away of natural causes on June 18, 2014, in New Rochelle, New York, at age 85, survived by his son Gregory. He had been named an NEA Jazz Master in 1995, inducted into DownBeat's Hall of Fame and awarded an honorary doctorate from Berklee College of Music in 1996, and given the Recording Academy's President's Merit Award in 2005.

Silver built a distinct pianistic identity around melody and rhythm rather than harmonic density: a crisp, syncopated right hand playing short, blues- and gospel-derived phrases against a dark, percussive, near-constant left-hand rumble, punctuated by tone clusters and quick slurs into flatted fifths. As an accompanist he favored riff-like background figures closer to a big-band horn section's punctuation than to the busy comping style of his bebop contemporaries, and his playing carried a plainly audible good humor, quoting other tunes mid-solo and leaning into blues inflection where Bud Powell's generation had leaned into harmonic sophistication. DownBeat called him, as early as 1956, "a key influence on a large segment of modern jazz pianists," and his stamp is audible in Ramsey Lewis, Les McCann, and Bobby Timmons. His compositional legacy runs even further: dozens of tunes built on economical, blues-and-gospel-rooted melodies, several of them ("Song for My Father," "Sister Sadie," "The Preacher," "Doodlin'," "Nica's Dream") now standard repertoire, prompted critic John S. Wilson to credit him with leading jazz "a return to an emphasis on melody" during a period when the music was drifting toward greater abstraction. Alongside Art Blakey, he is credited as a principal architect of hard bop and of its standard quintet instrumentation (tenor sax, trumpet, piano, bass, drums), and his bandstand doubled for decades as a finishing school for young sidemen who went on to lead their own significant careers.