SOUND PROJECTIONS
AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE
EDITOR: KOFI NATAMBU
FALL, 2015
VOLUME TWO NUMBER ONE
AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE
EDITOR: KOFI NATAMBU
FALL, 2015
VOLUME TWO NUMBER ONE
Featuring the Musics and Aesthetic Visions of:
LAURA MVULA
October 10-16
DIZZY GILLESPIE
October 17-23
LESTER YOUNG
October 24-30
TIA FULLER
October 31-November 6
ROSCOE MITCHELL
November 7-13
MAX ROACH
November 14-20
DINAH WASHINGTON
November 21-27
BUDDY GUY
November 28-December 4
JOE HENDERSON
December 5-11
HENRY THREADGILL
December 12-18
MUDDY WATERS
December 19-25
B.B. KING
December 26-January 1
Jazz saxophonist and composer Joe Henderson could best be described as a renaissance man. Creating a style unique from the dominant saxophonists of his early career --namely John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins – Henderson became the consummate leader and sideman. His name has become synonymous with power and grace on the tenor saxophone, and has long been revered in musical circles for his distinctive sound and powers of invention. Although Henderson’s earliest recordings were marked by a strong hard-bop influence, his playing encompassed not only the bebop tradition, but rhythm and blues, latin, and avant-garde as well.
Henderson has had a remarkably consistent career, carving out his own reputation through technical excellence, songwriting ability, and a stunning diversity that made him a sought-after sideman early in his career. He made his mark at Blue Note records as a member of the Kenny Dorham band and went on to record with the Horace Silver group that made the classic Song for My Father. A master of composition, his songs “Recorda- Me” and “Inner Urge” have become jazz classics.
From 1963 to 1968 Joe appeared on nearly thirty albums for Blue Note. The recordings ranged from relatively conservative hard-bop sessions to more avant-garde explorations. He played a prominent role in many landmark recordings: Horace Silver’s swinging and soulful Song For My Father, Herbie Hancock’s dark and densely orchestrated Prisoner, and Andrew Hill’s avant-garde Black Fire. Henderson’s adaptability and eclecticism would become even more apparent in the years to follow.
Henderson’s playing has a distinctively tender sense of swing, which can be heard on dozens of Blue Note albums from the 1960s. Often overlooked at the peak of his career, he returned to recording in the 1980s to great acclaim.
After a long battle with emphysema and a stroke in 1998 which stopped his public career, Joe Henderson passed away on June 30, 2001, leaving a legacy and career that spanned for over four decades and a permanent prototype for others to follow.
“Joe Henderson is always in the middle of a great solo.”
Joe Henderson
A giant of the jazz saxophone, his modesty stood in contrast to his melodic improvisation
by John Fordham
Monday 2 July 2001
The Guardian (UK)
For all that he won Grammy awards, played saxophone with Bill Clinton at his first presidential inauguration, acquired elder statesman jazz status during the 1990s and was the very quintessence of a musician's musician, Joe Henderson, who has died of heart failure aged 64, always inhabited a concert stage as if he had no business being there.
When his partners were playing and he was taking time out, he would look, for all the world, like a restlessly preoccupied man at a bus stop. Yet, despite the machinations of his impenetrably devious reserve, and the competition of an avalanche of brilliant postbop practitioners on his instrument - from Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane to Michael Brecker and James Carter - he was one of the greatest saxophone improvisors in the period from the 1960s to the present. Often discussed as a plausible heir apparent to Sonny Rollins, it is a sad surprise that the younger man should be the one to leave the stage first.
The musical impact of Ohio-born Henderson was all the more remarkable for his dislike of grandstanding, egotism or bravura. He fastidiously avoided the crowd-baiting hot lick, and had his own imperturbable perception of musical dynamics, rarely deviating from a steady, methodical mid-range purr, the very limitations of which made his remarkable harmonic and melodic imagination all the more audible.
Though he liked the middle register, which he occupied in a kind of penetrating murmur, he had a high-register sound as pure as a flute. He favoured fast, incisive statements of densely-packed runs, often ending in brusquely dissonant squalls or prolonged warbles, as if he were gargling with pebbles. Much of the vividness of his improvising stemmed from manipulations of tonal contrasts and phrase-density, and a composer-like juggling with fragmentary phrases and motifs, but on the fly. On top of it all, his ability to avoid repeating favourite phrases of his own - or anybody else's - could be little short of uncanny.
After the uplift of interest in straightahead jazz during the 1990s, Henderson's audiences were a lot bigger than the handful who used to show up at Ronnie Scott's club 20 years before, when he was already a jaw-dropping executant of sharp curves and four-wheel skids as a melodic improvisor, but mostly playing straight jazz rather than the then commercially dominant idiom of jazz-funk. But for those present, Henderson was obviously a whirlwind force on the rise - not only for his imagination, but for his openness to the contributions of the local musicians he worked with on those solo travels in Europe, particularly the innovative British drummer Tony Oxley.
Rollins and Charlie Parker were always clearly among Henderson's primary influences, but he had also absorbed the work of those equally wayward individualists, Ornette Coleman and Thelonious Monk. A broad-minded and erudite musician, who explored classical, Indian and Balinese music - as well as jazz - he would later say that he heard Monk the way he heard Paul Hindemith. The subsequent 1990s movement toward classical pianists beginning to record Monk tunes as high points of 20th-century music came as no surprise to him.
Henderson studied music at Kentucky State College from 1956, and at Wayne State University, Detroit, where one of his fellow students was the multi-reed player Yusef Lateef. He briefly worked with Sonny Stitt and led his own band before military service, which ended in 1962. Then he joined the bands of trumpeter Kenny Dorham and pianist Horace Silver, eventually co-leading a hard bop group called the Jazz Communicators, with trumpeter Freddie Hubbard. After that, he worked with Herbie Hancock in the pianist's harmonically adventurous, if commercially obscure, sextet of 1969-70, and with the jazz-rock band Blood, Sweat And Tears. He toyed with jazz-rock fusion, but it was not especially memorably.
Though Henderson would recall that some of his earliest sax-playing experiences had been for dances around Detroit, and that his first experience of hearing Charlie Parker live was also to witness dancers gyrating to fast bop improvisations on Indiana and Cherokee, the dance versions of jazz music that came from rhythm 'n' blues, rather than swing roots, struck him as more repetitive, and harder to improvise inventively with.
Impatient with the narrowing opportunities for uncompromising jazz improvisors during the 1970s, he moved to San Francisco, and became active in music education. He also worked with Freddie Hubbard and others in a group variously known as Echoes Of An Era, and the Griffith Park Band.
Henderson appeared on 34 Blue Note albums between 1963 and 1990, alongside some of the most creative musicians in American jazz - including McCoy Tyner, Elvin Jones, Chick Corea, Ron Carter and Al Foster. But 1985 was re-emergence year for this often overlooked artist. He played with Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter and Tony Williams at the televised concert, One Night With Blue Note (the relaunch of the famous Blue Note label), and also recorded the adventurous double-set, The State Of The Tenor, alongside Carter and Foster. A series of thematic recording opportunities followed when he changed to Verve Records - including the lyrical Lush Life (devoted to Billy Strayhorn), and 1992's So Near, So Far (Musings For Miles), a tribute to the recently-departed Miles Davis by a supergroup that included former Miles sidemen John Scofield, Dave Holland and Al Foster.
Henderson loved improvising; taking a musical chance was his reason for artistic existence. He once remarked, in an interview in the Guardian, on how invaluable a quality adaptability was. "If, in a musical situation, you've got to do all that talking, and explaining . . . jeez, man, it can just go on and on. But you get a certain group of people, you just have to count the tune in, or call the tune, or sometimes not even that, just start playing . . . and everything that's supposed to fall in place does just that. I was at a rehearsal with Miles once that was like that; he just walked around with a can of beer, talking in that barely audible voice, didn't hand out any parts.
"But then it dawned on you, same as it was with Monk. If he had you there, that underscored how he felt about you, that was the confidence that he had. When mother's not there, telling you what to do, it's sink or swim. But once somebody tells you, convincingly enough, that this is now your style - that's all you need to know."
Joe Henderson, saxophonist, born April 24 1937; died June 29 2001
When his partners were playing and he was taking time out, he would look, for all the world, like a restlessly preoccupied man at a bus stop. Yet, despite the machinations of his impenetrably devious reserve, and the competition of an avalanche of brilliant postbop practitioners on his instrument - from Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane to Michael Brecker and James Carter - he was one of the greatest saxophone improvisors in the period from the 1960s to the present. Often discussed as a plausible heir apparent to Sonny Rollins, it is a sad surprise that the younger man should be the one to leave the stage first.
The musical impact of Ohio-born Henderson was all the more remarkable for his dislike of grandstanding, egotism or bravura. He fastidiously avoided the crowd-baiting hot lick, and had his own imperturbable perception of musical dynamics, rarely deviating from a steady, methodical mid-range purr, the very limitations of which made his remarkable harmonic and melodic imagination all the more audible.
Though he liked the middle register, which he occupied in a kind of penetrating murmur, he had a high-register sound as pure as a flute. He favoured fast, incisive statements of densely-packed runs, often ending in brusquely dissonant squalls or prolonged warbles, as if he were gargling with pebbles. Much of the vividness of his improvising stemmed from manipulations of tonal contrasts and phrase-density, and a composer-like juggling with fragmentary phrases and motifs, but on the fly. On top of it all, his ability to avoid repeating favourite phrases of his own - or anybody else's - could be little short of uncanny.
After the uplift of interest in straightahead jazz during the 1990s, Henderson's audiences were a lot bigger than the handful who used to show up at Ronnie Scott's club 20 years before, when he was already a jaw-dropping executant of sharp curves and four-wheel skids as a melodic improvisor, but mostly playing straight jazz rather than the then commercially dominant idiom of jazz-funk. But for those present, Henderson was obviously a whirlwind force on the rise - not only for his imagination, but for his openness to the contributions of the local musicians he worked with on those solo travels in Europe, particularly the innovative British drummer Tony Oxley.
Rollins and Charlie Parker were always clearly among Henderson's primary influences, but he had also absorbed the work of those equally wayward individualists, Ornette Coleman and Thelonious Monk. A broad-minded and erudite musician, who explored classical, Indian and Balinese music - as well as jazz - he would later say that he heard Monk the way he heard Paul Hindemith. The subsequent 1990s movement toward classical pianists beginning to record Monk tunes as high points of 20th-century music came as no surprise to him.
Henderson studied music at Kentucky State College from 1956, and at Wayne State University, Detroit, where one of his fellow students was the multi-reed player Yusef Lateef. He briefly worked with Sonny Stitt and led his own band before military service, which ended in 1962. Then he joined the bands of trumpeter Kenny Dorham and pianist Horace Silver, eventually co-leading a hard bop group called the Jazz Communicators, with trumpeter Freddie Hubbard. After that, he worked with Herbie Hancock in the pianist's harmonically adventurous, if commercially obscure, sextet of 1969-70, and with the jazz-rock band Blood, Sweat And Tears. He toyed with jazz-rock fusion, but it was not especially memorably.
Though Henderson would recall that some of his earliest sax-playing experiences had been for dances around Detroit, and that his first experience of hearing Charlie Parker live was also to witness dancers gyrating to fast bop improvisations on Indiana and Cherokee, the dance versions of jazz music that came from rhythm 'n' blues, rather than swing roots, struck him as more repetitive, and harder to improvise inventively with.
Impatient with the narrowing opportunities for uncompromising jazz improvisors during the 1970s, he moved to San Francisco, and became active in music education. He also worked with Freddie Hubbard and others in a group variously known as Echoes Of An Era, and the Griffith Park Band.
Henderson appeared on 34 Blue Note albums between 1963 and 1990, alongside some of the most creative musicians in American jazz - including McCoy Tyner, Elvin Jones, Chick Corea, Ron Carter and Al Foster. But 1985 was re-emergence year for this often overlooked artist. He played with Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter and Tony Williams at the televised concert, One Night With Blue Note (the relaunch of the famous Blue Note label), and also recorded the adventurous double-set, The State Of The Tenor, alongside Carter and Foster. A series of thematic recording opportunities followed when he changed to Verve Records - including the lyrical Lush Life (devoted to Billy Strayhorn), and 1992's So Near, So Far (Musings For Miles), a tribute to the recently-departed Miles Davis by a supergroup that included former Miles sidemen John Scofield, Dave Holland and Al Foster.
Henderson loved improvising; taking a musical chance was his reason for artistic existence. He once remarked, in an interview in the Guardian, on how invaluable a quality adaptability was. "If, in a musical situation, you've got to do all that talking, and explaining . . . jeez, man, it can just go on and on. But you get a certain group of people, you just have to count the tune in, or call the tune, or sometimes not even that, just start playing . . . and everything that's supposed to fall in place does just that. I was at a rehearsal with Miles once that was like that; he just walked around with a can of beer, talking in that barely audible voice, didn't hand out any parts.
"But then it dawned on you, same as it was with Monk. If he had you there, that underscored how he felt about you, that was the confidence that he had. When mother's not there, telling you what to do, it's sink or swim. But once somebody tells you, convincingly enough, that this is now your style - that's all you need to know."
Joe Henderson, saxophonist, born April 24 1937; died June 29 2001
Obituaries
Joe Henderson; Eloquent Tenor Saxophonist
July 02, 2001
by MYRNA OLIVER
TIMES STAFF WRITER
Los Angeles Times
Joe Henderson, a tenor saxophonist known for his inventive improvisation and lyrical contemporary jazz style who was late to achieve the widespread fame he had long deserved, has died at the age of 64.
Henderson earned four Grammys, three of them for best album in the early 1990s when he was in his mid-50s. He died Saturday of heart failure in San Francisco where he had lived for more than 25 years. He suffered a stroke in 1998, which ended his public performing career, and he also struggled with emphysema.
Although he was respected by jazz artists, Henderson was something of a well-kept secret until he signed with the Verve label in 1992. In rapid succession, he made three Grammy-winning albums paying homage to other jazz greats--Billy Strayhorn with "Lush Life," Miles Davis with "So Near, So Far" and Antonio Carlos Jobim with "Double Rainbow."
In that better-late-than-never rocket ride to fame, Henderson also won Down Beat magazine's "triple crown"--best artist, best tenor saxophonist and best album listings--two years in a row.
[FOR THE RECORDl: Correction]
Henderson obituary--Monday's obituary of jazz tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson incorrectly listed the number of Grammy awards he collected. Henderson, who died Saturday in San Francisco at age 64, earned four Grammys.
Asked in 1994 if his career had come to fruition in the previous two years, Henderson told The Times: "There have been more gigs and that kind of thing, and the remunerative part of that equation has gotten to the point to where it could have been--should have been--all of the time. You're talking to a pretty pleased person here. . . . My brain is just buzzing as a result of this late recognition."
Frequently compared to the legendary Stan Getz, yet unique and instantly identifiable for the warmth and variation of his tone, Henderson never left the microphone without raising his tenor saxophone in a silent salute to his listeners. That small gesture symbolized the connection he was able to make with jazz audiences, a warmly intimate reflection of the man as much as his music.
Don Heckman, the critic who writes frequently about jazz for The Times, has called Henderson "one of the four or five finest jazz saxophonists in the world" and once speculated that he "probably could make musical magic out of the tones on a push-button phone."
In recent years, Henderson became one of the first of his generation of players to create thematically oriented albums. In addition to his tributes to Strayhorn, Davis and Jobim, he recorded his jazz interpretation of George Gershwin's classic opera "Porgy and Bess" and the "Joe Henderson Big Band" album, all for Verve.
"In Henderson's hands, projects such as these were never gimmicky, or market-oriented in nature," Heckman said Sunday. "His renderings of the songs of Jobim and Strayhorn, for example, were compelling because he found so much within them that expressed qualities in his own creative persona.
"His big band writing--a skill not generally associated with Henderson--traced back to his earlier years," Heckman added, "but, as with the other thematic recordings, it was the product of a unique combination of musical curiosity, artistic integrity and a constant willingness to take creative risks."
Henderson used Gershwin's "Porgy and Bess"--which he called "an absolutely magnificent reinterpretation, or a re-imagining, of African American experience through Gershwin's European kind of education"--in a 1998 Jazz Bakery performance he titled "Jazz Variations on Gershwin."
Also respected as a composer, Henderson created such tunes as "Recordame," "Black Narcissus," "Inner Urge," "Isotope," "The Bad Game" and "Caribbean Fire Dance."
Henderson always offered surprise in his own playing, but also inspired others' creativity as well, Heckman once noted, providing "the kind of lively rhythms and appealing harmonies capable of stimulating a jazz artist's improvisatory imagination."
Born in Lima, Ohio, Henderson came from a musical family and grew up absorbing the recorded sounds of Charlie Parker, Lester Young and Ben Webster. He also developed an appreciation for classical music, including the works of Bartok and Stravinsky.
A self-taught saxophonist from an early age, Henderson studied music at Kentucky State College and Wayne State University in Detroit, where he turned professional. He played with Sonny Stitt and then led his own band in Detroit.
Military service in 1960-62 meant touring the world as part of an Army band.
Afterward, he performed in Baltimore and then New York, working with Jack McDuff and co-leading a group with Kenny Dorham. He recorded with Blue Note in the 1960s, and also performed successively with Horace Silver, Andrew Hill, Jazz Communicators and Freddie Hubbard, Louis Hayes and the Herbie Hancock Sextet.
He worked briefly with Blood, Sweat & Tears in the early 1970s and then moved to San Francisco where he played, recorded and taught, frequently appearing at conferences of such prestigious organizations as the International Assn. of Jazz Educators.
Erudite in his music and his words, Henderson was nonetheless a quiet man who kept to himself when not performing. Friends nicknamed him "The Phantom" for his ability to drop out of sight to recover from his emotionally taxing profession.
"Unlike so many of today's younger players," Heckman said, "Henderson never sounded like anyone but himself, and his technique, while virtuosic, was always placed at the service of his improvisational thoughts. When he played a note, he played it with a reason, and he never played two or three notes where one would not only suffice, but do a better job of underscoring the dramatic ruminations that were the prime metier of his music."
Henderson's favorite Selmer tenor sax was stolen once, then recovered only to be destroyed in a fire after an automobile accident.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/03/arts/joe-henderson-saxophonist-and-composer-dies-at-64.html
Joe Henderson, Saxophonist And Composer, Dies at 64
by BEN RATLIFF
July 3, 2001
New York Times
Joe Henderson, one of the great jazz saxophonists and a composer who wrote a handful of tunes known by almost every jazz student, died on Saturday in San Francisco. He was 64 and lived in San Francisco.
The cause was heart failure after a long struggle with emphysema, The Associated Press reported.
Mr. Henderson was unmistakably modern. ''Joe had one foot in the present, the other in the future, and he was just a step away from immortality,'' said the saxophonist Benny Golson. His tenor saxophone sound was shaded, insinuating, full of layers, with quicksilver lines amid careful ballad phrases and short trills. He had a clean, expressive upper register and a talent for improvising in semi-abstract harmony, and when the far-out years for jazz arrived in the mid-60's, led by musicians like John Coltrane and Miles Davis, he was well positioned to take part. He made a series of records for Milestone that used studio echo, Alice Coltrane's harp, violins, wood flutes and other exotic accouterments.
But Mr. Henderson's greatest strengths were more traditional: the ballad, the uptempo tune, the standard. And by the early 1990's, when he was a respected elder, he made some of his greatest statements on a series of well-produced, nearly theatrical albums for Verve Records.
Born in Lima, Ohio, he was one of 15 siblings. His parents and his brother James encouraged him to study music because of the talents he displayed as a saxophonist in his high school band. He attended Kentucky State College for a year, then transferred to Wayne State University in Detroit, where he was among fellow students like Yusef Lateef, Curtis Fuller and Hugh Lawson. In Detroit he worked with the saxophonist Sonny Stitt, and eventually formed his own group before joining the Army in 1960. He played in the Army band at Fort Benning, Ga., and toured military bases in the Far East and Europe with a revue called the Rolling Along Show.
In 1962 Mr. Henderson, who soon became a distinctive presence with his rail-thin body, thick black glasses and bushy mustache, was discharged and headed for New York. He quickly joined the young musicians recording for Blue Note records, especially the trumpeter Kenny Dorham, who was acting as a talent scout for the label. He made his recording debut in 1963 on Dorham's ''Una Mas,'' one of the classic Blue Note records of the early 60's.
Mr. Henderson was entering jazz at a fertile moment, when a few ambitious, challenging albums, like John Coltrane's ''My Favorite Things'' and Miles Davis's ''Kind of Blue,'' had broken through to a wide audience. A new self-possessed intellectualism was widespread in black music, and the experimental and traditional factions hadn't yet hardened their positions. Within the same four-month stretch as a Blue Note session regular, Mr. Henderson found himself playing solos on Lee Morgan's ''Sidewinder,'' an album full of bluesy, hard-bop tunes, and Andrew Hill's album ''Point of Departure,'' with its opaque, knotted harmonies and rhythmic convolutions. He played more roadhouse riffs on Morgan's record, more abstract thematic improvisations on Mr. Hill's, and sounded perfectly natural in both contexts.
After making five albums with Dorham, Mr. Henderson replaced Junior Cook in Horace Silver's band from 1964 to 1966. Again he was on hand for a milestone album, ''Song for My Father.'' He was also a member of Herbie Hancock's band from 1969 to 1970.
During the 60's he made several first-rate albums under his own name, including ''Page One'' and ''Inner Urge,'' and wrote tunes -- among them the blues pieces ''Isotope'' and ''A Shade of Jade,'' the waltz ''Black Narcissus,'' the bossa nova ''Recordame'' and the harmonically complex ''Inner Urge'' -- that earned lasting underground reputations as premium modern-jazz improvisational vehicles.
Mr. Henderson briefly joined the jazz-rock band Blood, Sweat and Tears in 1971, and his albums for Milestone, where he recorded until 1976, started to change from mystical Coltrane-inspired sessions to grooves and near jazz-rock. By the end of the 70's, he was working with the pianist Chick Corea. Then, after a five-year silence, he came back with the two volumes of ''The State of the Tenor.'' The first of his moves to redefine his career, these excellent mainstream jazz sets were recorded live at the Village Vanguard.
In the early 1990's he signed a new contract with Verve, which led to three Grammys. ''Lush Life,'' from 1991, used Billy Strayhorn tunes. With its first-rate playing and narrative arc -- it began with a duet, expanded to a quintet and ended with a saxophone solo -- it has sold nearly 90,000 copies, reports Soundscan, a company that tracks album sales.
Other songbook albums, only slightly less successful, included ''So Near, So Far (Musings for Miles),'' a treatment of pieces associated with Miles Davis; ''Double Rainbow,'' an album of Antonio Carlos Jobim's music; and Gershwin's ''Porgy and Bess,'' recorded with an all-star jazz lineup as well as the pop singers Sting and Chaka Khan. His 90's discography also included ''Joe Henderson Big Band,'' a lavish rendering of his compositions.
Mr. Henderson's survivors include a sister, Phyllis, and a brother, Troy. http://musicians.allaboutjazz.com/joehenderson
Joe Henderson
All About Jazz
Biography
The tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson was born on April 24, 1937 in a small city called Lima Ohio midway between Dayton and Toledo. He spent his childhood and adolescence in Lima in a family of 15 children where he was exposed to a variety of musical styles. By the time he was a high school student he was already arranging and writing music for the school band and other local outfits. It was in high school that a music teacher introduced him to the tenor saxophone. After graduation he enrolled first at the Kentucky State College to study music and then moved on to Wayne State University in Detroit. There he had as classmates several future jazz greats such as Yusef Lateef and Donald Byrd. From 1960-1962 he enlisted in the US army where he led several small jazz groups and won first place in a musical competition and was sent on a tour to entertain the troops all over Japan and Europe where he met a few of the expatriate musicians.
Early career: the Blue Note years
After being discharged from the army he traveled to New York and sat in at Birdland with Dexter Gordon and other local musicians. During one of these sessions he was introduced to the trumpeter Kenny Dorham who was so impressed by his musicianship that he arranged for Joe Henderson’s first recording session as a leader with Blue Note Records. This resulted in the record Page One (1963) which to this day remains one of his most critically acclaimed albums. This recording also spawned the standard Blue Bossa. During the following four years he led 4 other sessions for Blue Note and recorded as sideman on over to 2 dozen albums for the same label. Some of these records are today classics of not only the label but also of jazz music. Andrew Hill’s Point of Departure, Larry Young’s Unity, Horace Silver’s Song For My Father and Lee Morgan’s Sidewinder are just a few examples of those fruitful years. In addition to creating timeless music Joe Henderson’s style also evolved during this period to incorporate all genres of jazz from hard bop to avant garde from latin to soul-jazz.
Middle period: the Milestone, Verve and experimentation years
From 1967-1979 he recorded primarily for the Milestone label with occasional sessions as a leader for the Verve label and one, sorely underappreciated, record for the Enja label called Barcelona. Over this “middle period” of his career his style gradually evolved from the powerful acoustic style of post bop to fusion, electric music, avant garde and back to post-bop. Through all the changes, however, his virtuosity remained intact even when the some of the later records from this period were overall not as creative as his other works. During these years he also composed prolifically and co-led groups with Freddie Hubbard and Herbie Hancock. His forays outside of the realm of jazz led him to play with Blood Sweat and Tears and other rock and R and B groups. In the early seventies Joe Henderson became involved in teaching as well and moved to San Francisco.
The latter period: the 80s and the tenor trio.
The highlight of the 80s in Joe Henderson’s career was the recording of the phenomenal live session at the Village Vanguard released on a two disc set as The State of the Tenor Live at the Village Vanguard. It is a live trio set with bass and drums similar to Sonny Rollins’ landmark recordings of over 2 decades before. Despite garnering critical accolades the record remains underappreciated and not as well known as it should be.
The latter period:
The 90s, Verve, awards and commercial success
During the 90s Joe Henderson recorded 3 tribute sessions for Verve that were not only critically acclaimed but were also commercially highly successful. He won multiple Down Beat music awards in 1992, including the international critics and readers polls, was named jazz musician of the year and top tenor saxophonist. The first of the tribute albums Lush Life: The Music of Billy Strayhorn, named album of the year and went on to sell more than 450,000 worldwide in one year (1992); 100,000 copies of it in the United States. The success of those records launched his international career and he performed at many an international jazz festival and concert hall. The second of these albums So Near So Far: Musings for Miles won him a Grammy for best jazz performance. The decade also saw him recording as a sideman with a number of up and coming jazz musicians such as Renee Rosnes, Rebecca Coupe Franks, Stephen Scott and Holy Cole just to name a few.
In 1997 he recorded his last album Porgy and Bess and a year later he suffered a stroke that kept him from performing and in poor health. The world of jazz lost one of its great composers and most accomplished musicians on June 30th 2001 when Joe Henderson passed away from emphysema in San Francisco.
http://panopticonreview.blogspot.com/2014/04/joe-henderson-1934-2001-major.html
Friday, April 25, 2014
Joe Henderson (1934-2001), Major Saxophonist, Composer, and Bandleader: A Tribute On His 77th Birthday
http://www.joehendersonsax.com/biography/
http://www.joehendersonsax.com/video/
Biography
Joe Henderson (tenor saxophonist) was born on April 24, 1937 in Lima, Ohio and passed away on June 30, 2001 in San Francisco, California.
Born in the small city of Lima Ohio between Dayton and Toledo, he spent his childhood and adolescence years in a family of 15 children where he was exposed to a variety of musical styles, and was encouraged by his parents and older brother James T. to study music. He dedicated his first album to them for being so understanding and tolerant during his formative years.
By the time he was a high school student he was already arranging and writing music for the school band and other local outfits. It was in high school that a music teacher introduced him to the tenor saxophone. After graduation he enrolled first at the Kentucky State College to study music and then moved on to Wayne State University in Detroit. There he had as classmates several future jazz greats such as Yusef Lateef and Donald Byrd. From 1960-1962 he enlisted in the US army where he led several small jazz groups and won first place in a musical competition and was sent on a tour to entertain the troops all over Japan and Europe where he met a few of the expatriate musicians.
The Blue Note Years
After being discharged from the army he traveled to New York and sat in at Birdland with Dexter Gordon and other local musicians. During one of these sessions he was introduced to the trumpeter Kenny Dorham who was so impressed by his musicianship that he arranged for Joe Henderson’s first recording session as a leader with Blue Note Records. This resulted in the record Page One (1963) which to this day remains one of his most critically acclaimed albums. This recording also spawned the standard Blue Bossa.
During the following 4 years he led four other sessions for Blue Note and recorded as sideman on over to two dozen albums for the same label. Some of these records are today classics of not only the label but also of jazz music. Andrew Hill’s Point of Departure, Larry Young’s Unity, Horace Silver’s Song For My Father and Lee Morgan’s Sidewinder are just a few examples of those fruitful years. In addition to creating timeless music Joe Henderson’s style also evolved during this period to incorporate all genres of jazz, from hard bop to avant garde, from latin to soul-jazz.
The Milestone / Verve Years
From 1967-1979 he recorded primarily for the Milestone label with occasional sessions as a leader for the Verve label and one, sorely underappreciated, record for the Enja label called Barcelona. Over this “middle period” of his career his style gradually evolved from the powerful acoustic style of post bop to fusion, electric music, avant garde and back to post-bop. Through all the changes, however, his virtuosity remained intact even when the some of the later records from this period were overall not as creative as his other works. During these years he also composed prolifically and co-led groups with Freddie Hubbard and Herbie Hancock. His forays outside of the realm of jazz led him to play with Blood Sweat and Tears and other rock and R & B groups. In the early seventies Joe Henderson became involved in teaching as well and moved to San Francisco.
The Latter Years: 80s & 90s
The highlight of the 80s in Joe Henderson’s career was the recording of the phenomenal live session at the Village Vanguard released on a two disc set as The State of the Tenor Live at the Village Vanguard. It is a live trio set with bass and drums similar to Sonny Rollins’ landmark recordings of over 2 decades before. Despite garnering critical accolades the record remains underappreciated and not as well known as it should be.
During the 90s Joe Henderson recorded 3 tribute sessions for Verve that were not only critically acclaimed but were also commercially highly successful. He won multiple Down Beat music awards in 1992, including the international critics and readers polls, was named jazz musician of the year and top tenor saxophonist. The first of the tribute albums Lush Life: The Music of Billy Strayhorn, named album of the year and went on to sell more than 450,000 worldwide in one year (1992); 100,000 copies of it in the United States. The success of those records launched his international career and he performed at many an international jazz festival and concert hall. The second of these albums So Near So Far: Musings for Miles won him a Grammy for best jazz performance. The decade also saw him recording as a sideman with a number of up and coming jazz musicians such as Renee Rosnes, Rebecca Coupe Franks, Stephen Scott and Holy Cole just to name a few.
In 1997 he recorded his last album Porgy and Bess and a year later he suffered a stroke that kept him from performing and in poor health. The world of jazz lost one of its great composers and most accomplished musicians on June 30th 2001 when Joe Henderson passed away from emphysema in San Francisco.
http://jazzprofiles.blogspot.com/2013/09/joe-henderson-revelatory.html
Jazz Profiles
Focused profiles on Jazz and its makers.
Tuesday, September 17, 2013
For nearly thirty years, Henderson has possessed his own sound and has developed his own angles on swing, melody, timbre and harmony, while constantly expanding his own skill at playing in uncommon meters and rhythms. In his playing you hear an imposing variety of harmonic, rhythmic and melodic choices; you also hear his personal appropriation of the technical victories for his instrument achieved by men such as Sonny Stitt, Stan Getz, Sonny Rollins, Warne Marsh, Paul Gonsalves, Johnny Griffin and John Coltrane.
His, then, is a style informed by enormous sophistication, not limited by insufficient study or dependence on eccentric clichés brought into action for the purpose of masking the lack of detailed authority. In this tenor playing there's a relaxation in face of options that stretch from Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young and Charlie Parker to all of the substantial innovations since. So the music of Joe Henderson contains all of the components that make jazz so unique and so influential woven together with the sort of feeling, imagination, soul and technical authority that do the art proud.- Stanley Crouch, Jazz author and critic
In connection with Joe Henderson’s music, “revelatory” has as it’s meaning so much that is eloquent, expressive and significant that it is difficult to understand how often it is often overlooked, let alone, taken for granted by Jazz fans in general.
Names such as Coleman Hawkins, Chu Berry, Lester Young, Stan Getz, Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane are often mentioned as great tenor saxophonists, but Joe Henderson’s name is rarely among them.
It should be.
Joe’s sound and approach to improvisation are as distinctive and unique as any of the great tenor masters and his influence on generations of Jazz musicians has been huge.
Take for example this assessment of Joe’s significance by guitarist John Scofield:
And Joe is also no secret to the tenor saxophonists who evolved under his influence in the generation following his such as Joe Lovano and Branford Marsalis.
I got to know Joe a bit after the time of his interview with Michael Bourne for Downbeat [March, 1992; see below]. He had just finished the Lush Life [Verve/Polygram 314 511 779-2] tribute to Bill Strayhorn and was working on the charts that would appear a few years later on the Joe Henderson Big Band CD [Verve/Polygram 314 533 451-2].
He and I lived on either side of Divisadero Street in central San Francisco. Divisadero is a north-south traffic throughway that cuts through several neighborhoods, including Lower Haight, Alamo Square, Pacific Heights, and the Marina and offers a kaleidoscopic mix of dining, grocery, and merchant fronts that serve each neighborhood.
The first time we met, Joe was sitting in a barbecue ribs place on Divisadero called The Brothers and while I waited for my take-out order I spotted him sitting quietly in a window seat reading some music scoring sheets.
For years, Joe wore a straw-hat version of Lester Young’s pork-pie hat and big suspenders that adorned shirts with thick, colorful stripes. This garb along with his salt and pepper beard was a dead give-away so I sauntered up to him and said: “You’re Kenny Dorham aren’t you?" [Joe was close friends with trumpeter and composer Dorham and made his recording debut on Kenny’s Una Mas Blue Note LP.]
He looked up from his scores with a momentary, puzzled look that quickly turned into a smile once he saw that I was wearing one too.
Motioning me to sit down at the table next to him he asked: “And what would you know about Kenny Dorham?”
That conversation in various forms took on a life of its own for a number of years in a variety of Divisadero locations ranging from coffee shops to pizzerias.
During this period, Joe often talked about his big band disc which was issued on Verve in 1996 [314 533 451-2].
I didn’t see him very much after the Joe Henderson Big Band CD was released as by then I had moved to the West Portal area of the city.
Joe died in 2001 at the much-too-young-age of sixty-four [64].
The editorial staff at JazzProfiles wanted to remember Joe on these pages with this interview which is followed by a video playlist of Joe’s original compositions and/or solos by Joe in other settings.
© -Michael Bourne/Downbeat, copyright protected; all rights reserved.
He's not Pres-like or Bird-like, not 'Trane-ish or Newk-ish. None of the stylistic adjectives so convenient for critics work for tenor saxist Joe Henderson. It's evident he's listened to the greats: to Lester Young, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins — to them and all the others he's enjoyed. But he doesn't play like them, doesn't sound like them. Joe Henderson is a master, and, like the greats, unique.
When he came along in the '60s, jazz was happening every which way, from mainstream and avant-garde to blues, rock and then some, and everything that was happening he played. Henderson's saxo phone became a Triton's horn and trans formed the music, whatever the style, whatever the groove, into himself. And he's no different (or, really, always different) today. There's no "typical" Joe Henderson album, and every solo is, like the soloist, original and unusual, thoughtful and always from the heart.
"I think playing the saxophone is what I'm supposed to be doing on this planet," says Joe Henderson. "We all have to do some thing. I play the saxo phone. It's the best way I know that I can make the largest number of people happy and get for myself the largest amount of happiness."
Joe was born April 24, 1937, in Lima, Ohio. When he was nine he was tested for musical aptitude. "I wanted to play drums. I'd be making drums out of my mother's pie pans. But they said I'd gotten a high enough score that I could play anything, and they gave me a saxophone. It was a C melody. I played that about six months and went to the tenor. I was kind of born on the tenor." Even before he played, Joe was fascinated by his brother's jazz records. "I lis tened to Lester Young, Flip Phillips, Stan Getz, Charlie Parker, all the people associ ated with Jazz at the Philharmonic.
This stuff went into my ears early on, so when I started to play the saxophone I had in my mind an idea of how that instrument was supposed to sound. I also heard the rhythm-and-blues saxophone players when they came through my hometown."
Soon he was playing dances and learn ing melodies with his friends. "I think of playing music on the bandstand like an actor relates to a role. I've always wanted to be the best inter preter the world has ever seen. Where a preco cious youngster gets an idea like that is beyond me, but somehow improv isation set in on me pretty early, probably before I knew what improvisation was, really. I've always tried to re-create melodies even better than the composers who wrote them. I've always tried to come up with something that never even occurred to them. This is the challenge: not to rearrange the intentions of the composers but to stay within the parameters of what the composers have in mind and be creative and imaginative and meaningful."
One melody that's become almost as much Henderson's as the composer's is Ask Me Now by Thelonious Monk. He's recorded it often, each performance an odyssey of sounds and feelings.
"I play it 75 percent of the time because I like it and the other 25 percent because it's demanded that I play it. I sometimes have to play it twice a night, even three times. That tune just laid around for a while. Monk did an incredible job on it, but other than Monk I don't think I heard anyone play it before I recorded it. It's a great tune, very simple. There are some melodies that just stand by themselves. Gershwin was that kind of writer. You don't even have to improvise. You don't have to do anything but play the melody and people will be pleased. One of the songs like that is Lush Life. That's for me the most beautiful tune ever written. It's even more profound knowing that Hilly Strayhorn wrote it, words and music, when he was 17 or 18. How does an 18-year-old arrive at that point of feeling, that depth'"
Lush Life is the title song of Henderson's new album of Strayhorn's music. "Musicians have to plant some trees—and replant some trees to extend the life of these good things. Billy Strayhorn was one of the people whose talent should be known. Duke Ellington knew about him, so that says something. There are still a lot of peo ple who haven't heard Strayhorn's music, but if I can do something to enable them to become aware of Strayhorn's genius. I'd feel great about that."
Lush Life is the first of several projects he'll record for Verve. Don Sickler worked with Henderson selecting and arranging some of Strayhorn's classics and, with Polygram Jazz VP Richard Seidel, pro duced the album. Henderson plays Lush Life alone, and, on the other songs he's joined for duets to quintets by four of the brightest young players around, pianist Stephen Scott, bassist Christian McBride, drummer Gregory Hutchinson, and trum peter Wynton Marsalis. That the interplay of generations is respectful, inspirational and affectionate is obvious.
"I think this was part of it, to present some of the youngsters with one of the more established voices. This is the natural way that it happens. This is the way it hap pened for me. I wouldn't have met the peo ple I met if it hadn't been for Kenny Dorham, Horace Silver, Miles Davis, peo ple I've been on the bandstand with. They introduced me to their audience. We have to do things like this. When older musicians like me find people who can continue the tradition, we have to create ways to bring these people to the fore."
Henderson came to the fore in the '60s. He'd studied for a year at Kentucky State, then four years at Wayne State in Detroit, where he often gigged alongside Yusef Lateef, Barry Harris, Hugh Lawson and Donald Byrd. He was drafted in 1960 and played bass in a military show that traveled the world. While touring in 1961, he met and played with Bud Powell and Kenny Clarke in Paris. Once he was dis charged in 1962, he settled in New York, where so many of his friends from Detroit were already regulars, and where trum peter Kenny Dorham became a brother.
"Kenny Dorham was one of the most important creators in New York, and he's damn near a name you don't hear any more. That's a shame. How can you over look a diamond in the rough like him? There haven't been that many people who have that much on the ball creatively as Kenny Dorham."
Henderson's first professional record ing was Dorham's album Una Mas, the first of many albums he recorded through the '60s as a sideman or a leader for Blue Note. This was the classic time of Blue Note, and what's most remarkable is the variety of music Henderson played, from the grooves of Lee Morgan's The Sidewinder to the avant-garde sounds of Andrew Hill's Point of Departure. Whatever was happening musically, Joe Henderson was a natural.
"That's part of what I wanted to do early on — be the best interpreter I could pos sibly be. I wanted to interpret Andrew Hill's music better than he could write it, the same with Duke Pearson and Horace Silver. I'd study and try to find ways of being imagina tive and interesting for this music without changing the music around. I didn't want to make Horace Silver's music different from what he had in mind. I wanted to make it even more of what he had in mind."
He joined the Horace Silver band for several years and fronted a big band with
Kenny Dorham — music he'll re-create and record this year at Lincoln Center. He worked with Blood, Sweat and Tears for a minute in 1969, but quit to work with Miles Davis.
"Miles, Wayne Shorter and I were the only constants in the band. I never knew who was going to show up. There'd be a different drummer every night—Tony Williams, Jack De Johnette, Billy Cobham. Ron Carter would play one night, next night Miroslav Vitous or Eddie Gomez. Chick Corea would play one night, next night Herbie Hancock. It never settled. We played all around but never recorded. This was previous to everyone having Walkman recorders. Miles had a great sense of humor. I couldn't stop laughing. I'd be on the bandstand and I'd remember some thing he said in the car to the gig, and right in the middle of a phrase I'd crack up!"
Henderson's worked more and more as a leader ever since, and recorded many albums, like Lush Life, with particular ideals. He recorded "concept" albums like The Elements with Alice Coltrane and was among the first to experiment with the new sounds of synthesizers. He composed tunes like Power to the People with a more social point of view. "I got politically involved in a musical way. Especially in the '60s, when people were trying to effect a cure for the ills that have beset this country for such a long time, I thought I'd use the music to convey some of my thoughts. I'd think of a title like Black Narcissus, and then put the music together. I'd try to create a nice melody, but at the same time, when people heard it on the radio, a title like Afro-Centric or Power to the People made a statement."
Words have always inspired Joe Henderson. "I try to create ideas in a musical way the same as writers try to create images with words. I use the mechanics of writing in playing solos. I use quotations. I use commas, semicolons. Pepper Adams turned me on to a writer, Henry Robinson. He wrote a sentence that spanned three or four pages before the period came. And it wasn't a stream of consciousness that went on and on and on. He was stopping, pausing in places with hyphens, brackets around things. He kept moving from left to right with this thought. I can remember in Detroit trying to do that, trying to play the longest meaningful phrase that I could pos sibly play before I took the obvious breath."
Henderson names Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Herman Hesse and the Bible among his favorites. "I think the creative faculties are the same whether you're a musician, a writer, a painter. I can appreciate a painter as if he were a musician playing a phrase with a stroke, the way he'll match two colors together the same as I'll match two tones together."
He tells a story uniquely as a soloist and composer, and he's inspired many musicians through the years. But what sometimes bothers Henderson is when oth ers imitate his strokes and his colors, but don't name the source. He heard a popular tenor saxist a while ago and was staggered. "I heard eight bars at a time that I know I worked out. I can tell you when I worked the music out. I can show you the music when I was putting it together. But when guys like this do an interview they don't acknowledge me. I'm not about to be bitter about this, but I've always felt good about acknowledging people who've had some thing to do with what I'm about. I've played the ideas of other people—Lester Young, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Lee Konitz, Stan Getz — and I mention these guys whenever I do an interview. But there are players who are putting stuff out as if it's their music and they didn't create it. I did."
He's nonetheless happy these days and amused about some of the excitement about Lush Life, that the new album, like every new album from Joe Henderson, feels like a comeback. "I have by no means vanished from the scene. I've never stopped playing. I'm very much at home in the trenches. I'm right out there on the front line. That's where I exist. I've been inspired joining the family at Polygram in a way I haven't been inspired in a long time. I'm gonna get busy and do what I'm supposed to do."
http://www.allmusic.com/artist/joe-henderson-mn0000139804/biography
JOE HENDERSON
Artist Biography by Scott Yanow
AllMusic.com
Joe Henderson is proof that jazz can sell without watering down the music; it just takes creative marketing. Although his sound and style were virtually unchanged from the mid-'60s, Joe Henderson's signing with Verve in 1992 was treated as a major news event by the label (even though he had already recorded many memorable sessions for other companies). His Verve recordings had easy-to-market themes (tributes to Billy Strayhorn, Miles Davis, and Antonio Carlos Jobim) and, as a result, he became a national celebrity and a constant poll winner while still sounding the same as when he was in obscurity in the 1970s.
The general feeling is that it couldn't have happened to a more deserving jazz musician. After studying at Kentucky State College and Wayne State University, Joe Henderson played locally in Detroit before spending time in the military (1960-1962). He played briefly with Jack McDuff and then gained recognition for his work with Kenny Dorham (1962-1963), a veteran bop trumpeter who championed him and helped Henderson get signed to Blue Note. Henderson appeared on many Blue Note sessions both as a leader and as a sideman, spent 1964-1966 with Horace Silver's Quintet, and during 1969-1970 was in Herbie Hancock's band. From the start, he had a very distinctive sound and style which, although influenced a bit by both Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane, also contained a lot of brand new phrases and ideas. Henderson had long been able to improvise in both inside and outside settings, from hard bop to freeform. In the 1970s, he recorded frequently for Milestone and lived in San Francisco, but was somewhat taken for granted. The second half of the 1980s found him continuing his freelancing and teaching while recording for Blue Note, but it was when he hooked up with Verve that he suddenly became famous. Virtually all of his recordings are currently in print on CD, including a massive collection of his neglected (but generally rewarding) Milestone dates. On June 30, 2001, Joe Henderson passed away due to heart failure after a long battle with emphysema.
http://www.allmusic.com/album/mode-for-joe-mw0000196145
'Mode for Joe'
Album by Joe Henderson. Blue Note. 1966
All Music Review by Eric Starr
Given the recording date of Mode for Joe and the band lineup, it's easy to assume this is a straight-up hard bop album. However, this 1966 Joe Henderson record -- featuring trumpeter Lee Morgan, trombonist Curtis Fuller, vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson, pianist Cedar Walton, bassist Ron Carter, and drummer Joe Chambers -- is a great example of modern jazz at its best. It was recorded during a time of sweeping musical changes due to developments in free jazz, soul-jazz, and even early experiments with fusion. It was a time when the bluesy and funky leanings of hard boppers were giving way to more individualized contemporary approaches. One of the best examples of this shift, Mode for Joe sounds more like the experimental work of Branford Marsalis than the groovy musings of Art Blakey & the Jazz Messengers. The last track here, "Free Wheelin'," is the only dyed-in-the-wool hard bop tune heard here. Other than that, this outing's mostly uptempo songs serve as vehicles for solos. Henderson himself proves that the template for players such as Marsalis, Joe Lovano, and Joshua Redman was invented a generation earlier, as evidenced on "A Shade of Jade," "Black," and others, making this one of the sax legend's most intriguing albums.
http://www.allaboutjazz.com/joe-henderson-page-one--1963-joe-henderson-by-marc-davis.php
Joe Henderson: Page One – 1963
by MARC DAVIS
June 15, 2015
AllAboutJazz
“Page One is the first of many great records in Henderson's long, distinguished career. ”
Joe Henderson is one of those jazz guys who made such a spectacular comeback late in life that you tend to forget how good he was in the beginning. Page One is all the evidence you need of Henderson's early heroics.
Let's start at the end.
The last four albums of Henderson's long, outstanding career were arguably his very best. Each was a tribute to music's past and each was amazing. In 1992, there was So Near, So Far (Musings for Miles). Later the same year, there was Lush Life: The Music of Billy Strayhorn. Two years later, in 1994, there was Double Rainbow: The Music of Antonio Carlos Jobim. And finally, his last album, in 1997, was Porgy and Bess. He died in 2001.
For any artist, these four records would be the highlight of a career. Each one is worth owning. But if you go back to the beginning of Henderson's career, you'll find another set of great albums.
Page One, from 1963, is Henderson's first as a leader, and quite possibly the best of his early recordings. The band is first-rate. In addition to Henderson on tenor, there's Kenny Dorham on trumpet, McCoy Tyner on piano, Butch Warren on bass and Pete LaRoca on drums. (Funny note: Tyner is actually uncredited on the album cover, which lists the other four musicians plus "ETC." Blue Note was afraid to openly acknowledge Tyner because he had just signed with another label. But that's him on the record.)
Page One boasts six diverse cuts with no alternate takes: Two bossa novas, two ballads and two hard bop numbers.
The Latin-style pieces ("Blue Bossa" and "Recorda Me") are delicious precisely because they're not your typical Stan Getz-Jobim bossa novas. Think, instead, of a cross between bop and bossa—mid-tempo Latin grooves that gently swing. Dorham puts a weird vibrato on his horn, Henderson sounds bold and very Sonny Rollins-ish, and Tyner has an unusually (for Tyner) flowery touch.
The two bop numbers are fantastic toe-tappers. "Homestretch" features some really nice unison playing by the horns. And "Jinrikisha" has the well-known Tyner block chords backing a Henderson solo that sounds a lot like John Coltrane. (Not a huge surprise because one year later Tyner would back Trane on the all-time classic A Love Supreme.)
Finally, the ballads. "La Mesha" features Henderson sounding sad and soulful, and Dorham sounding sweet and simple. But my favorite is the aptly named closer, "Out of the Night," a smoky blues that does, indeed, sound like it was recorded at midnight. Down, dirty and, well, bluesy.
Page One isn't my favorite Joe Henderson record (I prefer the later masterpieces) but it is an outstanding record indeed—the first of many great records in a very long, distinguished career.
Rating: 4 stars (out of 5)
http://musicians.allaboutjazz.com/joehendersonMy Blue Note Obsession
Joe Henderson: Page One – 1963
CD/LP/Track ReviewMode for Joe by Greg Simmons
In 'N Out by Greg Simmons
Power to the People by Tom Greenland
Power To the People by David Rickert
Inner Urge by Norman Weinstein
Joe Henderson In Japan by Derek Taylor
http://jazztimes.com/articles/75453-the-roots-of-joe-henderson
03/18/13
by Tom Reney
JazzTimes
The Roots of Joe Henderson
Tom Reney blogs about the saxophonist’s impact and influences
If the expression “auspicious beginning” hadn’t already been coined by 1963, Joe Henderson’s Page One would have inspired it. The tenor saxophonist made his masterful debut as a leader on June 3 of that year, eight weeks after appearing on record for the first time on Kenny Dorham’s Una Mas. Henderson had joined Durham’s quintet shortly after his arrival in New York in the late summer of 1962, and the trumpeter appeared with Henderson on Page One. Dorham also premiered his evergreen “Blue Bossa” on the date, and wrote the liner notes too. He hailed Henderson as “indubitably one of the most musical young saxophonists to show since Charlie Parker.”
Speaking of Bird, Henderson told Mel Martin in a 1991 interview for Saxophone Journal that when he studied music at Wayne State University in the late ’50s, he “learned every Charlie Parker tune that was ever written,” but that his early background in Lima, Ohio, gave him plenty of exposure to both R&B and C&W. “I know as much about Johnny Cash as I do about Charlie Parker, because I grew up in that area. This was all we heard on the radio…When I got a little older, I would go out to these dances…When James Brown, B.B. King and these cats would come to my hometown, I’d be there checking out the saxophone players.”
Henderson’s early exposure to jazz came primarily through a “jazz buff” brother who turned him on to a Jazz at the Philharmonic album where he heard Lester Young (“the first influence that I could single out”), Illinois Jacquet and Flip Phillips. Through this and other records, including Young’s “D.B. Blues,” he “knew what the saxophone was supposed to sound like” before he began playing it. Henderson’s interests were impressively wide-ranging, including the classical modernists Bartok, Hindemith and Stravinsky. Stan Getz was a formative influence, and the harmonic outer limits that intrigued him were modeled most compellingly by tenor saxophonist Warne Marsh on his 1949 recordings with the Lennie Tristano Sextet and the Lee Konitz Quintet.
In Unsung Cat: The Life and Music of Warne Marsh, Henderson told biographer Safford Chamberlain, “I could have had a hundred other records and they wouldn’t have meant as much to me as that one album,” which included “Marshmallow,” “Fishin’ Around,” “Tautology” and “Sound-Lee.” Henderson added, “A vital part of whatever it is I’m about today, I’m sure came from that zone, from hearing players like Marsh and Konitz who had some technical mastery over the instrument as well as great feeling.”
Henderson echoed an article of faith in the Tristano-Konitz-Marsh manifesto when he told Martin, “Having a sense of composition has served me well, and also having a rich sense of rhythm and a desire not to repeat stuff. I consider it one of the worst sins a musician could possibly commit, to play an idea more than one time. You’ve got to keep changing things around, keep inventing, especially when you’re making records. I came into it thinking of change as a constant thing.”
Henderson enjoyed a late-career flurry of acclaim for a series of recordings he made in the ’90s, beginning with Lush Life, an album devoted to compositions by Billy Strayhorn. The record was a critical and commercial success, selling over 90,000 copies, and it proved to be the first of three Grammy winners he enjoyed in the final decade of his life.
Joe Henderson, Saxophonist And Composer, Dies at 64
by BEN RATLIFF
July 3, 2001
New York Times
Joe Henderson, one of the great jazz saxophonists and a composer who wrote a handful of tunes known by almost every jazz student, died on Saturday in San Francisco. He was 64 and lived in San Francisco.
The cause was heart failure after a long struggle with emphysema, The Associated Press reported.
Mr. Henderson was unmistakably modern. ''Joe had one foot in the present, the other in the future, and he was just a step away from immortality,'' said the saxophonist Benny Golson. His tenor saxophone sound was shaded, insinuating, full of layers, with quicksilver lines amid careful ballad phrases and short trills. He had a clean, expressive upper register and a talent for improvising in semi-abstract harmony, and when the far-out years for jazz arrived in the mid-60's, led by musicians like John Coltrane and Miles Davis, he was well positioned to take part. He made a series of records for Milestone that used studio echo, Alice Coltrane's harp, violins, wood flutes and other exotic accouterments.
But Mr. Henderson's greatest strengths were more traditional: the ballad, the uptempo tune, the standard. And by the early 1990's, when he was a respected elder, he made some of his greatest statements on a series of well-produced, nearly theatrical albums for Verve Records.
Born in Lima, Ohio, he was one of 15 siblings. His parents and his brother James encouraged him to study music because of the talents he displayed as a saxophonist in his high school band. He attended Kentucky State College for a year, then transferred to Wayne State University in Detroit, where he was among fellow students like Yusef Lateef, Curtis Fuller and Hugh Lawson. In Detroit he worked with the saxophonist Sonny Stitt, and eventually formed his own group before joining the Army in 1960. He played in the Army band at Fort Benning, Ga., and toured military bases in the Far East and Europe with a revue called the Rolling Along Show.
In 1962 Mr. Henderson, who soon became a distinctive presence with his rail-thin body, thick black glasses and bushy mustache, was discharged and headed for New York. He quickly joined the young musicians recording for Blue Note records, especially the trumpeter Kenny Dorham, who was acting as a talent scout for the label. He made his recording debut in 1963 on Dorham's ''Una Mas,'' one of the classic Blue Note records of the early 60's.
Mr. Henderson was entering jazz at a fertile moment, when a few ambitious, challenging albums, like John Coltrane's ''My Favorite Things'' and Miles Davis's ''Kind of Blue,'' had broken through to a wide audience. A new self-possessed intellectualism was widespread in black music, and the experimental and traditional factions hadn't yet hardened their positions. Within the same four-month stretch as a Blue Note session regular, Mr. Henderson found himself playing solos on Lee Morgan's ''Sidewinder,'' an album full of bluesy, hard-bop tunes, and Andrew Hill's album ''Point of Departure,'' with its opaque, knotted harmonies and rhythmic convolutions. He played more roadhouse riffs on Morgan's record, more abstract thematic improvisations on Mr. Hill's, and sounded perfectly natural in both contexts.
After making five albums with Dorham, Mr. Henderson replaced Junior Cook in Horace Silver's band from 1964 to 1966. Again he was on hand for a milestone album, ''Song for My Father.'' He was also a member of Herbie Hancock's band from 1969 to 1970.
During the 60's he made several first-rate albums under his own name, including ''Page One'' and ''Inner Urge,'' and wrote tunes -- among them the blues pieces ''Isotope'' and ''A Shade of Jade,'' the waltz ''Black Narcissus,'' the bossa nova ''Recordame'' and the harmonically complex ''Inner Urge'' -- that earned lasting underground reputations as premium modern-jazz improvisational vehicles.
Mr. Henderson briefly joined the jazz-rock band Blood, Sweat and Tears in 1971, and his albums for Milestone, where he recorded until 1976, started to change from mystical Coltrane-inspired sessions to grooves and near jazz-rock. By the end of the 70's, he was working with the pianist Chick Corea. Then, after a five-year silence, he came back with the two volumes of ''The State of the Tenor.'' The first of his moves to redefine his career, these excellent mainstream jazz sets were recorded live at the Village Vanguard.
In the early 1990's he signed a new contract with Verve, which led to three Grammys. ''Lush Life,'' from 1991, used Billy Strayhorn tunes. With its first-rate playing and narrative arc -- it began with a duet, expanded to a quintet and ended with a saxophone solo -- it has sold nearly 90,000 copies, reports Soundscan, a company that tracks album sales.
Other songbook albums, only slightly less successful, included ''So Near, So Far (Musings for Miles),'' a treatment of pieces associated with Miles Davis; ''Double Rainbow,'' an album of Antonio Carlos Jobim's music; and Gershwin's ''Porgy and Bess,'' recorded with an all-star jazz lineup as well as the pop singers Sting and Chaka Khan. His 90's discography also included ''Joe Henderson Big Band,'' a lavish rendering of his compositions.
Mr. Henderson's survivors include a sister, Phyllis, and a brother, Troy. http://musicians.allaboutjazz.com/joehenderson
Joe Henderson
All About Jazz
Biography
The tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson was born on April 24, 1937 in a small city called Lima Ohio midway between Dayton and Toledo. He spent his childhood and adolescence in Lima in a family of 15 children where he was exposed to a variety of musical styles. By the time he was a high school student he was already arranging and writing music for the school band and other local outfits. It was in high school that a music teacher introduced him to the tenor saxophone. After graduation he enrolled first at the Kentucky State College to study music and then moved on to Wayne State University in Detroit. There he had as classmates several future jazz greats such as Yusef Lateef and Donald Byrd. From 1960-1962 he enlisted in the US army where he led several small jazz groups and won first place in a musical competition and was sent on a tour to entertain the troops all over Japan and Europe where he met a few of the expatriate musicians.
Early career: the Blue Note years
After being discharged from the army he traveled to New York and sat in at Birdland with Dexter Gordon and other local musicians. During one of these sessions he was introduced to the trumpeter Kenny Dorham who was so impressed by his musicianship that he arranged for Joe Henderson’s first recording session as a leader with Blue Note Records. This resulted in the record Page One (1963) which to this day remains one of his most critically acclaimed albums. This recording also spawned the standard Blue Bossa. During the following four years he led 4 other sessions for Blue Note and recorded as sideman on over to 2 dozen albums for the same label. Some of these records are today classics of not only the label but also of jazz music. Andrew Hill’s Point of Departure, Larry Young’s Unity, Horace Silver’s Song For My Father and Lee Morgan’s Sidewinder are just a few examples of those fruitful years. In addition to creating timeless music Joe Henderson’s style also evolved during this period to incorporate all genres of jazz from hard bop to avant garde from latin to soul-jazz.
Middle period: the Milestone, Verve and experimentation years
From 1967-1979 he recorded primarily for the Milestone label with occasional sessions as a leader for the Verve label and one, sorely underappreciated, record for the Enja label called Barcelona. Over this “middle period” of his career his style gradually evolved from the powerful acoustic style of post bop to fusion, electric music, avant garde and back to post-bop. Through all the changes, however, his virtuosity remained intact even when the some of the later records from this period were overall not as creative as his other works. During these years he also composed prolifically and co-led groups with Freddie Hubbard and Herbie Hancock. His forays outside of the realm of jazz led him to play with Blood Sweat and Tears and other rock and R and B groups. In the early seventies Joe Henderson became involved in teaching as well and moved to San Francisco.
The latter period: the 80s and the tenor trio.
The highlight of the 80s in Joe Henderson’s career was the recording of the phenomenal live session at the Village Vanguard released on a two disc set as The State of the Tenor Live at the Village Vanguard. It is a live trio set with bass and drums similar to Sonny Rollins’ landmark recordings of over 2 decades before. Despite garnering critical accolades the record remains underappreciated and not as well known as it should be.
The latter period:
The 90s, Verve, awards and commercial success
During the 90s Joe Henderson recorded 3 tribute sessions for Verve that were not only critically acclaimed but were also commercially highly successful. He won multiple Down Beat music awards in 1992, including the international critics and readers polls, was named jazz musician of the year and top tenor saxophonist. The first of the tribute albums Lush Life: The Music of Billy Strayhorn, named album of the year and went on to sell more than 450,000 worldwide in one year (1992); 100,000 copies of it in the United States. The success of those records launched his international career and he performed at many an international jazz festival and concert hall. The second of these albums So Near So Far: Musings for Miles won him a Grammy for best jazz performance. The decade also saw him recording as a sideman with a number of up and coming jazz musicians such as Renee Rosnes, Rebecca Coupe Franks, Stephen Scott and Holy Cole just to name a few.
In 1997 he recorded his last album Porgy and Bess and a year later he suffered a stroke that kept him from performing and in poor health. The world of jazz lost one of its great composers and most accomplished musicians on June 30th 2001 when Joe Henderson passed away from emphysema in San Francisco.
http://panopticonreview.blogspot.com/2014/04/joe-henderson-1934-2001-major.html
Friday, April 25, 2014
Joe Henderson (1934-2001), Major Saxophonist, Composer, and Bandleader: A Tribute On His 77th Birthday
JOE HENDERSON
(b. April 24, 1937--d. June 30, 2001)
http://www.joehendersonsax.com/biography/
http://www.joehendersonsax.com/video/
Biography
Joe Henderson (tenor saxophonist) was born on April 24, 1937 in Lima, Ohio and passed away on June 30, 2001 in San Francisco, California.
Born in the small city of Lima Ohio between Dayton and Toledo, he spent his childhood and adolescence years in a family of 15 children where he was exposed to a variety of musical styles, and was encouraged by his parents and older brother James T. to study music. He dedicated his first album to them for being so understanding and tolerant during his formative years.
By the time he was a high school student he was already arranging and writing music for the school band and other local outfits. It was in high school that a music teacher introduced him to the tenor saxophone. After graduation he enrolled first at the Kentucky State College to study music and then moved on to Wayne State University in Detroit. There he had as classmates several future jazz greats such as Yusef Lateef and Donald Byrd. From 1960-1962 he enlisted in the US army where he led several small jazz groups and won first place in a musical competition and was sent on a tour to entertain the troops all over Japan and Europe where he met a few of the expatriate musicians.
The Blue Note Years
After being discharged from the army he traveled to New York and sat in at Birdland with Dexter Gordon and other local musicians. During one of these sessions he was introduced to the trumpeter Kenny Dorham who was so impressed by his musicianship that he arranged for Joe Henderson’s first recording session as a leader with Blue Note Records. This resulted in the record Page One (1963) which to this day remains one of his most critically acclaimed albums. This recording also spawned the standard Blue Bossa.
During the following 4 years he led four other sessions for Blue Note and recorded as sideman on over to two dozen albums for the same label. Some of these records are today classics of not only the label but also of jazz music. Andrew Hill’s Point of Departure, Larry Young’s Unity, Horace Silver’s Song For My Father and Lee Morgan’s Sidewinder are just a few examples of those fruitful years. In addition to creating timeless music Joe Henderson’s style also evolved during this period to incorporate all genres of jazz, from hard bop to avant garde, from latin to soul-jazz.
The Milestone / Verve Years
From 1967-1979 he recorded primarily for the Milestone label with occasional sessions as a leader for the Verve label and one, sorely underappreciated, record for the Enja label called Barcelona. Over this “middle period” of his career his style gradually evolved from the powerful acoustic style of post bop to fusion, electric music, avant garde and back to post-bop. Through all the changes, however, his virtuosity remained intact even when the some of the later records from this period were overall not as creative as his other works. During these years he also composed prolifically and co-led groups with Freddie Hubbard and Herbie Hancock. His forays outside of the realm of jazz led him to play with Blood Sweat and Tears and other rock and R & B groups. In the early seventies Joe Henderson became involved in teaching as well and moved to San Francisco.
The Latter Years: 80s & 90s
The highlight of the 80s in Joe Henderson’s career was the recording of the phenomenal live session at the Village Vanguard released on a two disc set as The State of the Tenor Live at the Village Vanguard. It is a live trio set with bass and drums similar to Sonny Rollins’ landmark recordings of over 2 decades before. Despite garnering critical accolades the record remains underappreciated and not as well known as it should be.
During the 90s Joe Henderson recorded 3 tribute sessions for Verve that were not only critically acclaimed but were also commercially highly successful. He won multiple Down Beat music awards in 1992, including the international critics and readers polls, was named jazz musician of the year and top tenor saxophonist. The first of the tribute albums Lush Life: The Music of Billy Strayhorn, named album of the year and went on to sell more than 450,000 worldwide in one year (1992); 100,000 copies of it in the United States. The success of those records launched his international career and he performed at many an international jazz festival and concert hall. The second of these albums So Near So Far: Musings for Miles won him a Grammy for best jazz performance. The decade also saw him recording as a sideman with a number of up and coming jazz musicians such as Renee Rosnes, Rebecca Coupe Franks, Stephen Scott and Holy Cole just to name a few.
In 1997 he recorded his last album Porgy and Bess and a year later he suffered a stroke that kept him from performing and in poor health. The world of jazz lost one of its great composers and most accomplished musicians on June 30th 2001 when Joe Henderson passed away from emphysema in San Francisco.
http://jazzprofiles.blogspot.com/2013/09/joe-henderson-revelatory.html
Jazz Profiles
Focused profiles on Jazz and its makers.
Tuesday, September 17, 2013
Joe Henderson – Revelatory
© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.
For nearly thirty years, Henderson has possessed his own sound and has developed his own angles on swing, melody, timbre and harmony, while constantly expanding his own skill at playing in uncommon meters and rhythms. In his playing you hear an imposing variety of harmonic, rhythmic and melodic choices; you also hear his personal appropriation of the technical victories for his instrument achieved by men such as Sonny Stitt, Stan Getz, Sonny Rollins, Warne Marsh, Paul Gonsalves, Johnny Griffin and John Coltrane.
His, then, is a style informed by enormous sophistication, not limited by insufficient study or dependence on eccentric clichés brought into action for the purpose of masking the lack of detailed authority. In this tenor playing there's a relaxation in face of options that stretch from Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young and Charlie Parker to all of the substantial innovations since. So the music of Joe Henderson contains all of the components that make jazz so unique and so influential woven together with the sort of feeling, imagination, soul and technical authority that do the art proud.- Stanley Crouch, Jazz author and critic
In connection with Joe Henderson’s music, “revelatory” has as it’s meaning so much that is eloquent, expressive and significant that it is difficult to understand how often it is often overlooked, let alone, taken for granted by Jazz fans in general.
Names such as Coleman Hawkins, Chu Berry, Lester Young, Stan Getz, Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane are often mentioned as great tenor saxophonists, but Joe Henderson’s name is rarely among them.
It should be.
Joe’s sound and approach to improvisation are as distinctive and unique as any of the great tenor masters and his influence on generations of Jazz musicians has been huge.
Take for example this assessment of Joe’s significance by guitarist John Scofield:
"Joe Henderson is the essence of jazz ….He embodies musically all the different elements that came together in his generation: hard-bop masterfulness plus the avant-garde. He's a great bopper like Hank Mobley or Sonny Stitt, but he also plays out. He can take it far harmonically, but still with roots. He's a great blues player, a great ballads player. He has one of the most beautiful tones and can set as pretty as Pres or Stan Getz. He's got unbelievable time. He can float, but he can also dig in. He can put the music wherever he wants it. He's got his own vocabulary, his own phrases he plays all dif ferent ways, like all the great jazz players. He plays songs in his improvisations. He'll play a blues shout like something that would come from Joe Turner, next to some of the fastest, outest, most angular, atonal music you've ever heard. Who's playing bet ter on any instrument, more interest ingly, more cutting edge yet completely with roots than Joe Henderson? He's my role model in jazz."
And Joe is also no secret to the tenor saxophonists who evolved under his influence in the generation following his such as Joe Lovano and Branford Marsalis.
"Joe Henderson and Wayne Shorter emerged at the same time with their own sounds and rhythms and tunes. They inspired me as a young player ….Henderson always had his own voice. He's developed his own concepts with the inspirations of the people he dug but without copying them. I hear Joe in other tenor players. I hear not only phrases copped from Joe, but lately I hear younger cats trying to cop his sound. That's who you are as a player: your sound. It's one thing to learn from someone, but to copy his sound is strange. Joe's solo development live is a real journey — and you can't cop that! He's on an adventure whenever he plays."
- Joe Lovano
"Joe Henderson is one of the most influential saxophone players of the 20th century …. I learned all the solos on Mode for Joe and the records he did with McCoy Tyner, a lot of the stuff he's on, like The Prison er. He was one of the few saxophone players who could really play what I call the modern music, that really came from the bebop tradition but extended the harmonic tradition fur ther. There's a small group of guys in that pantheon: Coltrane, Wayne Shorter, Warne Marsh, Lucky Thompson, Sonny and Ornette, and Joe Hen. He's an amazing musician. I'm really jaded. I don't really go to the clubs anymore. There's not really anything I want to hear — except when Joe's in town. And when Joe's in town, I'm there every night!"
– Branford Marsalis
I got to know Joe a bit after the time of his interview with Michael Bourne for Downbeat [March, 1992; see below]. He had just finished the Lush Life [Verve/Polygram 314 511 779-2] tribute to Bill Strayhorn and was working on the charts that would appear a few years later on the Joe Henderson Big Band CD [Verve/Polygram 314 533 451-2].
He and I lived on either side of Divisadero Street in central San Francisco. Divisadero is a north-south traffic throughway that cuts through several neighborhoods, including Lower Haight, Alamo Square, Pacific Heights, and the Marina and offers a kaleidoscopic mix of dining, grocery, and merchant fronts that serve each neighborhood.
The first time we met, Joe was sitting in a barbecue ribs place on Divisadero called The Brothers and while I waited for my take-out order I spotted him sitting quietly in a window seat reading some music scoring sheets.
For years, Joe wore a straw-hat version of Lester Young’s pork-pie hat and big suspenders that adorned shirts with thick, colorful stripes. This garb along with his salt and pepper beard was a dead give-away so I sauntered up to him and said: “You’re Kenny Dorham aren’t you?" [Joe was close friends with trumpeter and composer Dorham and made his recording debut on Kenny’s Una Mas Blue Note LP.]
He looked up from his scores with a momentary, puzzled look that quickly turned into a smile once he saw that I was wearing one too.
Motioning me to sit down at the table next to him he asked: “And what would you know about Kenny Dorham?”
That conversation in various forms took on a life of its own for a number of years in a variety of Divisadero locations ranging from coffee shops to pizzerias.
During this period, Joe often talked about his big band disc which was issued on Verve in 1996 [314 533 451-2].
I didn’t see him very much after the Joe Henderson Big Band CD was released as by then I had moved to the West Portal area of the city.
Joe died in 2001 at the much-too-young-age of sixty-four [64].
The editorial staff at JazzProfiles wanted to remember Joe on these pages with this interview which is followed by a video playlist of Joe’s original compositions and/or solos by Joe in other settings.
© -Michael Bourne/Downbeat, copyright protected; all rights reserved.
He's not Pres-like or Bird-like, not 'Trane-ish or Newk-ish. None of the stylistic adjectives so convenient for critics work for tenor saxist Joe Henderson. It's evident he's listened to the greats: to Lester Young, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins — to them and all the others he's enjoyed. But he doesn't play like them, doesn't sound like them. Joe Henderson is a master, and, like the greats, unique.
When he came along in the '60s, jazz was happening every which way, from mainstream and avant-garde to blues, rock and then some, and everything that was happening he played. Henderson's saxo phone became a Triton's horn and trans formed the music, whatever the style, whatever the groove, into himself. And he's no different (or, really, always different) today. There's no "typical" Joe Henderson album, and every solo is, like the soloist, original and unusual, thoughtful and always from the heart.
"I think playing the saxophone is what I'm supposed to be doing on this planet," says Joe Henderson. "We all have to do some thing. I play the saxo phone. It's the best way I know that I can make the largest number of people happy and get for myself the largest amount of happiness."
Joe was born April 24, 1937, in Lima, Ohio. When he was nine he was tested for musical aptitude. "I wanted to play drums. I'd be making drums out of my mother's pie pans. But they said I'd gotten a high enough score that I could play anything, and they gave me a saxophone. It was a C melody. I played that about six months and went to the tenor. I was kind of born on the tenor." Even before he played, Joe was fascinated by his brother's jazz records. "I lis tened to Lester Young, Flip Phillips, Stan Getz, Charlie Parker, all the people associ ated with Jazz at the Philharmonic.
This stuff went into my ears early on, so when I started to play the saxophone I had in my mind an idea of how that instrument was supposed to sound. I also heard the rhythm-and-blues saxophone players when they came through my hometown."
Soon he was playing dances and learn ing melodies with his friends. "I think of playing music on the bandstand like an actor relates to a role. I've always wanted to be the best inter preter the world has ever seen. Where a preco cious youngster gets an idea like that is beyond me, but somehow improv isation set in on me pretty early, probably before I knew what improvisation was, really. I've always tried to re-create melodies even better than the composers who wrote them. I've always tried to come up with something that never even occurred to them. This is the challenge: not to rearrange the intentions of the composers but to stay within the parameters of what the composers have in mind and be creative and imaginative and meaningful."
One melody that's become almost as much Henderson's as the composer's is Ask Me Now by Thelonious Monk. He's recorded it often, each performance an odyssey of sounds and feelings.
"I play it 75 percent of the time because I like it and the other 25 percent because it's demanded that I play it. I sometimes have to play it twice a night, even three times. That tune just laid around for a while. Monk did an incredible job on it, but other than Monk I don't think I heard anyone play it before I recorded it. It's a great tune, very simple. There are some melodies that just stand by themselves. Gershwin was that kind of writer. You don't even have to improvise. You don't have to do anything but play the melody and people will be pleased. One of the songs like that is Lush Life. That's for me the most beautiful tune ever written. It's even more profound knowing that Hilly Strayhorn wrote it, words and music, when he was 17 or 18. How does an 18-year-old arrive at that point of feeling, that depth'"
Lush Life is the title song of Henderson's new album of Strayhorn's music. "Musicians have to plant some trees—and replant some trees to extend the life of these good things. Billy Strayhorn was one of the people whose talent should be known. Duke Ellington knew about him, so that says something. There are still a lot of peo ple who haven't heard Strayhorn's music, but if I can do something to enable them to become aware of Strayhorn's genius. I'd feel great about that."
Lush Life is the first of several projects he'll record for Verve. Don Sickler worked with Henderson selecting and arranging some of Strayhorn's classics and, with Polygram Jazz VP Richard Seidel, pro duced the album. Henderson plays Lush Life alone, and, on the other songs he's joined for duets to quintets by four of the brightest young players around, pianist Stephen Scott, bassist Christian McBride, drummer Gregory Hutchinson, and trum peter Wynton Marsalis. That the interplay of generations is respectful, inspirational and affectionate is obvious.
"I think this was part of it, to present some of the youngsters with one of the more established voices. This is the natural way that it happens. This is the way it hap pened for me. I wouldn't have met the peo ple I met if it hadn't been for Kenny Dorham, Horace Silver, Miles Davis, peo ple I've been on the bandstand with. They introduced me to their audience. We have to do things like this. When older musicians like me find people who can continue the tradition, we have to create ways to bring these people to the fore."
Henderson came to the fore in the '60s. He'd studied for a year at Kentucky State, then four years at Wayne State in Detroit, where he often gigged alongside Yusef Lateef, Barry Harris, Hugh Lawson and Donald Byrd. He was drafted in 1960 and played bass in a military show that traveled the world. While touring in 1961, he met and played with Bud Powell and Kenny Clarke in Paris. Once he was dis charged in 1962, he settled in New York, where so many of his friends from Detroit were already regulars, and where trum peter Kenny Dorham became a brother.
"Kenny Dorham was one of the most important creators in New York, and he's damn near a name you don't hear any more. That's a shame. How can you over look a diamond in the rough like him? There haven't been that many people who have that much on the ball creatively as Kenny Dorham."
Henderson's first professional record ing was Dorham's album Una Mas, the first of many albums he recorded through the '60s as a sideman or a leader for Blue Note. This was the classic time of Blue Note, and what's most remarkable is the variety of music Henderson played, from the grooves of Lee Morgan's The Sidewinder to the avant-garde sounds of Andrew Hill's Point of Departure. Whatever was happening musically, Joe Henderson was a natural.
"That's part of what I wanted to do early on — be the best interpreter I could pos sibly be. I wanted to interpret Andrew Hill's music better than he could write it, the same with Duke Pearson and Horace Silver. I'd study and try to find ways of being imagina tive and interesting for this music without changing the music around. I didn't want to make Horace Silver's music different from what he had in mind. I wanted to make it even more of what he had in mind."
He joined the Horace Silver band for several years and fronted a big band with
Kenny Dorham — music he'll re-create and record this year at Lincoln Center. He worked with Blood, Sweat and Tears for a minute in 1969, but quit to work with Miles Davis.
"Miles, Wayne Shorter and I were the only constants in the band. I never knew who was going to show up. There'd be a different drummer every night—Tony Williams, Jack De Johnette, Billy Cobham. Ron Carter would play one night, next night Miroslav Vitous or Eddie Gomez. Chick Corea would play one night, next night Herbie Hancock. It never settled. We played all around but never recorded. This was previous to everyone having Walkman recorders. Miles had a great sense of humor. I couldn't stop laughing. I'd be on the bandstand and I'd remember some thing he said in the car to the gig, and right in the middle of a phrase I'd crack up!"
Henderson's worked more and more as a leader ever since, and recorded many albums, like Lush Life, with particular ideals. He recorded "concept" albums like The Elements with Alice Coltrane and was among the first to experiment with the new sounds of synthesizers. He composed tunes like Power to the People with a more social point of view. "I got politically involved in a musical way. Especially in the '60s, when people were trying to effect a cure for the ills that have beset this country for such a long time, I thought I'd use the music to convey some of my thoughts. I'd think of a title like Black Narcissus, and then put the music together. I'd try to create a nice melody, but at the same time, when people heard it on the radio, a title like Afro-Centric or Power to the People made a statement."
Words have always inspired Joe Henderson. "I try to create ideas in a musical way the same as writers try to create images with words. I use the mechanics of writing in playing solos. I use quotations. I use commas, semicolons. Pepper Adams turned me on to a writer, Henry Robinson. He wrote a sentence that spanned three or four pages before the period came. And it wasn't a stream of consciousness that went on and on and on. He was stopping, pausing in places with hyphens, brackets around things. He kept moving from left to right with this thought. I can remember in Detroit trying to do that, trying to play the longest meaningful phrase that I could pos sibly play before I took the obvious breath."
Henderson names Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Herman Hesse and the Bible among his favorites. "I think the creative faculties are the same whether you're a musician, a writer, a painter. I can appreciate a painter as if he were a musician playing a phrase with a stroke, the way he'll match two colors together the same as I'll match two tones together."
He tells a story uniquely as a soloist and composer, and he's inspired many musicians through the years. But what sometimes bothers Henderson is when oth ers imitate his strokes and his colors, but don't name the source. He heard a popular tenor saxist a while ago and was staggered. "I heard eight bars at a time that I know I worked out. I can tell you when I worked the music out. I can show you the music when I was putting it together. But when guys like this do an interview they don't acknowledge me. I'm not about to be bitter about this, but I've always felt good about acknowledging people who've had some thing to do with what I'm about. I've played the ideas of other people—Lester Young, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Lee Konitz, Stan Getz — and I mention these guys whenever I do an interview. But there are players who are putting stuff out as if it's their music and they didn't create it. I did."
He's nonetheless happy these days and amused about some of the excitement about Lush Life, that the new album, like every new album from Joe Henderson, feels like a comeback. "I have by no means vanished from the scene. I've never stopped playing. I'm very much at home in the trenches. I'm right out there on the front line. That's where I exist. I've been inspired joining the family at Polygram in a way I haven't been inspired in a long time. I'm gonna get busy and do what I'm supposed to do."
http://www.allmusic.com/artist/joe-henderson-mn0000139804/biography
JOE HENDERSON
Artist Biography by Scott Yanow
AllMusic.com
Joe Henderson is proof that jazz can sell without watering down the music; it just takes creative marketing. Although his sound and style were virtually unchanged from the mid-'60s, Joe Henderson's signing with Verve in 1992 was treated as a major news event by the label (even though he had already recorded many memorable sessions for other companies). His Verve recordings had easy-to-market themes (tributes to Billy Strayhorn, Miles Davis, and Antonio Carlos Jobim) and, as a result, he became a national celebrity and a constant poll winner while still sounding the same as when he was in obscurity in the 1970s.
The general feeling is that it couldn't have happened to a more deserving jazz musician. After studying at Kentucky State College and Wayne State University, Joe Henderson played locally in Detroit before spending time in the military (1960-1962). He played briefly with Jack McDuff and then gained recognition for his work with Kenny Dorham (1962-1963), a veteran bop trumpeter who championed him and helped Henderson get signed to Blue Note. Henderson appeared on many Blue Note sessions both as a leader and as a sideman, spent 1964-1966 with Horace Silver's Quintet, and during 1969-1970 was in Herbie Hancock's band. From the start, he had a very distinctive sound and style which, although influenced a bit by both Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane, also contained a lot of brand new phrases and ideas. Henderson had long been able to improvise in both inside and outside settings, from hard bop to freeform. In the 1970s, he recorded frequently for Milestone and lived in San Francisco, but was somewhat taken for granted. The second half of the 1980s found him continuing his freelancing and teaching while recording for Blue Note, but it was when he hooked up with Verve that he suddenly became famous. Virtually all of his recordings are currently in print on CD, including a massive collection of his neglected (but generally rewarding) Milestone dates. On June 30, 2001, Joe Henderson passed away due to heart failure after a long battle with emphysema.
http://www.allmusic.com/album/mode-for-joe-mw0000196145
'Mode for Joe'
Album by Joe Henderson. Blue Note. 1966
All Music Review by Eric Starr
Given the recording date of Mode for Joe and the band lineup, it's easy to assume this is a straight-up hard bop album. However, this 1966 Joe Henderson record -- featuring trumpeter Lee Morgan, trombonist Curtis Fuller, vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson, pianist Cedar Walton, bassist Ron Carter, and drummer Joe Chambers -- is a great example of modern jazz at its best. It was recorded during a time of sweeping musical changes due to developments in free jazz, soul-jazz, and even early experiments with fusion. It was a time when the bluesy and funky leanings of hard boppers were giving way to more individualized contemporary approaches. One of the best examples of this shift, Mode for Joe sounds more like the experimental work of Branford Marsalis than the groovy musings of Art Blakey & the Jazz Messengers. The last track here, "Free Wheelin'," is the only dyed-in-the-wool hard bop tune heard here. Other than that, this outing's mostly uptempo songs serve as vehicles for solos. Henderson himself proves that the template for players such as Marsalis, Joe Lovano, and Joshua Redman was invented a generation earlier, as evidenced on "A Shade of Jade," "Black," and others, making this one of the sax legend's most intriguing albums.
http://www.allaboutjazz.com/joe-henderson-page-one--1963-joe-henderson-by-marc-davis.php
Joe Henderson: Page One – 1963
by MARC DAVIS
June 15, 2015
AllAboutJazz
“Page One is the first of many great records in Henderson's long, distinguished career. ”
Joe Henderson is one of those jazz guys who made such a spectacular comeback late in life that you tend to forget how good he was in the beginning. Page One is all the evidence you need of Henderson's early heroics.
Let's start at the end.
The last four albums of Henderson's long, outstanding career were arguably his very best. Each was a tribute to music's past and each was amazing. In 1992, there was So Near, So Far (Musings for Miles). Later the same year, there was Lush Life: The Music of Billy Strayhorn. Two years later, in 1994, there was Double Rainbow: The Music of Antonio Carlos Jobim. And finally, his last album, in 1997, was Porgy and Bess. He died in 2001.
For any artist, these four records would be the highlight of a career. Each one is worth owning. But if you go back to the beginning of Henderson's career, you'll find another set of great albums.
Page One, from 1963, is Henderson's first as a leader, and quite possibly the best of his early recordings. The band is first-rate. In addition to Henderson on tenor, there's Kenny Dorham on trumpet, McCoy Tyner on piano, Butch Warren on bass and Pete LaRoca on drums. (Funny note: Tyner is actually uncredited on the album cover, which lists the other four musicians plus "ETC." Blue Note was afraid to openly acknowledge Tyner because he had just signed with another label. But that's him on the record.)
Page One boasts six diverse cuts with no alternate takes: Two bossa novas, two ballads and two hard bop numbers.
The Latin-style pieces ("Blue Bossa" and "Recorda Me") are delicious precisely because they're not your typical Stan Getz-Jobim bossa novas. Think, instead, of a cross between bop and bossa—mid-tempo Latin grooves that gently swing. Dorham puts a weird vibrato on his horn, Henderson sounds bold and very Sonny Rollins-ish, and Tyner has an unusually (for Tyner) flowery touch.
The two bop numbers are fantastic toe-tappers. "Homestretch" features some really nice unison playing by the horns. And "Jinrikisha" has the well-known Tyner block chords backing a Henderson solo that sounds a lot like John Coltrane. (Not a huge surprise because one year later Tyner would back Trane on the all-time classic A Love Supreme.)
Finally, the ballads. "La Mesha" features Henderson sounding sad and soulful, and Dorham sounding sweet and simple. But my favorite is the aptly named closer, "Out of the Night," a smoky blues that does, indeed, sound like it was recorded at midnight. Down, dirty and, well, bluesy.
Page One isn't my favorite Joe Henderson record (I prefer the later masterpieces) but it is an outstanding record indeed—the first of many great records in a very long, distinguished career.
Rating: 4 stars (out of 5)
http://musicians.allaboutjazz.com/joehendersonMy Blue Note Obsession
Joe Henderson: Page One – 1963
CD/LP/Track ReviewMode for Joe by Greg Simmons
In 'N Out by Greg Simmons
Power to the People by Tom Greenland
Power To the People by David Rickert
Inner Urge by Norman Weinstein
Joe Henderson In Japan by Derek Taylor
http://jazztimes.com/articles/75453-the-roots-of-joe-henderson
03/18/13
by Tom Reney
JazzTimes
The Roots of Joe Henderson
Tom Reney blogs about the saxophonist’s impact and influences
If the expression “auspicious beginning” hadn’t already been coined by 1963, Joe Henderson’s Page One would have inspired it. The tenor saxophonist made his masterful debut as a leader on June 3 of that year, eight weeks after appearing on record for the first time on Kenny Dorham’s Una Mas. Henderson had joined Durham’s quintet shortly after his arrival in New York in the late summer of 1962, and the trumpeter appeared with Henderson on Page One. Dorham also premiered his evergreen “Blue Bossa” on the date, and wrote the liner notes too. He hailed Henderson as “indubitably one of the most musical young saxophonists to show since Charlie Parker.”
Elvin Jones with Joe Henderson and Shirley Horn, 1995
Jimmy Katz
JOE HENDERSON
Speaking of Bird, Henderson told Mel Martin in a 1991 interview for Saxophone Journal that when he studied music at Wayne State University in the late ’50s, he “learned every Charlie Parker tune that was ever written,” but that his early background in Lima, Ohio, gave him plenty of exposure to both R&B and C&W. “I know as much about Johnny Cash as I do about Charlie Parker, because I grew up in that area. This was all we heard on the radio…When I got a little older, I would go out to these dances…When James Brown, B.B. King and these cats would come to my hometown, I’d be there checking out the saxophone players.”
Henderson’s early exposure to jazz came primarily through a “jazz buff” brother who turned him on to a Jazz at the Philharmonic album where he heard Lester Young (“the first influence that I could single out”), Illinois Jacquet and Flip Phillips. Through this and other records, including Young’s “D.B. Blues,” he “knew what the saxophone was supposed to sound like” before he began playing it. Henderson’s interests were impressively wide-ranging, including the classical modernists Bartok, Hindemith and Stravinsky. Stan Getz was a formative influence, and the harmonic outer limits that intrigued him were modeled most compellingly by tenor saxophonist Warne Marsh on his 1949 recordings with the Lennie Tristano Sextet and the Lee Konitz Quintet.
In Unsung Cat: The Life and Music of Warne Marsh, Henderson told biographer Safford Chamberlain, “I could have had a hundred other records and they wouldn’t have meant as much to me as that one album,” which included “Marshmallow,” “Fishin’ Around,” “Tautology” and “Sound-Lee.” Henderson added, “A vital part of whatever it is I’m about today, I’m sure came from that zone, from hearing players like Marsh and Konitz who had some technical mastery over the instrument as well as great feeling.”
Henderson echoed an article of faith in the Tristano-Konitz-Marsh manifesto when he told Martin, “Having a sense of composition has served me well, and also having a rich sense of rhythm and a desire not to repeat stuff. I consider it one of the worst sins a musician could possibly commit, to play an idea more than one time. You’ve got to keep changing things around, keep inventing, especially when you’re making records. I came into it thinking of change as a constant thing.”
Henderson enjoyed a late-career flurry of acclaim for a series of recordings he made in the ’90s, beginning with Lush Life, an album devoted to compositions by Billy Strayhorn. The record was a critical and commercial success, selling over 90,000 copies, and it proved to be the first of three Grammy winners he enjoyed in the final decade of his life.
THE DOZENS: ESSENTIAL JOE HENDERSON
by S. Victor Aaron
Jazz.com
Joe Henderson. Photo by Jos L. Knaepen
So many tenor saxophonists who came of age in the 1960s adapted heavily from both Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane, but none exceeded the success that Joe Henderson had in forging his own inimitable style from two such familiar influences. Henderson’s “inside-outside” approach was nuanced enough to bring vitality to tender ballads and abrasive enough to set more dynamic songs afire.
First making an impact as a member of Horace Silver’s Song for My Father quintet, Henderson also appeared on such other notable records as Lee Morgan’s The Sidewinder, Andrew Hill’s Point of Departure and McCoy Tyner’s The Real McCoy, just to name a few from early in his career. Many of Henderson’s own records of that time were of nearly equal quality: the Blue Notes from Page One to Mode for Joe, and the following Milestone era that produced such great works as Tetragon, Power to the People, and live In Japan.
Despite his outstanding recordings, Henderson spent much of the next couple of decades sharing roughly the same status to most jazz listeners as, say, Curtis Fuller or George Coleman: a talented and valuable Blue Note sideman. That finally started to change in the fall of 1985, when a pivotal live performance helped Henderson achieve in the jazz public’s mind the lofty standing that his playing had already earned more than 20 years earlier. The Verve years of the 1990s, with tributes to Miles Davis, Antonio Carlos Jobim and Billy Strayhorn, cemented his legend and belatedly brought him the commercial returns scant few who toil in uncompromised jazz enjoy.
And if anything, that’s perhaps Henderson’s overarching accomplishment: stubbornly sticking to his undiluted approach, he nudged the boundaries of hard bop when he could have effortlessly pursued the crossover success that most of his contemporaries sought. Instead of Joe Henderson finding an audience, the audience found Joe Henderson. He died in 2001 at age 64 and at peace in knowing that he had persevered.
The following 12 selections provide a representative cross section of Henderson’s work as a leader, in varying settings, eras and song styles. Since most of his artistic fulfillment occurred in the 1960s, there’s a preponderance of selections from that period, with a notable performance apiece from each of the three succeeding decades.
Joe Henderson: Blue Bossa
Buy Track
Musicians:
Joe Henderson (tenor sax), Kenny Dorham (trumpet), McCoy Tyner (piano), Butch Warren (bass), Pete La Roca (drums).
Composed by Kenny Dorham
.
Recorded: Englewood Cliffs, NJ, June 3, 1963Joe Henderson (tenor sax), Kenny Dorham (trumpet), McCoy Tyner (piano), Butch Warren (bass), Pete La Roca (drums).
Composed by Kenny Dorham
.
Rating: 96/100 (learn more)
As the title advertises, "Blue Bossa" is bossa nova with blues overtones. An eminently catchy tune (even non-jazz fans recognize it), it's Kenny Dorham's rightful entry into the jazz standards canon. In original form here as the first track from Joe Henderson's debut album, a strong composition is given strong treatment. After the two horn players state the theme in unison, Dorham takes the lead, restating his theme with a succession of rapid-fire tremolos that sound like he's playing his trumpet behind an electric fan. The rest of the way, he stays close to the theme in a clean and relaxed manner. Henderson's ensuing solo introduces his warm tenor from the Sonny Rollins school, finding notes that aren't always obvious but always fit. Foreshadowing his affinity for Antonio Carlos Jobim's music, Tyner already sounds right at home with the Brazilian form. Warren makes his own solo statement concise."Blue Bossa" introduced the world to Joe Henderson in fine fashion. This classic piece remains the place to start for discovering the treasure trove of Henderson's body of work.
Reviewer: S. Victor Aaron
Joe Henderson: Recorda Me
Track
Recorda Me [aka Recordame, Recorda-me]
Artist
Joe Henderson (tenor sax)
CD
Page One (Blue Note BST-84140)
Musicians:
Joe Henderson (tenor sax), Kenny Dorham (trumpet), McCoy Tyner (piano), Butch Warren (bass), Pete La Roca (drums).
Composed by Joe Henderson
.
Recorded: Englewood Cliffs, NJ, June 3, 1963Joe Henderson (tenor sax), Kenny Dorham (trumpet), McCoy Tyner (piano), Butch Warren (bass), Pete La Roca (drums).
Composed by Joe Henderson
.
Rating: 97/100 (learn more)
Like its more recognizable album mate "Blue Bossa," "Recorda Me" is bossa nova at its core. However, this Joe Henderson-penned tune boasts a shiftier rhythm underneath and busier thematic lines out front. Another difference is that Henderson leads off the soloing this time, and it's here that his careful phrasing and modulation of intensity testify to his tenor mastery. Kenny Dorham contrasts nicely by holding his notes where there might be spaces. Tyner's own lead shows off a little bit of his familiar detached, right-hand arpeggios before a horn line signals the transition back to the head."Recorda Me" became a longtime staple in Joe Henderson's live performances and has been covered by acts as diverse as the fusion supergroup Steps Ahead and avant-garde giant Anthony Braxton. This early Henderson composition has stood the tests of both time and presentation quite well.
Reviewer: S. Victor Aaron
Joe Henderson: Our Thing
Musicians:
Joe Henderson (tenor sax), Kenny Dorham (trumpet), Andrew Hill (piano), Pete La Roca (drums),
Eddie Khan (bass)
. Composed by Joe Henderson
.
Recorded: Englewood Cliffs, NJ, September 9, 1963Joe Henderson (tenor sax), Kenny Dorham (trumpet), Andrew Hill (piano), Pete La Roca (drums),
Eddie Khan (bass)
. Composed by Joe Henderson
.
Rating: 93/100 (learn more)
With its variable beats and hot bop lines, "Our Thing" could be considered something of a precursor to the better-known "The Kicker," which Joe Henderson would record the following year with the Horace Silver Quintet. But even more than with the song he lent to Silver, Henderson tests the limits of hard bop with "Our Thing."The time signature changes from double-time to a leisurely gallop and back again. The main theme that rides on this rocky rhythm might be a gauntlet for most horn players to negotiate alone, much less in perfect unison with another musician as Henderson and Dorham do here. Henderson swings superbly on his solo, and Dorham lays down some Clifford Brown-type phrasing before turning matters over to Hill and his rhythmic precision.
"Our Thing" shows Henderson the composer constructing complex harmonics and tempos, even near the beginning of his career.
Reviewer: S. Victor Aaron
Joe Henderson: Punjab
Buy Track
Musicians:
Joe Henderson (tenor sax), McCoy Tyner (piano), Richard Davis (bass), Elvin Jones (drums).
Composed by Joe Henderson
.
Recorded: Englewood Cliffs, NJ, April 10, 1964Joe Henderson (tenor sax), McCoy Tyner (piano), Richard Davis (bass), Elvin Jones (drums).
Composed by Joe Henderson
.
Rating: 95/100 (learn more)
Like many of Joe Henderson's songs, "Punjab" is the kind of modern jazz composition that arose in the wake of harmonic innovations introduced in Coltrane's Giant Steps and Miles's Kind of Blue. There's a lot of root movement in the thematic line declared by Henderson and Dorham. While the tune is a blues at its core, it's a longer form than the standard 12 bars. But since it's still the blues, Henderson sounds right at home, producing an endless wellspring of articulations that employ both lightning-fast arpeggios and easygoing, rhythmic phrases, all gliding over a melody with strange chord changes. And oddly enough, it's a melody that's hard to shake once it gets inside of you. "Punjab" succeeds in making the complex simple to digest.Reviewer: S. Victor Aaron
Joe Henderson: Inner Urge
Buy Track
Musicians:
Joe Henderson (tenor sax), McCoy Tyner (piano), Bob Cranshaw (bass), Elvin Jones (drums).
Recorded: Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, November 30, 1964 Joe Henderson (tenor sax), McCoy Tyner (piano), Bob Cranshaw (bass), Elvin Jones (drums).
Rating: 95/100 (learn more)
"Inner Urge" is a hard-swinging vehicle for a torrid blowing session. Joe Henderson lined up Coltrane's pianist and drummer (as well as Rollins's bass player) to back him, just nine days before Trane's two sidemen joined their boss (and bassist Jimmy Garrison) to record A Love Supreme. Clearly Henderson was seriously intent on showing he could measure up to two of his primary tenor influences, and doesn't disappoint.Henderson's two solos here are extended, but he keeps things flowing by liberally mixing pleasantly tuneful passages with exciting, turbulent ones. Cranshaw and Tyner also sparkle during their turns. Elvin Jones, however, nearly steals the show with peerless, thunderous polyrhythms that rank among his better drum solos on record.
As a supremely confident saxophonist already running out of things to prove at this stage, Henderson again upped the ante with "Inner Urge."
Reviewer: S. Victor Aaron
Joe Henderson: Mode For Joe
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Musicians:
Joe Henderson (tenor sax), Lee Morgan (trumpet), Curtis Fuller (trombone), Bobby Hutcherson (vibes), Cedar Walton (piano), Ron Carter (bass), Joe Chambers (drums).
Composed by Cedar Walton
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Recorded: Englewood Cliffs, NJ, January 27, 1966Joe Henderson (tenor sax), Lee Morgan (trumpet), Curtis Fuller (trombone), Bobby Hutcherson (vibes), Cedar Walton (piano), Ron Carter (bass), Joe Chambers (drums).
Composed by Cedar Walton
.
Rating: 100/100 (learn more)
Cedar Walton is no minor composer, but he may have reached the pinnacle with "Mode for Joe." Chords gracefully ascend and descend, and optimal use is made of spacing and timing. The expanded horn ensemble along with Hutcherson's vibes gives the song the elegant heft it demands, without being too large to play nimbly.This song isn't perfect just because Walton scored it flawlessly, though. "Mode" is a signature Joe Henderson performance as well. In the midst of the call and response between Henderson and the rest of the front line, the leader shocks the listener by inserting some rough, dissonant lines that he repeats precisely as played the first time. His solo that follows is likewise a mixture of cool, precise phrasing with loosely conceived statements punctuated by coarse honks.
Like the great painter Picasso, Joe Henderson combines the odd with the beautiful to create something oddly beautiful.
Reviewer: S. Victor Aaron
Joe Henderson: Tetragon
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Musicians:
Joe Henderson (tenor sax), Kenny Barron (piano), Ron Carter (bass), Louis Hayes (drums).
Composed by Joe Henderson
.
Recorded: New York, September 27, 1967 and May 16, 1968Joe Henderson (tenor sax), Kenny Barron (piano), Ron Carter (bass), Louis Hayes (drums).
Composed by Joe Henderson
.
Rating: 91/100 (learn more)
"Tetragon" is a modernized bebop tune, with the head demonstrating Joe Henderson's flair for imaginative chord progressions. This time, it's a series of descending chords and a start-stop melody that gives the song distinction. Another distinction is Henderson's sheer speed in running through scales even through chord changes. While he had the ability to modulate brilliantly between hot and cool from one phrase to the next, it's almost all hot blowing in this instance, and it's top notch. Henderson gets some solid comping from Kenny Barron, who was just starting to come into his own around this time. The pianist steps out shortly thereafter into a fine solo, followed by Ron Carter's blues walking on his standup bass.Though inspired largely by postwar jazz, Joe Henderson's blues-based "Tetragon" is a timeless display of artistry.
Reviewer: S. Victor Aaron
Joe Henderson: Waltz For Zweetie
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Musicians:
Joe Henderson (tenor sax), Don Friedman (piano), Ron Carter (bass), Jack DeJohnette (drums).
Composed by Walter Bishop
.
Recorded: New York, September 27, 1967 and May 16, 1968Joe Henderson (tenor sax), Don Friedman (piano), Ron Carter (bass), Jack DeJohnette (drums).
Composed by Walter Bishop
.
Rating: 94/100 (learn more)
"Waltz For Zweetie" provides a contrast from the more advanced compositions that Joe Henderson was then tackling. The inaugural recording of Walter Bishop's tune casts the tenorman in more conventional 3/4 time, showing off his knack for the sweet, romantic style that waltzes typically call for. The piece is also more democratic, as Friedman's impressionistic stylings get fully articulated and Carter's bass work is outstanding in its range and lyricism. The leader himself solos last, steadfastly in the Rollins tradition and making excellent use of space. "Waltz For Zweetie" hasn't been covered much since, which is a shame. It's got a light, buoyant melody that's memorable. In any case, it would be hard to beat Joe Henderson's rendition.Reviewer: S. Victor Aaron
Joe Henderson: Black Narcissus
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Musicians:
Joe Henderson (tenor sax), Herbie Hancock (electric piano), Ron Carter (bass), Jack DeJohnette (drums).
Composed by Joe Henderson
.
Recorded: New York, May 29, 1969Joe Henderson (tenor sax), Herbie Hancock (electric piano), Ron Carter (bass), Jack DeJohnette (drums).
Composed by Joe Henderson
.
Rating: 96/100 (learn more)
Jazz was changing rapidly as the '60s turned into the '70s, and Joe Henderson was present for much of it; he participated in Freddie Hubbard's Red Clay and Herbie Hancock's Fat Albert Rotunda, after all. But while Henderson was open for electric instrumentation in his own work, he also steadfastly refused to commercialize his music.Henderson's first departure from an all-acoustic format as a leader came in the guise of a beautiful tone poem he wrote called "Black Narcissus." The only plugged-in instrument may have been Herbie Hancock's Fender Rhodes, but it was critical in giving the song a warm glow. Combined with Ron Carter's delicately plucked high notes, the song has an ethereal soundscape upon which Henderson quietly drops his notes.
"Black Narcissus" is less about Henderson's considerable sax skills than about his acumen in sketching atmospheric pieces. As far as those go, this is one of his best.
Reviewer: S. Victor Aaron
Joe Henderson: 'Round Midnight
Buy Track
Musicians:
Joe Henderson (tenor sax),
Hideo Ichikawa (electric piano), Kunimitsu Inaba (bass), Motohiko Hino (drums)
. Composed by Thelonious Monk
.
Recorded: live at The Junk Club, Tokyo, Japan, August 4, 1971Joe Henderson (tenor sax),
Hideo Ichikawa (electric piano), Kunimitsu Inaba (bass), Motohiko Hino (drums)
. Composed by Thelonious Monk
.
Rating: 92/100 (learn more)
In the early '70s, Joe Henderson had Monk's most celebrated tune at least semi-regularly in his live rotation, as evidenced by its inclusion in At the Lighthouse, recorded almost a year earlier. This time, however, there's no trumpet player, and Henderson allows himself to stretch more.And stretch he does. Starting the song unaccompanied, he combines trills with trips to the altissimo register, playing coyly and summoning up Coleman Hawkins. Never in this a cappella performance does he lose track of the melodic line. As the local backing players enter three minutes later, Henderson glides right into the groove. Hino is playing with an ear close to what the leader is doing, and Inaba is rock solid. Ichikawa doesn't shrink from the challenge of following Henderson, bringing much humanness to his electric piano.
Joe Henderson could spin magic no matter what he played, where he played, or with whom he played.
Reviewer: S. Victor Aaron
Joe Henderson: Isotope
Buy Track
Musicians:
Joe Henderson (tenor sax), Ron Carter (bass), Al Foster (drums).
Composed by Joe Henderson
.
Recorded: live at the Village Vanguard, New York, November 16, 1985Joe Henderson (tenor sax), Ron Carter (bass), Al Foster (drums).
Composed by Joe Henderson
.
Rating: 92/100 (learn more)
"Isotope" first appeared on Joe Henderson's 1964 album Inner Urge, but this version is of special interest because of the way he deconstructs the tune down to the root. In the 1964 version, he played the advanced bop thematic line in unison with a piano. This 1985 version takes the piano out of the equation, leaving it up to the remaining three to fill in the void left by the absence of a comping instrument.Luckily, he's got Ron Carter to help out. Carter finds the crucial notes for filling out the melody on the bottom end, while Henderson performs that task for the higher registers while simultaneously blowing out quick arpeggios and other expressions. Foster keeps a beat at about double-time the original, adding his accents in appropriate spots to prod along the other two.
"Isotope" was a long-time staple in Henderson's live performances; it was only fitting that he included this in his pivotal performance at the Vanguard. It was a firm signal to the world that through changing tastes in jazz he remained the same old Joe he'd always been.
Reviewer: S. Victor Aaron
Joe Henderson: Lush Life
Track
Lush Life
Artist
Joe Henderson (tenor sax)
CD
Lush Life: The Music of Billy Strayhorn (Verve 314 511 779-2)
Recorded: Englewood Cliffs, NJ, September 3, 6 & 8, 1991
Rating: 99/100 (learn more)
Joe Henderson was not just a great composer and technician, he was also a fine interpreter of standards. You can find examples of that throughout his career, but it was the major focal point of the final recording period of his life during which he recorded for Verve.The first Verve project tackled the lofty music of Ellington cohort Billy Strayhorn, using varying band configurations. Right at the end of the record is Henderson alone scaling the most magnificent of Strayhorn compositions, "Lush Life." The melody flows from his horn without any equivocation, the transitions between shapes are effortless and the phrasing is creative but never too cute.
Joe Henderson's flawless solo presentation of "Lush Life" is the kind of performance that only a first-ballot Hall of Fame tenor player can give.
Reviewer: S. Victor Aaron
http://hardbop.tripod.com/modejoe.html
http://joehenderson.jazzgiants.net/biography/
Joe Henderson
Biography
Joe Henderson was born on April 24th, 1937 in Lima, Ohio. One of fifteen children, he started playing saxophone around the age of eight or nine, with the encouragement of his older brother, James T. James T. helped him learn to play solos from records in his record collection by Lester Young, who Joe has cited as the first identifiable influence in his music.
While growing up in Ohio, Henderson was exposed to many styles of music, including country & western, rhythm-and-blues, and rock ’n roll. As a teenager, Henderson started buying the records of Stan Getz, Woody Herman, and Duke Ellington. Henderson particularly gravitated towards the airy style of Getz.
Henderson’s first saxophone teacher, Hubert Murphy, contributed to his technical understanding of the instrument. In high school, Henderson composed music for the school band as well as for rock ‘n roll bands. After high school, Henderson attended Kentucky State University and then after one year, transferred to Wayne University in Detroit, where he attended classes with Yusef Lateef, Barry Harris and Donald Byrd. He also studied with legendary saxophone teacher Larry Teal, and played with many visiting musicians.
By 1959, Henderson was leading his own band around Detroit and was commissioned by UNAC, an African-American advocacy group, to compose a suite called “Swing and Strings,” which was performed by members of Detroit Symphony Orchestra. A few private recordings of Henderson from this period have survived. In September of 1958, a recording was made in the basement of Joe Brazil in Detroit that featured Henderson along with tenor saxophonist John Coltrane. That same year in December, Henderson can be heard performing along with pianist Barry Harris at the Bohemian Club in Detroit.
In 1960, Henderson was drafted into the United States Army where he remained until 1962. During this two year stint, Henderson was stationed at Fort Benning in Georgia, where he led an award-winning quartet, which was subsequently chosen to tour the world to entertain United States troops. Henderson traveled from England to Paris to Korea to Japan in his short two-and-a-half years in the military. Henderson managed to play a little bit with drummer Kenny Clarke while he was in France. In the summer of 1962, Henderson was discharged from the military and immediately headed for New York City.
JOE HENDERSON AND KENNY DORHAM (Left)
Henderson was introduced to trumpeter Kenny Dorham in the summer of 1962, just after he arrived in New York, at a party at saxophonist Junior Cook’s place. The pair hit it off, and went down later that night to hear Dexter Gordon play at the Village Vanguard. Gordon invited Henderson up on stage to play, and fifteen choruses later, his career in New York was off and running.
Dorham employed Henderson on his first official recording date in April of 1963 for Dorham’s Blue Note release Una Mas. Between the years of 1963 and 1966, Henderson appeared on release after release for Blue Note, both as a leader and as a sideman. Henderson’s first album as a leader, Page One, featured one of his most enduring compositions, “Recordame.” It also featured Dorham’s “Blue Bossa,” with McCoy Tyner on piano which later became a well-known jazz standard.
In 1963, Henderson recorded with Johnny Coles and trumpeter Blue Mitchell and released his second album as a leader entitled Our Thing. The album featured Andrew Hill on piano, Dorham on trumpet, and Eddie Khan on bass.
In late 1963, Henderson recorded with Grant Green on his album Idle Moments and also appeared on pianist Andrew Hill’s influential album “Black Fire,” along with bassist Richard Davis and drummer Roy Haynes.
Henderson and Hill continued to collaborate and record together in 1964 on Hill’s Blue Note album Point of Departure and can be heard on the song “Refuge.” Henderson’s output with Blue Note as a sideman is very consistent as the tenor player is heard on Lee Morgan’s soul-jazz hit “The Sidewinder.”
In late 1964, Henderson joined pianist Horace Silver’s group and Henderson is heard on the Silver original “Song For My Father,” along with Teddy Smith on bass. Henderson released his album Inner Urge in early 1965, and it featured McCoy Tyner on piano and Elvin Jones on drums.
Henderson was also active as a sideman through 1967. He appeared on albums by trumpeter Freddie Hubbard and performed on organist Larry Young’s album Unity and is heard on the song “The Moontrane.” In fact, his work as a sideman in this period rivaled that of almost any active jazz musician of the era, but went largely unnoticed from a commercial standpoint.
Henderson made key contributions to other late 1960s albums from other Blue Note artists, most notably to McCoy Tyner’s hard bop classic The Real McCoy, which featured songs such as “Search For Peace” and “Passion Dance.” Also in the late 1960s, Henderson was briefly a member of Miles Davis’s second quintet, but never appeared on any recordings.
In 1966, Henderson released his solo album Mode for Joe, which began to establish his distinctive sound. Henderson’s playing is tender, warm but still striking and swinging on the title track and the Cedar Walton tune “Carribean Fire Dance.”
In the early 1970s, Henderson recorded with trumpeter Freddie Hubbard his fusion album Red Clay. He also switched over to the Milestones label, and recorded a string of albums which included Power to the People in 1969 and The Elements in 1973. Not long after this, he moved to San Francisco, where he began to teach and played briefly with the funk-rock group Blood, Sweat, and Tears.
In the 1980s, Henderson began to finally receive both critical and commercial acclaim. His 1985 live album The State of the Tenor, which was recorded live at the Village Vanguard in November, was a commercial and critical success. It featured the saxophonist on such songs as Thelonious Monk’s “Boo Boo’s Birthday” and “Ask Me Now,” along with Ron Carter on bass and Al Foster on drums. That same year, Henderson took part in Blue Note Records’ 40th anniversary concert at New York’s Town Hall along with Herbie Hancock, Stanley Jordan, and Art Blakey. In 1991, Henderson recorded an album of the music of composer Billy Strayhorn entitled Lush Life: The Music of Billy Strayhorn, including “Take the A Train.”
In 1994, Henderson recorded Double Rainbow: The Music of Antonio Carlos Jobim, a tribute to the Brazilian composer. In 1996, he recorded a big band album of his original compositions with a band which included Chick Corea on piano and Christian McBride on bass. Henderson’s waltz “Black Narcissus” is one of many songs arranger Bob Belden reinterpreted for the album.
Henderson continued to record and perform up to his death on June 30th, 2001 from emphysema. The saxophonist left behind a wonderful legacy of compositions, and an often overlooked trove of appearances as a sideman on some of the most influential and important recordings in jazz from the 1960s.
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Jazz Night In America Videos
SFJAZZ Collective Plays Joe Henderson And More
Updated March 19, 2015 by Patrick Jarenwattananon • Every year, each of the eight members of the SFJAZZ Collective is tasked with two writing assignments. The first: Compose a new piece specifically for the band, which gathers some of the most outstanding performers on the modern jazz scene. The second: Rearrange a composition by the elder artist that the Collective has chosen to feature that year. For the 2014-15 season, SFJAZZ is paying tribute to a tenor saxophone titan, a composer of classic tunes and a long-time San Francisco resident: the late Joe Henderson.
From the purpose-built SFJAZZ Center in San Francisco, Jazz Night In America features the SFJAZZ Collective as it reimagines Joe Henderson — both iconic standards like "Recorda-Me" and lesser-known material — and imagines new jazz works specifically for its own strengths.
Personnel:
Miguel Zenón, alto saxophone; David Sánchez, tenor saxophone, Avishai Cohen, trumpet; Robin Eubanks, trombone; Warren Wolf, vibraphone; Edward Simon, piano; Matt Penman, bass; Obed Calvaire, drums.
April 24, 1937 - June 30, 2001
OBITUARY
Special thanks to Greg Chapman for recovering this issue
Of all the saxophonists that I would like to interview, Joe Henderson has been at the top of my list for sometime. Since he resides in the San Francisco Bay Area, I was able to ultimately hook up with him in spite of his extremely busy touring schedule. I've known Joe personally for quite a number of years and have listened closely to his music even longer. Hearing him on record, and in person with the likes of Horace Silver, Freddie Hubbard, Bobby Hutcherson, Herbie Hancock's remarkable sextet, and his own groups, Joe has proved to be among the most inventive players in jazz. His sound and concept reflect the history of jazz saxophone, yet introduce a logical extension. I had the opportunity to hear Joe's new band at Oakland's Yoshi's Nightspot. Shortly thereafter, we met at his spacious home in San Francisco and covered a wide range of topics, including his earliest influences, his new band, his teaching methods, and his feelings on new and old saxophones. So, I consider it a great honor to present to readers of Saxophone Journal, the man best known as 'The Phantom,' the great Joe Henderson.
To me you're one of the last of the great saxophone innovators. You have a style that many have tried to emulate, but there's not been anybody as original as you in succeeding generations. These things don't just fall out of the sky and hit people over the head, it comes from somewhere. I would be interested in knowing who your influences were. I know you've been playing like this since you were a youngster.
That's very interesting. It's difficult for me to blow my own horn (no pun intended). I got out of the military in August of 1962 and moved to New York in September or October. I started making records in the latter part of 1963. Prior to that I was born in a little town called Lima Ohio, which is about 125 miles from Detroit. I have nine brothers and five sisters, which is really a huge family. I remember one of my brothers, in particular, who is a scientist, had this Jazz At The Philharmonic collection. He was a jazz buff and it was very important and good for me to have been around that early on, because before I started to play the saxophone, I knew what the saxophone was a supposed to sound like. I heard a bunch of people like Lester Young, Illinois Jacquet, Coleman Hawkins, and Wardell Gray. Lester was probably the first influence that I could single out. There may have been others that are not clear, it's hard to know where and when these influences start. But I do remember taking some Lester Young solos off a record with the help of my brother. This was around age nine. Well, I wasn't doing it myself, my brother was helping me, having the kind of mind he had. It used to amaze me later how he was able to do that at that time. We had those 78 rpm records, so he'd take the needle, set it down on the record, and say, "Joe, play these notes," and he'd let about four or five notes go by, and I'd find them on the horn. You know, the one that Prez called D.B. Blues, it became very famous later. So, I learned that and I tried to imitate that sound. Pretty soon I could keep this in my mind and my fingers could remember where they should be. I remember that as being the first solo I was able to take off a record.
So, Prez, as it turns out, was probably the first person that I was conscious of influencing me. I had been listening to Rhythm and Blues, and I had gone through that generation. I was always around Country and Western music as well. I know as much about Johnny Cash as I do about Charlie Parker, because I grew up in that area. This was all we heard on the radio. Sometimes I could dial in these far off stations, like in Chicago, where I would hear something just a little more musical. A little more similar to the records that my brother had in his collection, and I liked this. I knew that this was bebop, and I could differentiate that. I spent most of my time listening to bebop, and that was what I appreciated most, so this is what I gravitated toward when I started developing and getting a few things together about playing the saxophone. I was still quite innocent, it was like a toy at that point.
When I got a little older I would go out to these dances that they would have in my home town. When James Brown, B.B. King, Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, and these cats would come to my hometown, I'd be there at those dances and I'd be checking out the saxophone players. They all had saxophones; two or three tenor players, a couple of baritones. And later James Moody would come to town with his bands. His stuff was a little more refined with his four horns. He'd have like a trumpet, trombone , baritone, and tenor or alto or flute. He played all the doubles. I can remember I saw 'Trane at a couple of these dances. When I was about fourteen years old he came there with the Earl Bostic band. At that time Bostic was playing tunes like Flamingo, and a bunch of tunes that he made hit records of. I saw a lot of people who came to that town, who ten years later from that time, would be known as jazz personalities.
But, they spent their time paying their dues travelling around in this Rhythm and Blues circuit. I didn't know that guy was John Coltrane, who I had seen and had talked to and met when I was about fourteen years old. I also saw Gene Ammons when I was about fifteen. He was the 'Red Top" guy. You know this tune My Little Red Top? Yeah, that was classic stuff. Good music. So, my tastes became a little refined later on.
So, my information and my knowledge is growing because I'm starting to buy records and starting to hear people like Stan Getz, Herbie Steward, Stan Kenton, Woody Herman, and Duke Ellington. All this stuff was having more meaning. And all at the same time I was listening to Bartok, Stravinsky, and Hindemith because of my one sister's tastes. I didn't know who Stravinsky was, but I knew I liked the music that I heard.
Later I started meeting other musicians in town, who started showing me things. I'm learning tunes, my vocabulary is growing in terms of tunes that I had memorized, and I'm playing dances around town. So, I'm getting into it very innocently. If I made a couple of bucks playing a dance, that was big money for me. But the information that I was gathering at that time was the thing that served me well later. I was getting a chance to play the saxophone at a time when this was what I should be doing. Nobody had to tell me "Joe, go in and practice your saxophone." I just did this.
Earlier on, I started writing tunes. When I was about fourteen or fifteen years old, I wrote my first composition. That tune was recorded on a Bluenote record, the very first record I did. It's one of the tunes that I get the most recognition for and it's called Recordame. When I first wrote it, it had a Latin flavor to it. But when the Bossa Nova came out I changed it to fit that rhythm, which meant that I changed a couple of phrases around.
I don't know where it all came from, but I've always personally suspected that I don't have an identifiable sound as a player. I shouldn't be allowed an opinion of my own stuff, I realize that.
It's hard to appraise your own work. To hear this come from you is very important to me, as I'm sure to the people reading this article. And to learn that, wow, you mean he doesn't know that either? You just don't know because you
can't be a critic and a player at the same time.
It really is hard to appraise your own work! Earlier on I wanted to be one of the greatest interpreters of music that the world has ever seen. If somebody put music down in front of me, I wanted to be able to interpret this music better than the writer. I also wanted to be a player of ballads. I really liked to play ballads, as ironic as that might be. Many times when I play it's kind of a frantic situation.
You made your mark in what was called the 'hard bebop' post-bop era. It was a harder style to play, the Bluenote style. The whole gang of East Coast players that were really putting that style down. That's what I came up with. I'm about five years younger that you, so I came up behind that listening to you, and a whole bunch of other folks out of that era.
That was a great era. There was a bunch of musical people around during the time that I was fortunate enough to have been associated with in the studios and on some gigs. I started to pick up the dice and roll them a bit, taking some chances with a few notes. Even at that time I didn't think I would have played something that wasn't musical or didn't fit the context of what was happening with the music.
After I had been in the military, been to Detroit and to college in Kentucky, I went to New York. I went to New York when I was about twenty-five. Naturally, when you first get to New York there's these people who try to pigeonhole you by saying, "He sounds like this, always sounds like that, etc.' There were some people that heard me who said, "I've been hearing this guy since he was fourteen years old and he's always sounded like that.' This is even before some of the people they said that I sounded like emerged onto the scene. Far be it for me to defend myself and say I don't sound like that. If they say I sound like that, well then maybe I do. This was a crucial time. How do you defend yourself in a situation like that? The writers and musicians needed to hear that I was original and always had been. Their mouths dropped open. Maybe I've been developing something that's fairly uniquely my own for a long time, but you're not aware of this stuff, you simply play. I've been a person who enjoys playing the saxophone, making music, writing melodies, writing compositions, and doing arrangements of minor importance for big bands and orchestras. But I never try to rate myself in any kind of way. I let other people do that.
I agree. I have read reviews that said you sounded like John Coltrane, etc. To me you always sounded like Joe Henderson. You have an iconoclastic style that sets you apart from other players. You're not consciously trying to emulate, yet you have influences that are very obvious. I can hear Charlie Parker, and I can hear Prez in your tone. You do not play in the Coleman Hawkins big brash style. In addition to this, I hear a lot of individualistic harmonic ideas that nobody else played at that time, or since. I'm curious, did you study with Larry Teal?
I sure did, for about three years. I also went to Wayne University for about five years. The year I got drafted I changed to Wayne State University. A lot of musicians went through that school. Yusef Lateef was there, Donald Byrd, Kenny Burrell, Hugh Lawson (we were in some classes together). Yusef and I were also in classes together. He was much older than I, going back to school, and taking a couple of courses as a non-matriculated student. We used to study together. Yusef was zooming and he was light years ahead of me in terms of understanding it all. In the next semester it dawned on me what the teacher was trying to run down in the first semester.
From about that point on I understood things in the present instead of it being a delayed situation. There's a point where you understand the information as they're running it down to you, and there's a point where you've got to do a little research and then you understand it. Then when Yusef and I studied together I was ahead of him. I remember feeling good about that, but I also felt good about being able to help him understand the things he didn't understand. Therein lies the genesis of me understanding myself as a teacher. I was in this environment that was about bebop. We learned every Charlie Parker tune that was every written. There was so much music that came through at that time. Fortunately, my radar was working and I was absorbing everything. I started understanding things like chord inversions where you don't have to play chords from the root up all the time. You can start from the 5th or the 6th or the 7th. As long as you know what the root feel is about you can turn things inside out taking this combination of notes and stack them up any number of ways.
What I hear in your playing is that you play intervals that go beyond the 13th. When you stack up intervals and play the 13th, you get all the hip sounds like the sharp eleven, and flat and sharp ninths. But, say you take a C13, where you have a C, and you might have a Bb, a D, an E, and F# and an A. You can go up and play a C13 oil top of that and it will work. You'll play an F natural on top of that and it will work. When you're not playing bebop kinds of lines, I hear you play some heavy arpeggios running through and across and around, sideways, all kinds of ways, but it seems to me you're playing intervals that go beyond the 13th.
I've heard things in that zone. This stems back from some of the non conventional sounds and combinations of notes that I first heard through Bartok and Stravinsky. I started to understand chords, chord movement, and chord classification in one set of chords; where it all came from and where it goes from there. Having a sense of composition has served me well, and also having a rich sense of rhythm, and a desire not to repeat stuff. I consider it one of the worst sins a musician could possibly commit, to play an idea more than one time. You've got to keep changing things around, keep inventing, and especially when you're making records. I came into it thinking of change being a constant thing. I can remember going onto the bandstand after being around Detroit for a few years, and consciously getting my brain to start phrases on different notes of the bar, with a different combination of notes, and a different rhythm. I developed the ability to start anywhere in the bar and it lent to a whole new attitude of constant variation. I would start with the first bar, not starting it on one but starting it on the 'and' of four or the 'and' of three, with a series of sixteenth notes with several triplets. I would let the first four bars take care of themselves until we got to the fifth bar, and start that at a certain point of the rhythmic structure of the bar. Then I'd start something in the seventh bar. What I was developing was a sense of not falling into that habit of playing the same things all the time. We are creatures of habit anyway so its easy to fall into them. You practice early on so that habits don't form which have to be dealt with later, like bad fingerings that you have to clean up later.
Those are technical processes, but you're also talking about creative musical processes. Instead of always following the same mental path you can evoke a different process whenever you want to. Everybody wants your formula. How many students have come to you and said, 'Joe, what are those patterns?'
And those are the kind of students I don't take. I want to effect the part of their brain to create these things. When you think about this in a certain way, there is no formula.
What they hear as a formula is actually something you created spontaneously out of all of the resources that you have at your command.
The way I teach is memory plus improvisation. I generally don't allow tape recorders at the lesson, although I will bend on that as it's so much a part of things now. In terms of them understanding what their creative faculty is supposed to be about, they don't need a tape recorder. We'll travel as far as their brain can go during a lesson. There's so much printed material around, fake books, etc., and I don't remember using those kinds of things. These things tend to become crutches. I learned the tunes. I've seen people come up on the bandstand and before I call count the tune off I'm hearing people turning these pages (laughter). Night after night they're still trying to find this song. I really wish they would understand that the mind will absorb the music in its time. You can't overload it.
There's so much that can enter into learning songs. Your emotional state and why you like a particular song.
One can get involved in all those aspects and make it more meaningful when they play. Teaching allows us to plant some trees, and to keep the art form alive. The information that was passed on to us helped us to enjoy the planet a little more through our music.
You recently had a new, young, all female band. Would you talk about them?
These people are young in years, and on a certain level, in their experience. Irene Rosnes is the pianist and came to New York from Vancouver, Canada. The drummer is Sylvia Cuenca and is from San Jose. I've known her since she was sixteen. The bassist is Marlene Rosenberg from Chicago and is twenty-eight. Now the level of experience of the pianist, for example, is far beyond her age of twenty-five years. We've all been to Europe three times and will go again. We've enjoyed a great deal of success out there. These are talented people and they are doing precisely what they should be doing. They're growing.
The impression I got is that you're allowing them the space to learn and absorb from a master, and the experience of playing and traveling together.
Somebody has to provide that when you consider their level of talent, so they can perfect their craft. I plan to record something soon with Blue Note. Although the uniqueness of the group gets a lot of attention, I'm not trying to make a social political statement or the like.
I found them very complimentary to your sound. You can be an aggressive player but your sound texture is generally of a softer nature, and their accompaniment is really quite suitable. But I have to say that your bassist plays as hard as any I've ever heard.
I've been on the bandstand with women before and there's some things I do notice. It's probably a situation that has to do more with experience than anything else. Jack DeJohnette sat in with us in Paris and he brought that 'manhood' to the stand. I thought that I would miss that, and maybe I had been missing that all along. But Sylvia came back and played the way she had developed with us and it was fine. I really feel its the experience that makes the difference. Mainly, men have been drummers and bass players. We've always had women piano players. They aren't trying to be men on their instruments. I have experienced with other women, however, a kind of going overboard to try and assert the Yang part of themselves, more so than necessary, to the point of abandoning their own delicacy as women. I worked with a pianist who would do this and I would mention it in a real professional way that she was neglecting that part of her nature.
You were telling me that you received more notoriety for this group than anything you've done in the past.
In Europe they were coming at me with a battery of microphones and cameras. Once they hear the music, they are convinced. The writeups haven't focused primarily on the fact that they are ladies, but they can't avoid it either.
At this point in our conversation we got into a discussion about vintage Selmer saxophones, sparked by Joe's recent purchases of a 56,000 series Mark VI This was necessitated by the loss, by theft, of one of his saxophones which was later returned by one of his students. Also, the ultimate destruction, by fire in an automobile accident, of his original 54,000 series.
A guy called me from Dallas who knew I would be coming through with the George Gruntz big band. I called him back and he said he had two Selmers to show me. When I got there he had them laid out in the dressing room. I had no idea that this was the vintage horn I'd been looking for. When I picked one up and played it, I couldn't believe how well it played. When my previous horn was destroyed, after twenty-six years, I thought it could never be replaced.
It's such a great story how that
horn came back to you through Hafez Modir, who we were both teaching
at that time. I'll never forget him coming into his lesson and
telling me about it.
Hafez was totally innocent. He simply came over for a lesson. About half an hour into the lesson he asked me to try his horn and check his low B. Usually I play piano and assign lines, a more "here and now approach." I really didn't want to do what he was asking, so I tried to steer him away from that by giving him more demanding material. But, he had the right kind of persistence. So, after hanging on the ropes about another half an hour I said, 'look man, give me the horn.' I went upstairs and got my mouthpiece and soaked up my reed, and started to play this horn. There were some thing that only I knew about that identified the horn. There was a screw right next to the octave key that would work its way out from time to time and would jab me in the finger. I had it filled down. As I was playing, these things began to come through. I was sitting there talking to myself and thinking, 'man, this is my horn!' I didn't want to give the student the impression that I had flipped out. But, after about fifteen more minutes he wanted it to be my horn. He called it a case of "the son coming back to the father." I exchanged another Selmer with him for my original horn. Apparently it had been purchased a year and a half earlier by a young lady in New York, and I had neglected to keep track of the serial number. If I had known approximately what the number was I could have gotten to a similar horn sooner. Someone once asked me whether or not I felt there was something "magical" about Selmers. I had to say there certainly was something magical about this particular vintage, but I feel their more recent horns have lost that quality. After my original horn was stolen I needed a new one. I was speaking with Selmer's engineers and discussing what I felt were problems with the Mark VII, which was the horn that no one knew I was playing.
Johnny Griffin told me he had one for awhile but took it back because his clothes kept getting caught in the keys.
Their answer was, "the kids want it." I realize these people are busy in their labs trying to develop new ideas, but please keep making that original product which so many people were happy with. They had Super 80's for me to try and that's what I've been playing until now. I'm sure it would be profitable for them to put out an instrument that sounds and feels good to the player. The Japanese are becoming very competitive in the musical instrument business. I talk to saxophonists all over the world, like myself, who are seriously questioning the quality of the new instruments. After all, our survival is depended on this.
Do you have any final comments?
I'm in constant search of new information and ideas, and I want to make the best of this short time that we're out here on this planet living this nebulous thing called life. And I want to plant a few trees along the way and nurture some minds and watch them grow, as people did for me.
Joe Henderson: Lotus Blossom (from Lush Life, 1992)
The interview was conducted by Bill King for the Jazz Report Magazine:
TRANSFERRED FROM A V.H.S TAPE:
George Mraz - bass
Recorded at the Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey on January 27, 1966. Originally released on Blue Note (BLP 4227
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Joe Henderson
Mode For Joe
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Mode For Joe
Joe Henderson, tenor sax; Lee Morgan, trumpet; Curtis Fuller, trombone; Bobby Hutcherson, vibes; Cedar Walton piano; Ron Carter, bass; Joe Chambers, drums.
| 1. A Shade of Jade (Joe Henderson) 7:07 2. Mode For Joe (Cedar Walton) 8:02 3. Black (Cedar Walton) 6:51 4. Caribbean Fire Dance (Joe Henderson) 6:41 5. Granted (Joe Henderson) 7:20 6. Free Wheelin' (Lee Morgan) 6:39 | Produced by ALFRED LION Cover Photo by FRANCIS WOLFF Cover Design by REID MILES Recording by RUDY VAN GELDER Recorded on January 27, 1966 |
In this new album Joe Henderson, who has previously been heard leading various quintets and a quartet, undertakes a more ambitious venture, one that involved a four-piece front line as well as the customary three-piece rhythm section. The sound, of course, is ampler, and there is room for new compositional initiatives on the part of Messrs. Henderson, Walton and Morgan. Joe was particularly pleased with the company he kept on this date. All the sidemen are musicians he has worked with before and/or admired at a distance.
Of Lee Morgan, he says: "I met him some years ago in Detroit. He's a fantastic musician. For the past four or five years he's had a very mature concept, what you might call an old-young or young-old approach to the horn. I also like him because he has a sense of humor, and because he really digs in and helps with suggestions on dates. We had a nice blend and seemed sympathetic to each other on his own dates like The Sidewinder and The Rumproller, so he was a logical choice for this session.
"I've known Curtis Fuller since the Detroit days, too; in fact, we were in a few classes at Wayne University together when he was working locally with Yusef Lateef's combo. Barry Harris is the first Detroit cat I ever recorded with, and Curtis is the second. I admire him as a person, and as an artist of great musical worth.
"Bobby Hutcherson I don't know that well personally; he's spent a lot of his time on the West Coast. We did a Grant Green LP together a while back--the Idle Moments album--and I knew he'd be a valuable addition to this date, not only as a soloist but as part of the front line for the fourway writing.
"Joe Chambers is one of my favorite drummers to play with. I like to listen to Max Roach but I don't know whether I'd enjoy playing with him. Joe's a fine pianist and composer - you know. He's one drummer with real musical knowledge; he has a sort of ESP, as all musicians should, when they're working behind the soloist.
"As for Ron Carter, I don't know him as a close friend, but as a musician he's admirable, and he was really necessary for this album. I never really knew him in Detroit, though I jammed with him when he was in town with Chico Hamilton. He's so sensitive. On 'A Shade of Jade' I just gave him a skeleton part, where he had to work closely with the horns and the rhythm, but he kept working his way into the arrangement exactly the way I wanted"
Cedar Walton's participation was equally helpful, says Joe: "Just before making this album we had a gig together in Pittsburgh, and we used it to rehearse his tunes and mine. So came to the session familiar with everything, and played very eloquently."
"A Shade of Jade" certainly fits the occasion not only as an illustration of Joe's melodic creativity but as a medium for some of the best blowing in the album by the leader, Lee and Cedar. Notice that the C Minor melody moves within a narrow melodic range, from G down to C, but in the release the cheerful changes offer a well-timed contrast in mood.
"Mode For Joe," Cedar Walton's theme, involves suspensions of the rhythm during the exposition of the theme. "In this passage I play two roles," says Joe, "one as part of the four-way voicing with trumpet, 'bone and vibes, and then secondly the solo fills." Joe's fast-evolving technique is used in his solo here as a means to a well-structured end. Bobby and Curtis, in their choruses, seem well attuned to the vibrations of this delightful melody. "We got the feeling for this one right away," says Joe. "This was the first take."
"Black," the other theme by Walton, is a simple tune in long notes with a 8-8-16-8 construction. Ron Carter's sturdy walking provides an inspiring, propulsive element for Henderson; Chambers' steady urgency is no less effective in his support of Lee. The piano solo is particularly outstanding ("Cedar really burned his hands off there," says Joe) and the solo by the leader is notable for the use of unpredictable intervals, typical of the diversity of ideas to be found in a Henderson solo. Notice the tricky voicing on the concluding chord, which basically is an F minor.
"Caribbean Fire Dance" is a syncopated theme with a strange haunting unresolved quality and assorted touches of Latin and Calypso feelings. "I did Latin music more and more," Joe says. His own solo here has an engaging sense of freedom, though it is never so free as to escape from its context. Lee and Curtis follow, after which there is another reminder that Hutcherson may well be the most inventive of the new wave of vibesmen.
"Granted" was named for Alan Grant, of WABC-FM in New York. "He's been very kind to me ever since I came to New York. In fact, he and Kenny Dorham originally introduced me to Alfred Lion. Al has used me as leader of my own groups on concerts that he's presented around town." The composition represents Joe's boppish bag, a unison affair that surrounds some of the most headstrong blowing of the set, by all three horns and by Bobby.
"Free Wheelin'" was written on the spur of the moment, during the session, by Lee Morgan. It might be called a 24-bar blues in 3/4 or a 12-bar blues in 6/4, depending how your ears adjust to it. Either way, Joe fits himself eloquently to the mood of the tune. His tendency to rhythmic and melodic complexity expands rather than limits the essential blues character of the performance. Note, too, the funky piano by Cedar behind Lee's solo, the complementary accents by Chambers during Fuller's outing ("Curtis reached back and got some of his old Detroit licks in there," says Joe), and the simple, honest statement by Hutcherson.
Admirers of Joe Henderson who have been following his career as a sideman and as a recording bandleader will probably know by now that he has decided on the important step into full-time leadership. As the six tracks on these sides fluently indicate, he is well on his way to becoming one of the major new jazz figures of the late 1960s.
--LEONARD FEATHER, from the liner notes.
http://joehenderson.jazzgiants.net/biography/
Joe Henderson
Biography
Joe Henderson was born on April 24th, 1937 in Lima, Ohio. One of fifteen children, he started playing saxophone around the age of eight or nine, with the encouragement of his older brother, James T. James T. helped him learn to play solos from records in his record collection by Lester Young, who Joe has cited as the first identifiable influence in his music.
While growing up in Ohio, Henderson was exposed to many styles of music, including country & western, rhythm-and-blues, and rock ’n roll. As a teenager, Henderson started buying the records of Stan Getz, Woody Herman, and Duke Ellington. Henderson particularly gravitated towards the airy style of Getz.
Henderson’s first saxophone teacher, Hubert Murphy, contributed to his technical understanding of the instrument. In high school, Henderson composed music for the school band as well as for rock ‘n roll bands. After high school, Henderson attended Kentucky State University and then after one year, transferred to Wayne University in Detroit, where he attended classes with Yusef Lateef, Barry Harris and Donald Byrd. He also studied with legendary saxophone teacher Larry Teal, and played with many visiting musicians.
By 1959, Henderson was leading his own band around Detroit and was commissioned by UNAC, an African-American advocacy group, to compose a suite called “Swing and Strings,” which was performed by members of Detroit Symphony Orchestra. A few private recordings of Henderson from this period have survived. In September of 1958, a recording was made in the basement of Joe Brazil in Detroit that featured Henderson along with tenor saxophonist John Coltrane. That same year in December, Henderson can be heard performing along with pianist Barry Harris at the Bohemian Club in Detroit.
In 1960, Henderson was drafted into the United States Army where he remained until 1962. During this two year stint, Henderson was stationed at Fort Benning in Georgia, where he led an award-winning quartet, which was subsequently chosen to tour the world to entertain United States troops. Henderson traveled from England to Paris to Korea to Japan in his short two-and-a-half years in the military. Henderson managed to play a little bit with drummer Kenny Clarke while he was in France. In the summer of 1962, Henderson was discharged from the military and immediately headed for New York City.
JOE HENDERSON AND KENNY DORHAM (Left)
Henderson was introduced to trumpeter Kenny Dorham in the summer of 1962, just after he arrived in New York, at a party at saxophonist Junior Cook’s place. The pair hit it off, and went down later that night to hear Dexter Gordon play at the Village Vanguard. Gordon invited Henderson up on stage to play, and fifteen choruses later, his career in New York was off and running.
Dorham employed Henderson on his first official recording date in April of 1963 for Dorham’s Blue Note release Una Mas. Between the years of 1963 and 1966, Henderson appeared on release after release for Blue Note, both as a leader and as a sideman. Henderson’s first album as a leader, Page One, featured one of his most enduring compositions, “Recordame.” It also featured Dorham’s “Blue Bossa,” with McCoy Tyner on piano which later became a well-known jazz standard.
In 1963, Henderson recorded with Johnny Coles and trumpeter Blue Mitchell and released his second album as a leader entitled Our Thing. The album featured Andrew Hill on piano, Dorham on trumpet, and Eddie Khan on bass.
In late 1963, Henderson recorded with Grant Green on his album Idle Moments and also appeared on pianist Andrew Hill’s influential album “Black Fire,” along with bassist Richard Davis and drummer Roy Haynes.
Henderson and Hill continued to collaborate and record together in 1964 on Hill’s Blue Note album Point of Departure and can be heard on the song “Refuge.” Henderson’s output with Blue Note as a sideman is very consistent as the tenor player is heard on Lee Morgan’s soul-jazz hit “The Sidewinder.”
In late 1964, Henderson joined pianist Horace Silver’s group and Henderson is heard on the Silver original “Song For My Father,” along with Teddy Smith on bass. Henderson released his album Inner Urge in early 1965, and it featured McCoy Tyner on piano and Elvin Jones on drums.
Henderson was also active as a sideman through 1967. He appeared on albums by trumpeter Freddie Hubbard and performed on organist Larry Young’s album Unity and is heard on the song “The Moontrane.” In fact, his work as a sideman in this period rivaled that of almost any active jazz musician of the era, but went largely unnoticed from a commercial standpoint.
Henderson made key contributions to other late 1960s albums from other Blue Note artists, most notably to McCoy Tyner’s hard bop classic The Real McCoy, which featured songs such as “Search For Peace” and “Passion Dance.” Also in the late 1960s, Henderson was briefly a member of Miles Davis’s second quintet, but never appeared on any recordings.
In 1966, Henderson released his solo album Mode for Joe, which began to establish his distinctive sound. Henderson’s playing is tender, warm but still striking and swinging on the title track and the Cedar Walton tune “Carribean Fire Dance.”
In the early 1970s, Henderson recorded with trumpeter Freddie Hubbard his fusion album Red Clay. He also switched over to the Milestones label, and recorded a string of albums which included Power to the People in 1969 and The Elements in 1973. Not long after this, he moved to San Francisco, where he began to teach and played briefly with the funk-rock group Blood, Sweat, and Tears.
In the 1980s, Henderson began to finally receive both critical and commercial acclaim. His 1985 live album The State of the Tenor, which was recorded live at the Village Vanguard in November, was a commercial and critical success. It featured the saxophonist on such songs as Thelonious Monk’s “Boo Boo’s Birthday” and “Ask Me Now,” along with Ron Carter on bass and Al Foster on drums. That same year, Henderson took part in Blue Note Records’ 40th anniversary concert at New York’s Town Hall along with Herbie Hancock, Stanley Jordan, and Art Blakey. In 1991, Henderson recorded an album of the music of composer Billy Strayhorn entitled Lush Life: The Music of Billy Strayhorn, including “Take the A Train.”
In 1994, Henderson recorded Double Rainbow: The Music of Antonio Carlos Jobim, a tribute to the Brazilian composer. In 1996, he recorded a big band album of his original compositions with a band which included Chick Corea on piano and Christian McBride on bass. Henderson’s waltz “Black Narcissus” is one of many songs arranger Bob Belden reinterpreted for the album.
Henderson continued to record and perform up to his death on June 30th, 2001 from emphysema. The saxophonist left behind a wonderful legacy of compositions, and an often overlooked trove of appearances as a sideman on some of the most influential and important recordings in jazz from the 1960s.
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Jazz Night In America Videos
SFJAZZ Collective Plays Joe Henderson And More
Updated March 19, 2015 by Patrick Jarenwattananon • Every year, each of the eight members of the SFJAZZ Collective is tasked with two writing assignments. The first: Compose a new piece specifically for the band, which gathers some of the most outstanding performers on the modern jazz scene. The second: Rearrange a composition by the elder artist that the Collective has chosen to feature that year. For the 2014-15 season, SFJAZZ is paying tribute to a tenor saxophone titan, a composer of classic tunes and a long-time San Francisco resident: the late Joe Henderson.
From the purpose-built SFJAZZ Center in San Francisco, Jazz Night In America features the SFJAZZ Collective as it reimagines Joe Henderson — both iconic standards like "Recorda-Me" and lesser-known material — and imagines new jazz works specifically for its own strengths.
Personnel:
Miguel Zenón, alto saxophone; David Sánchez, tenor saxophone, Avishai Cohen, trumpet; Robin Eubanks, trombone; Warren Wolf, vibraphone; Edward Simon, piano; Matt Penman, bass; Obed Calvaire, drums.
Interview Menu
| Stan Getz | Charles McPherson
| Steve Lacy | Wayne Shorter
| Billy Pierce | Lee Konitz
| Mel Martin (Bell) | Mel
Martin (SJ)
| Joe Henderson | Benny
Powell | Rufus Reid | Benny
Golson | Bobby Watson | James
Moody | Frank Foster | Johnny
Griffin |
Joe Henderson
April 24, 1937 - June 30, 2001
OBITUARY
by Mel Martin
Originally published in The Saxophone Journal March/April 1991
Special thanks to Greg Chapman for recovering this issue
Of all the saxophonists that I would like to interview, Joe Henderson has been at the top of my list for sometime. Since he resides in the San Francisco Bay Area, I was able to ultimately hook up with him in spite of his extremely busy touring schedule. I've known Joe personally for quite a number of years and have listened closely to his music even longer. Hearing him on record, and in person with the likes of Horace Silver, Freddie Hubbard, Bobby Hutcherson, Herbie Hancock's remarkable sextet, and his own groups, Joe has proved to be among the most inventive players in jazz. His sound and concept reflect the history of jazz saxophone, yet introduce a logical extension. I had the opportunity to hear Joe's new band at Oakland's Yoshi's Nightspot. Shortly thereafter, we met at his spacious home in San Francisco and covered a wide range of topics, including his earliest influences, his new band, his teaching methods, and his feelings on new and old saxophones. So, I consider it a great honor to present to readers of Saxophone Journal, the man best known as 'The Phantom,' the great Joe Henderson.
To me you're one of the last of the great saxophone innovators. You have a style that many have tried to emulate, but there's not been anybody as original as you in succeeding generations. These things don't just fall out of the sky and hit people over the head, it comes from somewhere. I would be interested in knowing who your influences were. I know you've been playing like this since you were a youngster.
That's very interesting. It's difficult for me to blow my own horn (no pun intended). I got out of the military in August of 1962 and moved to New York in September or October. I started making records in the latter part of 1963. Prior to that I was born in a little town called Lima Ohio, which is about 125 miles from Detroit. I have nine brothers and five sisters, which is really a huge family. I remember one of my brothers, in particular, who is a scientist, had this Jazz At The Philharmonic collection. He was a jazz buff and it was very important and good for me to have been around that early on, because before I started to play the saxophone, I knew what the saxophone was a supposed to sound like. I heard a bunch of people like Lester Young, Illinois Jacquet, Coleman Hawkins, and Wardell Gray. Lester was probably the first influence that I could single out. There may have been others that are not clear, it's hard to know where and when these influences start. But I do remember taking some Lester Young solos off a record with the help of my brother. This was around age nine. Well, I wasn't doing it myself, my brother was helping me, having the kind of mind he had. It used to amaze me later how he was able to do that at that time. We had those 78 rpm records, so he'd take the needle, set it down on the record, and say, "Joe, play these notes," and he'd let about four or five notes go by, and I'd find them on the horn. You know, the one that Prez called D.B. Blues, it became very famous later. So, I learned that and I tried to imitate that sound. Pretty soon I could keep this in my mind and my fingers could remember where they should be. I remember that as being the first solo I was able to take off a record.
So, Prez, as it turns out, was probably the first person that I was conscious of influencing me. I had been listening to Rhythm and Blues, and I had gone through that generation. I was always around Country and Western music as well. I know as much about Johnny Cash as I do about Charlie Parker, because I grew up in that area. This was all we heard on the radio. Sometimes I could dial in these far off stations, like in Chicago, where I would hear something just a little more musical. A little more similar to the records that my brother had in his collection, and I liked this. I knew that this was bebop, and I could differentiate that. I spent most of my time listening to bebop, and that was what I appreciated most, so this is what I gravitated toward when I started developing and getting a few things together about playing the saxophone. I was still quite innocent, it was like a toy at that point.
When I got a little older I would go out to these dances that they would have in my home town. When James Brown, B.B. King, Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, and these cats would come to my hometown, I'd be there at those dances and I'd be checking out the saxophone players. They all had saxophones; two or three tenor players, a couple of baritones. And later James Moody would come to town with his bands. His stuff was a little more refined with his four horns. He'd have like a trumpet, trombone , baritone, and tenor or alto or flute. He played all the doubles. I can remember I saw 'Trane at a couple of these dances. When I was about fourteen years old he came there with the Earl Bostic band. At that time Bostic was playing tunes like Flamingo, and a bunch of tunes that he made hit records of. I saw a lot of people who came to that town, who ten years later from that time, would be known as jazz personalities.
But, they spent their time paying their dues travelling around in this Rhythm and Blues circuit. I didn't know that guy was John Coltrane, who I had seen and had talked to and met when I was about fourteen years old. I also saw Gene Ammons when I was about fifteen. He was the 'Red Top" guy. You know this tune My Little Red Top? Yeah, that was classic stuff. Good music. So, my tastes became a little refined later on.
So, my information and my knowledge is growing because I'm starting to buy records and starting to hear people like Stan Getz, Herbie Steward, Stan Kenton, Woody Herman, and Duke Ellington. All this stuff was having more meaning. And all at the same time I was listening to Bartok, Stravinsky, and Hindemith because of my one sister's tastes. I didn't know who Stravinsky was, but I knew I liked the music that I heard.
Later I started meeting other musicians in town, who started showing me things. I'm learning tunes, my vocabulary is growing in terms of tunes that I had memorized, and I'm playing dances around town. So, I'm getting into it very innocently. If I made a couple of bucks playing a dance, that was big money for me. But the information that I was gathering at that time was the thing that served me well later. I was getting a chance to play the saxophone at a time when this was what I should be doing. Nobody had to tell me "Joe, go in and practice your saxophone." I just did this.
Earlier on, I started writing tunes. When I was about fourteen or fifteen years old, I wrote my first composition. That tune was recorded on a Bluenote record, the very first record I did. It's one of the tunes that I get the most recognition for and it's called Recordame. When I first wrote it, it had a Latin flavor to it. But when the Bossa Nova came out I changed it to fit that rhythm, which meant that I changed a couple of phrases around.
I don't know where it all came from, but I've always personally suspected that I don't have an identifiable sound as a player. I shouldn't be allowed an opinion of my own stuff, I realize that.
It's hard to appraise your own work. To hear this come from you is very important to me, as I'm sure to the people reading this article. And to learn that, wow, you mean he doesn't know that either? You just don't know because you
can't be a critic and a player at the same time.
It really is hard to appraise your own work! Earlier on I wanted to be one of the greatest interpreters of music that the world has ever seen. If somebody put music down in front of me, I wanted to be able to interpret this music better than the writer. I also wanted to be a player of ballads. I really liked to play ballads, as ironic as that might be. Many times when I play it's kind of a frantic situation.
You made your mark in what was called the 'hard bebop' post-bop era. It was a harder style to play, the Bluenote style. The whole gang of East Coast players that were really putting that style down. That's what I came up with. I'm about five years younger that you, so I came up behind that listening to you, and a whole bunch of other folks out of that era.
That was a great era. There was a bunch of musical people around during the time that I was fortunate enough to have been associated with in the studios and on some gigs. I started to pick up the dice and roll them a bit, taking some chances with a few notes. Even at that time I didn't think I would have played something that wasn't musical or didn't fit the context of what was happening with the music.
After I had been in the military, been to Detroit and to college in Kentucky, I went to New York. I went to New York when I was about twenty-five. Naturally, when you first get to New York there's these people who try to pigeonhole you by saying, "He sounds like this, always sounds like that, etc.' There were some people that heard me who said, "I've been hearing this guy since he was fourteen years old and he's always sounded like that.' This is even before some of the people they said that I sounded like emerged onto the scene. Far be it for me to defend myself and say I don't sound like that. If they say I sound like that, well then maybe I do. This was a crucial time. How do you defend yourself in a situation like that? The writers and musicians needed to hear that I was original and always had been. Their mouths dropped open. Maybe I've been developing something that's fairly uniquely my own for a long time, but you're not aware of this stuff, you simply play. I've been a person who enjoys playing the saxophone, making music, writing melodies, writing compositions, and doing arrangements of minor importance for big bands and orchestras. But I never try to rate myself in any kind of way. I let other people do that.
I agree. I have read reviews that said you sounded like John Coltrane, etc. To me you always sounded like Joe Henderson. You have an iconoclastic style that sets you apart from other players. You're not consciously trying to emulate, yet you have influences that are very obvious. I can hear Charlie Parker, and I can hear Prez in your tone. You do not play in the Coleman Hawkins big brash style. In addition to this, I hear a lot of individualistic harmonic ideas that nobody else played at that time, or since. I'm curious, did you study with Larry Teal?
I sure did, for about three years. I also went to Wayne University for about five years. The year I got drafted I changed to Wayne State University. A lot of musicians went through that school. Yusef Lateef was there, Donald Byrd, Kenny Burrell, Hugh Lawson (we were in some classes together). Yusef and I were also in classes together. He was much older than I, going back to school, and taking a couple of courses as a non-matriculated student. We used to study together. Yusef was zooming and he was light years ahead of me in terms of understanding it all. In the next semester it dawned on me what the teacher was trying to run down in the first semester.
From about that point on I understood things in the present instead of it being a delayed situation. There's a point where you understand the information as they're running it down to you, and there's a point where you've got to do a little research and then you understand it. Then when Yusef and I studied together I was ahead of him. I remember feeling good about that, but I also felt good about being able to help him understand the things he didn't understand. Therein lies the genesis of me understanding myself as a teacher. I was in this environment that was about bebop. We learned every Charlie Parker tune that was every written. There was so much music that came through at that time. Fortunately, my radar was working and I was absorbing everything. I started understanding things like chord inversions where you don't have to play chords from the root up all the time. You can start from the 5th or the 6th or the 7th. As long as you know what the root feel is about you can turn things inside out taking this combination of notes and stack them up any number of ways.
What I hear in your playing is that you play intervals that go beyond the 13th. When you stack up intervals and play the 13th, you get all the hip sounds like the sharp eleven, and flat and sharp ninths. But, say you take a C13, where you have a C, and you might have a Bb, a D, an E, and F# and an A. You can go up and play a C13 oil top of that and it will work. You'll play an F natural on top of that and it will work. When you're not playing bebop kinds of lines, I hear you play some heavy arpeggios running through and across and around, sideways, all kinds of ways, but it seems to me you're playing intervals that go beyond the 13th.
I've heard things in that zone. This stems back from some of the non conventional sounds and combinations of notes that I first heard through Bartok and Stravinsky. I started to understand chords, chord movement, and chord classification in one set of chords; where it all came from and where it goes from there. Having a sense of composition has served me well, and also having a rich sense of rhythm, and a desire not to repeat stuff. I consider it one of the worst sins a musician could possibly commit, to play an idea more than one time. You've got to keep changing things around, keep inventing, and especially when you're making records. I came into it thinking of change being a constant thing. I can remember going onto the bandstand after being around Detroit for a few years, and consciously getting my brain to start phrases on different notes of the bar, with a different combination of notes, and a different rhythm. I developed the ability to start anywhere in the bar and it lent to a whole new attitude of constant variation. I would start with the first bar, not starting it on one but starting it on the 'and' of four or the 'and' of three, with a series of sixteenth notes with several triplets. I would let the first four bars take care of themselves until we got to the fifth bar, and start that at a certain point of the rhythmic structure of the bar. Then I'd start something in the seventh bar. What I was developing was a sense of not falling into that habit of playing the same things all the time. We are creatures of habit anyway so its easy to fall into them. You practice early on so that habits don't form which have to be dealt with later, like bad fingerings that you have to clean up later.
Those are technical processes, but you're also talking about creative musical processes. Instead of always following the same mental path you can evoke a different process whenever you want to. Everybody wants your formula. How many students have come to you and said, 'Joe, what are those patterns?'
And those are the kind of students I don't take. I want to effect the part of their brain to create these things. When you think about this in a certain way, there is no formula.
What they hear as a formula is actually something you created spontaneously out of all of the resources that you have at your command.
The way I teach is memory plus improvisation. I generally don't allow tape recorders at the lesson, although I will bend on that as it's so much a part of things now. In terms of them understanding what their creative faculty is supposed to be about, they don't need a tape recorder. We'll travel as far as their brain can go during a lesson. There's so much printed material around, fake books, etc., and I don't remember using those kinds of things. These things tend to become crutches. I learned the tunes. I've seen people come up on the bandstand and before I call count the tune off I'm hearing people turning these pages (laughter). Night after night they're still trying to find this song. I really wish they would understand that the mind will absorb the music in its time. You can't overload it.
There's so much that can enter into learning songs. Your emotional state and why you like a particular song.
One can get involved in all those aspects and make it more meaningful when they play. Teaching allows us to plant some trees, and to keep the art form alive. The information that was passed on to us helped us to enjoy the planet a little more through our music.
You recently had a new, young, all female band. Would you talk about them?
These people are young in years, and on a certain level, in their experience. Irene Rosnes is the pianist and came to New York from Vancouver, Canada. The drummer is Sylvia Cuenca and is from San Jose. I've known her since she was sixteen. The bassist is Marlene Rosenberg from Chicago and is twenty-eight. Now the level of experience of the pianist, for example, is far beyond her age of twenty-five years. We've all been to Europe three times and will go again. We've enjoyed a great deal of success out there. These are talented people and they are doing precisely what they should be doing. They're growing.
The impression I got is that you're allowing them the space to learn and absorb from a master, and the experience of playing and traveling together.
Somebody has to provide that when you consider their level of talent, so they can perfect their craft. I plan to record something soon with Blue Note. Although the uniqueness of the group gets a lot of attention, I'm not trying to make a social political statement or the like.
I found them very complimentary to your sound. You can be an aggressive player but your sound texture is generally of a softer nature, and their accompaniment is really quite suitable. But I have to say that your bassist plays as hard as any I've ever heard.
I've been on the bandstand with women before and there's some things I do notice. It's probably a situation that has to do more with experience than anything else. Jack DeJohnette sat in with us in Paris and he brought that 'manhood' to the stand. I thought that I would miss that, and maybe I had been missing that all along. But Sylvia came back and played the way she had developed with us and it was fine. I really feel its the experience that makes the difference. Mainly, men have been drummers and bass players. We've always had women piano players. They aren't trying to be men on their instruments. I have experienced with other women, however, a kind of going overboard to try and assert the Yang part of themselves, more so than necessary, to the point of abandoning their own delicacy as women. I worked with a pianist who would do this and I would mention it in a real professional way that she was neglecting that part of her nature.
You were telling me that you received more notoriety for this group than anything you've done in the past.
In Europe they were coming at me with a battery of microphones and cameras. Once they hear the music, they are convinced. The writeups haven't focused primarily on the fact that they are ladies, but they can't avoid it either.
At this point in our conversation we got into a discussion about vintage Selmer saxophones, sparked by Joe's recent purchases of a 56,000 series Mark VI This was necessitated by the loss, by theft, of one of his saxophones which was later returned by one of his students. Also, the ultimate destruction, by fire in an automobile accident, of his original 54,000 series.
A guy called me from Dallas who knew I would be coming through with the George Gruntz big band. I called him back and he said he had two Selmers to show me. When I got there he had them laid out in the dressing room. I had no idea that this was the vintage horn I'd been looking for. When I picked one up and played it, I couldn't believe how well it played. When my previous horn was destroyed, after twenty-six years, I thought it could never be replaced.
It's such a great story how that
horn came back to you through Hafez Modir, who we were both teaching
at that time. I'll never forget him coming into his lesson and
telling me about it.Hafez was totally innocent. He simply came over for a lesson. About half an hour into the lesson he asked me to try his horn and check his low B. Usually I play piano and assign lines, a more "here and now approach." I really didn't want to do what he was asking, so I tried to steer him away from that by giving him more demanding material. But, he had the right kind of persistence. So, after hanging on the ropes about another half an hour I said, 'look man, give me the horn.' I went upstairs and got my mouthpiece and soaked up my reed, and started to play this horn. There were some thing that only I knew about that identified the horn. There was a screw right next to the octave key that would work its way out from time to time and would jab me in the finger. I had it filled down. As I was playing, these things began to come through. I was sitting there talking to myself and thinking, 'man, this is my horn!' I didn't want to give the student the impression that I had flipped out. But, after about fifteen more minutes he wanted it to be my horn. He called it a case of "the son coming back to the father." I exchanged another Selmer with him for my original horn. Apparently it had been purchased a year and a half earlier by a young lady in New York, and I had neglected to keep track of the serial number. If I had known approximately what the number was I could have gotten to a similar horn sooner. Someone once asked me whether or not I felt there was something "magical" about Selmers. I had to say there certainly was something magical about this particular vintage, but I feel their more recent horns have lost that quality. After my original horn was stolen I needed a new one. I was speaking with Selmer's engineers and discussing what I felt were problems with the Mark VII, which was the horn that no one knew I was playing.
Johnny Griffin told me he had one for awhile but took it back because his clothes kept getting caught in the keys.
Their answer was, "the kids want it." I realize these people are busy in their labs trying to develop new ideas, but please keep making that original product which so many people were happy with. They had Super 80's for me to try and that's what I've been playing until now. I'm sure it would be profitable for them to put out an instrument that sounds and feels good to the player. The Japanese are becoming very competitive in the musical instrument business. I talk to saxophonists all over the world, like myself, who are seriously questioning the quality of the new instruments. After all, our survival is depended on this.
Do you have any final comments?
I'm in constant search of new information and ideas, and I want to make the best of this short time that we're out here on this planet living this nebulous thing called life. And I want to plant a few trees along the way and nurture some minds and watch them grow, as people did for me.
©copyright Mel Martin 1991
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JOE HENDERSON INTERVIEWED (1994):
A star to guide them
Joe Henderson: Lotus Blossom (from Lush Life, 1992)
Joe Henderson is sitting at a press conference in Carnegie Hall,
New York, patiently answering another dumb leading question. Someone
among the contingent of journalists has just asked this legendary
tenor saxophonist -- who turned 57 this week -- why it has taken so
long for him to be recognised.
Henderson smiles wanly and with the humility that has been his hallmark says maybe it was best he didn’t get acknowledged up until recently - perhaps God thought, “If I give it to him early, his head will swell up."
There is a ripple of laughter around the room, then Henderson, realising the intensity of the Eastern European interviewer, adds, “But seriously . . .” and embarks on a bland answer.
Another question comes his way: what does Joe think of the Verve label? It’s about the third time the question has been asked and this time the collective groan from other journos flown in from as far afield as Japan, New Zealand and Europe shuts the question down dead.
This is the 50th anniversary salute to the Verve record label, the label to which Henderson signed two years ago, and the shy, bearded saxophonist is just one of the star-studded panel which includes Herbie Hancock, Betty Carter, young trumpeter Roy Hargrove, Antonio Carlos Jobim and guitarist Kenny Burrell. Yet of all these, Henderson, of worryingly fragile and birdlike frame, is attracting the most attention.
That's what winning Grammy Awards does for your profile. Suddenly - after a lifetime in jazz - Joe is an overnight sensation for soundbite television and print journalists after a quick quote.
Henderson smiles warmly but, gentleman though he is, he deserves better. He possesses, in the heading of a recent profile in the influential jazz magazine Downbeat, “The Sound That Launched a Thousand Horns”, has a career that dates back 30 years, has been the consummate sideman on albums which featured jazz musicians as influential as pianist McCoy Tyner, drummer Elvin Jones, trumpeters Lee Morgan and Freddie Hubbard . . .
The list goes on and Henderson's CV is crammed with the stuff of jazz legend. But more important for present
purposes is his commercial success.
In an art form where commercial success without artistic compromise is a rarity, Henderson has pulled it off. His Verve biography ludicrously overstates the case when it claims he is “the most celebrated jazz artist of the past 25 years”.
But there is no denying sales of 100,000 for his Verve debut Lush Life; The Music of Billy Strayhorn in '92 (his first Grammy and scooping multiple awards in Downbeat) or the even more successful follow-up, So Near, So Far; Musing for Miles of last year which pulled in Grammies for best jazz instrumental solo and best jazz instrumental performance.
Henderson's name was again at the top of Downbeat and Billboard readers and critics’ polls, and from New York‘s Village Voice and Times through USA Today to the Grand Rapids Press and the Cleveland Plain Dealer, his was the album that hit all the “best-of-the-year” lists. Thirty years after topping the Downbeat poll as a “talent deserving wider recognition," Joe Henderson was solidly placed at the top of the Billboard' jazz sales charts. A star.
Jazz success, however, can be easily won -- Kenny G, for instance -- but it usually doesn't sound like jazz. Kenny G, for instance.
But Henderson‘s albums are unmistakably jazz, crafted in the classical framework and tradition.
He plays on both recent albums with small groups (Wynton Marsalis appears on Lush Life, guitarist John Scofield on So Near, So Far) and the consistency of his vision has been reinforced by the reissue of some of his earlier albums in the wake of his current success.
The German label MPS recently reissued his 1980 album Mirrormirror and there is the magnificent four-disc box set The Blue Note Years which gathers together 36 tracks (mostly from the influential period in the Sixties).
All are testament to Henderson's unswerving musical integrity, his ability to play jazz without resorting to cliche or filibustering solos and to his deep immersion in the various threads of jazz throughout the decades. That sagging shelf of awards, trophies and plaques is much deserved.
And he has often - like Miles Davis, with whom he once played very briefly - worked with younger musicians.
“l like being with the ones who have done their homework,” he says once free of the dumb leading questions. "They deserve to be heard. They have to study the craft and take the music seriously. It’s not just getting up and looking hip on the bandstand; the music comes first and everything else comes after.
"There was a point where it seemed if you packaged it right and put it in the marketplace in the right places, whether it was ready or not, it seemed to be acceptable," he adds, referring to the Eighties when record companies went on signing sprees looking for the new Wynton Marsalis.
“Verve has at least moved away from that attitude and put some integrity back into the music. I'm happy to be recognised the way I have over the past year and a half, but I don’t do this for the recognition. I do it because it’s what I'm supposed to do on this planet, I enjoy what I do and I try to project that so the audience gets a lot of happiness.
"But we have to look at the whole picture. Miles [Davis] influenced this whole movement, just as Lester Young and others before did. And all those who never got recognised. I don’t appreciate them any the less for that [lack of recognition]."
What this late career success has meant, however, is that writers and critics, most of whom should know better, are writing Henderson up as the last survivor of his particular generation of jazz artists. Henderson is far too modest and knowledgeable to suggest that.
He sees himself as part of a tradition and his two Verve albums, the first a homage to the songwriter who for 30 years worked with Duke Ellington, the most recent a respectful nod to Miles Davis, were both projects he refers to as replanting the trees.
But this sudden flurry of attention for the albums, his invitation to play at the Clinton Inaugural Ball, a South Bank Show profile, numerous print interviews and sell-out live performances have cast Joe Henderson of Lima, Ohio, as some Anthony Hopkins of jazz -- the one who has always been there in workmanlike and creditable roles but has only lately been accorded his due for carefully crafted albums on his new label.
Hence the question: "What do you think of Verve, Joe?"
As the press conference winds down, Henderson takes his leave, grabs a salad off the amply stocked side-table and settles into a chair while television crews pursue Herbie Hancock for a soundbite. He seems delighted to be able to talk about music and, as his manager observes later, “You don’t get a five-minute interview out of Joe".
He is a gracious and generous talker, and a gentleman who is candid enough to admit the success now means he can get a good seat in a restaurant. He exchanges a few words in Spanish to a Mexican television crew and, like most jazz musicians who have found second homes in France,can
make small talk in French.
He has recorded in Japan, brought Afrocentrlc ideas to two famous albums in the Sixties (Black Narcissus and Power to the People, both with a hard political agenda), on the cusp of the Seventies spent six months in the jazz-rock band Blood. Sweat and Tears (which he hated – too repetitions, too many limos and too little music) and is now the elder statesman of the melodic, mature and confident sound of post-Davis bebop and ballads.
Joe Henderson has come a long way . . . but he remembers it all.
"I had no input into that Blue Note compilation because I'm now signed to this other company,” he says, "but I take my hat off to them. They did a beautiful job. I had a two-hour interview flying between LA and Nice with the guy who did the liner notes and I was surprised, as he was; just how much I could remember.
“When he was asking questions. the recording sessions seemed like they'd happened the day before. But because they were so long ago - the first one came from my first recording in 1963 - I can now be objective about them."
Henderson's recall easily encompasses his first paying gig in New York City. He'd previously studied at Kentucky State University for a year and spent four years at Wayne State in Detroit where he played alongside multi-instrumentalist Yusef Lateef and trumpeter Donald Byrd.
During two years in the military he spent time in France where he met jazz expatriates Bud Powell and Kenny Clarke. On his discharge in '62, he settled in New York and hooked up with a bassist from Detroit, Bernard McKinney, who showed him the ropes.
"I didn't know anything about the city but three months later I was working my first gig and at the end the guy says, ‘Here Joe, here’s your money.' It was $10 . . . and that went a long way in ’62. I’d gotten out of the military in August, so the gig would have been in the Fall. There weren’t a lot of people there, but just the fact I'd been hired for a gig in New York! I couldn’t believe it and I’ll never forget it.”
Within months Henderson was playing alongside trumpeter Kenny Dorham on a Blue Note recording session -- another coup, given that label's special place in jazz of the period. His own Blue Note debut, Page One, was recorded in mid-1963 and Henderson was on his way.
He played on 30 albums by others and recorded seven under his own name during that exciting decade of jazz where there seemed to be few boundaries. Vying for eartime in the jazz community of the time were the sounds of free jazz -- spontaneous improvisation which took as its starting point Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz album of 1960 -- and straight ahead hard bop. There was Third Stream with its classical influences, the Afro-driven spiritual sounds of John Coltrane, restrained experiments with time signature by Dave Brubeck and his acolytes building on his Take Five album of '58 . . .
A broad freedom of expression was available in the jazz vocabulary. And Henderson says he misses it these days.
“I’ve done some free things because there’s a part of me that is a bit of an iconoclast and was especially so at that time. Part of the spirit then was just to reject all that stuff like bar lines and key signatures. We didn’t want to know about it.
“So part of the thing then was just to get up on the bandstand. I became a little self-conscious about people coming in with their own music and parts written out for everyone to play and totally displacing what others might want to bring. I just said, ‘Let's play' and didn’t want to interfere by even suggesting a title for a tune.
“We'd just start playing and see what came out of it. We'd be able to deal with it and figure out afterwards what we did. It was such an interesting time and I don’t understand why that spirit didn’t have a longer life.
"People like Albert Ayler [the seminal avant-garde tenor player who died in 1970] aren’t around any more, of course. But Ornette still is, although he’s much more traditional and conservative than he was . . . and I‘m surprised by that. I was asking someone just a week ago, ‘Whatever happened to ...’ and a whole list came out of people who were connected with that free movement who just seem to have evaporated ir vanished.
"Today there doesn't seem to be too much interest in that free spirit of jazz where you just play and you don’t have to have gone to this or that university to ensure we all know similar things so we can make music together.
“That idea of saying, 'If you play saxophone, come on up and we’ll figure out something’ seems gone now," he concludes ruefully.
Doubtless that spirit of spontaneity was crushed in the Eighties by what has become known as the “neo-conservative” movement which had as its figurehead hot trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, whose insistence on the correct, respectful attitude to the music often took on the appearance of a political dogma.
Having sat out the Seventies after his Blood, Sweat and Tears encounter as a low-profile jazz player, Henderson steadily worked his way back to the forefront in a series of trio recordings during the neoconservative Eighties.
As one who was there for that particular jazz the first time round, he is surprised and saddened at the attitude of these younger musicians whose market profile he hinted at it whose music often doesn't match the claims made for it.
“I'm just surprised they seem so easily satisfied,” he says, shaking his head with a bewildered smile. “They are satisfied just to become the clones of the musicians of the previous generation. They only want to be as good as that. In the Sixties we were interested in pushing back those boundaries and adding something new and coming up with ways and undiscovered avenues of interpreting and improvising.
“We were young and excited by the possibilities - but today so many younger musicians appear to be satisfied with just being as good as the previous generations.
"I don't understand that spirit. I'm used to a much more dissatisfied climate out of which comes some great melodies and works of art oftentimes.
“The state of the art recording now is at a high level, although some things about it haven’t really changed as far as my ear is concerned. Sure, it’s gone from analogue to digital, so now it's nothing for these young musicians to have their music in stores right alongside the masters who are the mentors and influences. But how could it be that you would put something out which isn’t quite as good as that - but maybe just sounds better?
“I simply don’t understand that.”
If the neo-cons have been lining up to pay homage to those mentors and influences – notably Duke Ellington (in the case of Marsalis and his followers) and the early Miles Davis - then so, too, are many of the more mature musicians tipping their berets towards Henderson.
Dumb leading questions by interviewers notwithstanding (“What do you think of Joe Henderson?" directed to trumpeter Roy Hargrove. Answer: "Well, he’s always been recognised by musicians . . ."), Henderson cops acclaim whichever way he turns.
Guitarist John Scofield - one of the finds of the Eighties who didn't fit the neocon mould calls him “the essence of jazz” who embodies “all the different elements that came together in his generation: hard-bop masterfulness plus the avant-garde."
Branford Marsalis considers Henderson “one of the most influential saxophone players of the 20th century" and young pianist Stephen Scott, who plays on Lush Life, notes: "Joe uses so much space when he plays and, as a piano player, you have to learn to play in the cracks so that you won’t get in the soloist's way. Joe starts in the cracks!"
Respect from peers has always been more important in jazz than Grammles and critics' polls -- welcome though they may also be.
Tenor saxophonist Joe Lovano, himself a musician like Henderson who swam against the neo-con tides of the Eighties, offers the most telling tribute to a man whose particular path has been unique in a music that is by definition individual and unique.
“He's always had his own voice,” says Lovano. "He's developed his own concepts with inspirations of the people he dug but without copying them. I hear Joe in other tenor players. I hear not only phrases copped from Joe but lately I hear younger cats trying to cop his sound. That's who you are as player: your sound.
“It's one thing to learn from someone, but to copy his sound is strange. Joe’s solo development live is a real journey - and you can't cop that! He’s on an adventure whenever he plays.”
But it’s an adventure with the attendant pitfalls of success at this point. For a musician whose career spans the breadth of jazz expression, he has latterly become known for his two most recent tribute albums using the music of others.
He is scrupulous about according those musicians their due, but the question remains: Where's Joe going with this?
"I’m thinking about another album right now,” he says thoughtfully, "but we haven't settled on how we want to approach it. If it’s another tribute, well, I’d have to say that formula has worked well for me.
“They are great projects - Lush Life and Musing for Miles couldn’t have been better, just beautiful music regardless. But if I did another it would definitely have to be the last and I'd make a l80-degree turn because there is such a danger in being typecast.
“And I’ve done so many different things in jazz over the years.
“People say to me, ‘Look, that was all right - but we want to hear your music now.’ I get that more often than anything else these days. And when you‘ve had the success I`ve had recently, you have to plan things out a little more. Unfortunately you can't just go out there like a carefree spirit any more and have at it like you used to."
He offers a broad smile and the lines around his eyes etch in deeper.
Not like you used to?
“Yeah,” he laughs. “That's what success does for you!”
Joe Henderson's next album for Verve was in fact a tribute to Antonio Carlos Jobim (who also appeared at the Verve festival in his last live performance), and he also released his interpretation of Gershwin's Porgy and Bess. He died of heart failure due to complications from emphysema in 2001.
Henderson smiles wanly and with the humility that has been his hallmark says maybe it was best he didn’t get acknowledged up until recently - perhaps God thought, “If I give it to him early, his head will swell up."
There is a ripple of laughter around the room, then Henderson, realising the intensity of the Eastern European interviewer, adds, “But seriously . . .” and embarks on a bland answer.
Another question comes his way: what does Joe think of the Verve label? It’s about the third time the question has been asked and this time the collective groan from other journos flown in from as far afield as Japan, New Zealand and Europe shuts the question down dead.
This is the 50th anniversary salute to the Verve record label, the label to which Henderson signed two years ago, and the shy, bearded saxophonist is just one of the star-studded panel which includes Herbie Hancock, Betty Carter, young trumpeter Roy Hargrove, Antonio Carlos Jobim and guitarist Kenny Burrell. Yet of all these, Henderson, of worryingly fragile and birdlike frame, is attracting the most attention.
That's what winning Grammy Awards does for your profile. Suddenly - after a lifetime in jazz - Joe is an overnight sensation for soundbite television and print journalists after a quick quote.
Henderson smiles warmly but, gentleman though he is, he deserves better. He possesses, in the heading of a recent profile in the influential jazz magazine Downbeat, “The Sound That Launched a Thousand Horns”, has a career that dates back 30 years, has been the consummate sideman on albums which featured jazz musicians as influential as pianist McCoy Tyner, drummer Elvin Jones, trumpeters Lee Morgan and Freddie Hubbard . . .
The list goes on and Henderson's CV is crammed with the stuff of jazz legend. But more important for present
purposes is his commercial success.
In an art form where commercial success without artistic compromise is a rarity, Henderson has pulled it off. His Verve biography ludicrously overstates the case when it claims he is “the most celebrated jazz artist of the past 25 years”.
But there is no denying sales of 100,000 for his Verve debut Lush Life; The Music of Billy Strayhorn in '92 (his first Grammy and scooping multiple awards in Downbeat) or the even more successful follow-up, So Near, So Far; Musing for Miles of last year which pulled in Grammies for best jazz instrumental solo and best jazz instrumental performance.
Henderson's name was again at the top of Downbeat and Billboard readers and critics’ polls, and from New York‘s Village Voice and Times through USA Today to the Grand Rapids Press and the Cleveland Plain Dealer, his was the album that hit all the “best-of-the-year” lists. Thirty years after topping the Downbeat poll as a “talent deserving wider recognition," Joe Henderson was solidly placed at the top of the Billboard' jazz sales charts. A star.
Jazz success, however, can be easily won -- Kenny G, for instance -- but it usually doesn't sound like jazz. Kenny G, for instance.
But Henderson‘s albums are unmistakably jazz, crafted in the classical framework and tradition.
He plays on both recent albums with small groups (Wynton Marsalis appears on Lush Life, guitarist John Scofield on So Near, So Far) and the consistency of his vision has been reinforced by the reissue of some of his earlier albums in the wake of his current success.
The German label MPS recently reissued his 1980 album Mirrormirror and there is the magnificent four-disc box set The Blue Note Years which gathers together 36 tracks (mostly from the influential period in the Sixties).
All are testament to Henderson's unswerving musical integrity, his ability to play jazz without resorting to cliche or filibustering solos and to his deep immersion in the various threads of jazz throughout the decades. That sagging shelf of awards, trophies and plaques is much deserved.
And he has often - like Miles Davis, with whom he once played very briefly - worked with younger musicians.
“l like being with the ones who have done their homework,” he says once free of the dumb leading questions. "They deserve to be heard. They have to study the craft and take the music seriously. It’s not just getting up and looking hip on the bandstand; the music comes first and everything else comes after.
"There was a point where it seemed if you packaged it right and put it in the marketplace in the right places, whether it was ready or not, it seemed to be acceptable," he adds, referring to the Eighties when record companies went on signing sprees looking for the new Wynton Marsalis.
“Verve has at least moved away from that attitude and put some integrity back into the music. I'm happy to be recognised the way I have over the past year and a half, but I don’t do this for the recognition. I do it because it’s what I'm supposed to do on this planet, I enjoy what I do and I try to project that so the audience gets a lot of happiness.
"But we have to look at the whole picture. Miles [Davis] influenced this whole movement, just as Lester Young and others before did. And all those who never got recognised. I don’t appreciate them any the less for that [lack of recognition]."
What this late career success has meant, however, is that writers and critics, most of whom should know better, are writing Henderson up as the last survivor of his particular generation of jazz artists. Henderson is far too modest and knowledgeable to suggest that.
He sees himself as part of a tradition and his two Verve albums, the first a homage to the songwriter who for 30 years worked with Duke Ellington, the most recent a respectful nod to Miles Davis, were both projects he refers to as replanting the trees.
But this sudden flurry of attention for the albums, his invitation to play at the Clinton Inaugural Ball, a South Bank Show profile, numerous print interviews and sell-out live performances have cast Joe Henderson of Lima, Ohio, as some Anthony Hopkins of jazz -- the one who has always been there in workmanlike and creditable roles but has only lately been accorded his due for carefully crafted albums on his new label.
Hence the question: "What do you think of Verve, Joe?"
As the press conference winds down, Henderson takes his leave, grabs a salad off the amply stocked side-table and settles into a chair while television crews pursue Herbie Hancock for a soundbite. He seems delighted to be able to talk about music and, as his manager observes later, “You don’t get a five-minute interview out of Joe".
He is a gracious and generous talker, and a gentleman who is candid enough to admit the success now means he can get a good seat in a restaurant. He exchanges a few words in Spanish to a Mexican television crew and, like most jazz musicians who have found second homes in France,can
make small talk in French.
He has recorded in Japan, brought Afrocentrlc ideas to two famous albums in the Sixties (Black Narcissus and Power to the People, both with a hard political agenda), on the cusp of the Seventies spent six months in the jazz-rock band Blood. Sweat and Tears (which he hated – too repetitions, too many limos and too little music) and is now the elder statesman of the melodic, mature and confident sound of post-Davis bebop and ballads.
Joe Henderson has come a long way . . . but he remembers it all.
"I had no input into that Blue Note compilation because I'm now signed to this other company,” he says, "but I take my hat off to them. They did a beautiful job. I had a two-hour interview flying between LA and Nice with the guy who did the liner notes and I was surprised, as he was; just how much I could remember.
“When he was asking questions. the recording sessions seemed like they'd happened the day before. But because they were so long ago - the first one came from my first recording in 1963 - I can now be objective about them."
Henderson's recall easily encompasses his first paying gig in New York City. He'd previously studied at Kentucky State University for a year and spent four years at Wayne State in Detroit where he played alongside multi-instrumentalist Yusef Lateef and trumpeter Donald Byrd.
During two years in the military he spent time in France where he met jazz expatriates Bud Powell and Kenny Clarke. On his discharge in '62, he settled in New York and hooked up with a bassist from Detroit, Bernard McKinney, who showed him the ropes.
"I didn't know anything about the city but three months later I was working my first gig and at the end the guy says, ‘Here Joe, here’s your money.' It was $10 . . . and that went a long way in ’62. I’d gotten out of the military in August, so the gig would have been in the Fall. There weren’t a lot of people there, but just the fact I'd been hired for a gig in New York! I couldn’t believe it and I’ll never forget it.”
Within months Henderson was playing alongside trumpeter Kenny Dorham on a Blue Note recording session -- another coup, given that label's special place in jazz of the period. His own Blue Note debut, Page One, was recorded in mid-1963 and Henderson was on his way.
He played on 30 albums by others and recorded seven under his own name during that exciting decade of jazz where there seemed to be few boundaries. Vying for eartime in the jazz community of the time were the sounds of free jazz -- spontaneous improvisation which took as its starting point Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz album of 1960 -- and straight ahead hard bop. There was Third Stream with its classical influences, the Afro-driven spiritual sounds of John Coltrane, restrained experiments with time signature by Dave Brubeck and his acolytes building on his Take Five album of '58 . . .
A broad freedom of expression was available in the jazz vocabulary. And Henderson says he misses it these days.
“I’ve done some free things because there’s a part of me that is a bit of an iconoclast and was especially so at that time. Part of the spirit then was just to reject all that stuff like bar lines and key signatures. We didn’t want to know about it.
“So part of the thing then was just to get up on the bandstand. I became a little self-conscious about people coming in with their own music and parts written out for everyone to play and totally displacing what others might want to bring. I just said, ‘Let's play' and didn’t want to interfere by even suggesting a title for a tune.
“We'd just start playing and see what came out of it. We'd be able to deal with it and figure out afterwards what we did. It was such an interesting time and I don’t understand why that spirit didn’t have a longer life.
"People like Albert Ayler [the seminal avant-garde tenor player who died in 1970] aren’t around any more, of course. But Ornette still is, although he’s much more traditional and conservative than he was . . . and I‘m surprised by that. I was asking someone just a week ago, ‘Whatever happened to ...’ and a whole list came out of people who were connected with that free movement who just seem to have evaporated ir vanished.
"Today there doesn't seem to be too much interest in that free spirit of jazz where you just play and you don’t have to have gone to this or that university to ensure we all know similar things so we can make music together.
“That idea of saying, 'If you play saxophone, come on up and we’ll figure out something’ seems gone now," he concludes ruefully.
Doubtless that spirit of spontaneity was crushed in the Eighties by what has become known as the “neo-conservative” movement which had as its figurehead hot trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, whose insistence on the correct, respectful attitude to the music often took on the appearance of a political dogma.
Having sat out the Seventies after his Blood, Sweat and Tears encounter as a low-profile jazz player, Henderson steadily worked his way back to the forefront in a series of trio recordings during the neoconservative Eighties.
As one who was there for that particular jazz the first time round, he is surprised and saddened at the attitude of these younger musicians whose market profile he hinted at it whose music often doesn't match the claims made for it.
“I'm just surprised they seem so easily satisfied,” he says, shaking his head with a bewildered smile. “They are satisfied just to become the clones of the musicians of the previous generation. They only want to be as good as that. In the Sixties we were interested in pushing back those boundaries and adding something new and coming up with ways and undiscovered avenues of interpreting and improvising.
“We were young and excited by the possibilities - but today so many younger musicians appear to be satisfied with just being as good as the previous generations.
"I don't understand that spirit. I'm used to a much more dissatisfied climate out of which comes some great melodies and works of art oftentimes.
“The state of the art recording now is at a high level, although some things about it haven’t really changed as far as my ear is concerned. Sure, it’s gone from analogue to digital, so now it's nothing for these young musicians to have their music in stores right alongside the masters who are the mentors and influences. But how could it be that you would put something out which isn’t quite as good as that - but maybe just sounds better?
“I simply don’t understand that.”
If the neo-cons have been lining up to pay homage to those mentors and influences – notably Duke Ellington (in the case of Marsalis and his followers) and the early Miles Davis - then so, too, are many of the more mature musicians tipping their berets towards Henderson.
Dumb leading questions by interviewers notwithstanding (“What do you think of Joe Henderson?" directed to trumpeter Roy Hargrove. Answer: "Well, he’s always been recognised by musicians . . ."), Henderson cops acclaim whichever way he turns.
Guitarist John Scofield - one of the finds of the Eighties who didn't fit the neocon mould calls him “the essence of jazz” who embodies “all the different elements that came together in his generation: hard-bop masterfulness plus the avant-garde."
Branford Marsalis considers Henderson “one of the most influential saxophone players of the 20th century" and young pianist Stephen Scott, who plays on Lush Life, notes: "Joe uses so much space when he plays and, as a piano player, you have to learn to play in the cracks so that you won’t get in the soloist's way. Joe starts in the cracks!"
Respect from peers has always been more important in jazz than Grammles and critics' polls -- welcome though they may also be.
Tenor saxophonist Joe Lovano, himself a musician like Henderson who swam against the neo-con tides of the Eighties, offers the most telling tribute to a man whose particular path has been unique in a music that is by definition individual and unique.
“He's always had his own voice,” says Lovano. "He's developed his own concepts with inspirations of the people he dug but without copying them. I hear Joe in other tenor players. I hear not only phrases copped from Joe but lately I hear younger cats trying to cop his sound. That's who you are as player: your sound.
“It's one thing to learn from someone, but to copy his sound is strange. Joe’s solo development live is a real journey - and you can't cop that! He’s on an adventure whenever he plays.”
But it’s an adventure with the attendant pitfalls of success at this point. For a musician whose career spans the breadth of jazz expression, he has latterly become known for his two most recent tribute albums using the music of others.
He is scrupulous about according those musicians their due, but the question remains: Where's Joe going with this?
"I’m thinking about another album right now,” he says thoughtfully, "but we haven't settled on how we want to approach it. If it’s another tribute, well, I’d have to say that formula has worked well for me.
“They are great projects - Lush Life and Musing for Miles couldn’t have been better, just beautiful music regardless. But if I did another it would definitely have to be the last and I'd make a l80-degree turn because there is such a danger in being typecast.
“And I’ve done so many different things in jazz over the years.
“People say to me, ‘Look, that was all right - but we want to hear your music now.’ I get that more often than anything else these days. And when you‘ve had the success I`ve had recently, you have to plan things out a little more. Unfortunately you can't just go out there like a carefree spirit any more and have at it like you used to."
He offers a broad smile and the lines around his eyes etch in deeper.
Not like you used to?
“Yeah,” he laughs. “That's what success does for you!”
Joe Henderson's next album for Verve was in fact a tribute to Antonio Carlos Jobim (who also appeared at the Verve festival in his last live performance), and he also released his interpretation of Gershwin's Porgy and Bess. He died of heart failure due to complications from emphysema in 2001.
By Graham Reid, posted
THE MUSIC OF JOE HENDERSON: AN EXTENSIVE VIDEO OVERVIEW, A CROSS SECTION OF RECORDINGS, MUSICAL ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY, PLUS VARIOUS INTERVIEWS WITH MR. HENDERSON:
A Conversation with Joe Henderson
(Jazz Report Magazine 1993)
Verve
Records arranged a lunch with Joe at the Top of The Senator in Toronto
this coming on the release of 'Lush Life' the music of Billy Strayhorn.
The interview was conducted by Bill King for the Jazz Report Magazine:
Joe Henderson - 'In 'n Out' (Album):
In
'n Out is the third album by jazz saxophonist Joe Henderson released on
the Blue Note label. It was recorded on April 10, 1964 and features
performances by Henderson with Kenny Dorham, McCoy Tyner, Richard Davis
and Elvin Jones.
1. "In 'N Out"
2. "Punjab"
3. "Serenity"
4. "Short Story"
5. "Brown's Town"
6. "In 'N Out" [Alternate Take]
Joe Henderson — tenor saxophone
Kenny Dorham — trumpet
McCoy Tyner — piano
Richard Davis — bass
Elvin Jones — drums
Joe Henderson Trio
1. "In 'N Out"
2. "Punjab"
3. "Serenity"
4. "Short Story"
5. "Brown's Town"
6. "In 'N Out" [Alternate Take]
Joe Henderson — tenor saxophone
Kenny Dorham — trumpet
McCoy Tyner — piano
Richard Davis — bass
Elvin Jones — drums
Joe Henderson, Dave Holland and Al Foster - Muenchner Klaviersommer 1993:
Joe Henderson Trio
Muenchner Kalviersommer 1993
1hr 7mins
Joe Henderson - Tenor Saxophone
Dave Holland - Bass
Al Foster - Drums
Track listing:
00:00 1) Serenity
08:25 2) Recorda-me
23:34 3) Body and Soul
37:23 4) Take the A Train
49:00 5) Y Todavia La Quiero
Joe Henderson - 'Inner Urge' (Album)
Inner
Urge is an album by jazz saxophonist Joe Henderson released in 1965,
the fourth recorded as a leader for Blue Note Records. It was recorded
at the Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey on November 30,
1964. It features performances by pianist McCoy Tyner, Elvin Jones on
drums, bassist Bob Cranshaw and Joe Henderson on tenor saxophone.
Joe Henderson - 'Double Rainbow' (Full Album)
"Double
Rainbow: The Music of Antonio Carlos Jobim is a 1995 album by jazz
saxophonist Joe Henderson, released on Verve Records. It contains
Henderson's rearrangement of music by Brazilian composer Antonio Carlos
Jobim.[2]
The album was originally intended to be a collaboration between Henderson and Jobim, but the plan was changed following Jobim's death.[2]
Like his previous two albums for Verve Records, Double Rainbow received excellent reviews and relatively good sales for a jazz album in 1995. Reviewer Scott Yanow called the album "very accessible yet unpredictable".[2] The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD awarded the album three stars and described it as "essentially high-calibre light-jazz".[3]"
PERSONNEL:
Joe Henderson – tenor saxophone
Eliane Elias – piano (tracks 1-4)
Herbie Hancock – piano (tracks 6-11)
Oscar Castro-Neves – guitar (tracks 1, 2, 5)
Nico Assumpção – bass (tracks 1-4)
Christian McBride – bass (tracks 6-12)
Paulo Braga – drums (tracks 1-4)
Jack DeJohnette – drums (tracks 6-7, 9, 11)
The album was originally intended to be a collaboration between Henderson and Jobim, but the plan was changed following Jobim's death.[2]
Like his previous two albums for Verve Records, Double Rainbow received excellent reviews and relatively good sales for a jazz album in 1995. Reviewer Scott Yanow called the album "very accessible yet unpredictable".[2] The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD awarded the album three stars and described it as "essentially high-calibre light-jazz".[3]"
PERSONNEL:
Joe Henderson – tenor saxophone
Eliane Elias – piano (tracks 1-4)
Herbie Hancock – piano (tracks 6-11)
Oscar Castro-Neves – guitar (tracks 1, 2, 5)
Nico Assumpção – bass (tracks 1-4)
Christian McBride – bass (tracks 6-12)
Paulo Braga – drums (tracks 1-4)
Jack DeJohnette – drums (tracks 6-7, 9, 11)
Joe Henderson - 'In Japan' (Full Album)
Joe
Henderson in Japan is a live album by American saxophonist Joe
Henderson, released on Milestone Records in 1971. In the early 1970s
jazz was not enjoying an explosion of popularity in the land of its
birth. In Japan, the story was different. The country's jazz listeners
came to the music full of appreciation that grows from deep knowledge,
and they knew Joe Henderson. No young modern jazz player had created
more excitement and interest in Japan. When he arrived for an engagement
in Tokyo at a club with the piquant name Junk Club, anticipation was
running high. Joining a local rhythm section, he rewarded his fans with
some of the most inspired performances of his career. According to the
jazz historian Bill Kirchner:
"Joe Henderson in Japan... is one of the handful of records from the late Sixties and early Seventies to be studied like a textbook by the most advanced young jazz musicians. It's that kind of a record."
Tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson is heard in peak form throughout this set. Performing at the Junk Club in Tokyo, Henderson is joined by an all-Japanese rhythm section (electric pianist Hideo Ichikawa, bassist Kunimitsu Inaba, and drummer Motohiko Hino) on lengthy versions of "'Round Midnight," "Blue Bossa," and his two originals "Out 'n' In" and "Junk Blues." Henderson sounds quite inspired throughout the set, and the obscure rhythm section (only Hino is known in the U.S.) really pushes him. An underrated gem.
TRACK LISTING:
1. Round Midnight (Monk)
2. Out 'N' In (Henderson)
3. Blue Bossa (Dorham)
4. Junk Blues (Henderson)
PERSONNEL:
Joe Henderson - tenor saxophone
Hideo Ichikawa - electric piano
Kunimitsu Inaba - bass
Motohiko Hino - drums
"Beatrice" (Live) · Joe Henderson
"Joe Henderson in Japan... is one of the handful of records from the late Sixties and early Seventies to be studied like a textbook by the most advanced young jazz musicians. It's that kind of a record."
Tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson is heard in peak form throughout this set. Performing at the Junk Club in Tokyo, Henderson is joined by an all-Japanese rhythm section (electric pianist Hideo Ichikawa, bassist Kunimitsu Inaba, and drummer Motohiko Hino) on lengthy versions of "'Round Midnight," "Blue Bossa," and his two originals "Out 'n' In" and "Junk Blues." Henderson sounds quite inspired throughout the set, and the obscure rhythm section (only Hino is known in the U.S.) really pushes him. An underrated gem.
TRACK LISTING:
1. Round Midnight (Monk)
2. Out 'N' In (Henderson)
3. Blue Bossa (Dorham)
4. Junk Blues (Henderson)
PERSONNEL:
Joe Henderson - tenor saxophone
Hideo Ichikawa - electric piano
Kunimitsu Inaba - bass
Motohiko Hino - drums
"Beatrice" (Live) · Joe Henderson
The State of the Tenor Vol. 1 & 2 - Live at the Village Vanguard
℗ 1985 Blue Note Records. All rights reserved.
Composer: Sam Rivers
Joe Henderson quartet with the legendary Bheki Mseleku at the piano 1994:
TRANSFERRED FROM A V.H.S TAPE:
Joe Henderson-Tenor saxophone
Bheki Mseleku--piano
George Mraz - bass
Al Foster drums
Joe Henderson -- "Black Narcissus":
Joe Henderson - "Invitation"
JOE HENDERSON--"A Shade Of Jade":
Opening
track from Henderson's original "Mode For Joe" album. Joe Henderson
(tenor saxophone); Lee Morgan (trumpet); Curtis Fuller (trombone); Bobby
Hutcherson (vibraphone); Cedar Walton (piano); Ron Carter (bass); Joe
Chambers (drums).
Recorded at the Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey on January 27, 1966. Originally released on Blue Note (BLP 4227
Rare Conversation with John Scofield and Joe Henderson: 9/3/96:
9/3/96:
Guitarist John Scofield and Joe Henderson met with Bret Primack for an
interview that would become an article for JazzTimes magazine. Bret
documented the interview on a Sony High 8 camcorder and the tapes sat in
his archives for fifteen years. While transferring some content for
another video, Bret discovered the lost interview, found the content
quite interesting, and decided to post it here, in its entirety, even
though the technical quality is not up to today's standards.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Henderson
Joe Henderson (April 24, 1937 – June 30, 2001) was an American jazz tenor saxophonist. In a career spanning more than forty years Henderson played with many of the leading American players of his day and recorded for several prominent labels, including Blue Note.
By eighteen, Henderson was active on the Detroit jazz scene of the mid-1950s, playing in jam sessions with visiting New York stars. While attending classes of flute and bass at Wayne State University, he further developed his saxophone and compositional skills under the guidance of renowned teacher Larry Teal at the Teal School of Music. In late 1959, he formed his first group.[2] By the time he arrived at Wayne State University, he had transcribed and memorized so many Lester Young solos that his professors believed he had perfect pitch. Classmates Yusef Lateef, Barry Harris and Donald Byrd undoubtedly provided additional inspiration.[3] He also studied music at Kentucky State College.
Shortly prior to his army induction in 1960, Henderson was commissioned by UNAC to write some arrangements for the suite "Swings and Strings", which was later performed by a ten-member orchestra and the local dance band of Jimmy Wilkins.[2]
Although Henderson's earliest recordings were marked by a strong hard-bop influence, his playing encompassed not only the bebop tradition, but R&B, Latin and avant-garde as well. He soon joined Horace Silver's band and provided a seminal solo on the jukebox hit "Song for My Father". After leaving Silver's band in 1966, Henderson resumed freelancing and also co-led a big band with Dorham. His arrangements for the band went unrecorded until the release of Joe Henderson Big Band (Verve) in 1996.
In 1967, there was a brief association with Miles Davis's quintet featuring Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter and Tony Williams, although the band was never recorded. Henderson's adaptability and eclecticism would become even more apparent in the years to follow.
After a brief association with Blood, Sweat & Tears in 1971, Henderson moved to San Francisco and added teaching to his résumé.
It was only after the release of An Evening with Joe Henderson, a live trio set (featuring Charlie Haden and Foster) for the Italian independent label Red Records that Henderson underwent a major career change: Verve took notice of him and in the early 1990s signed him. That label adopted a 'songbook' approach to recording him, coupling it with a considerable marketing and publicity campaign, which more successfully positioned Henderson at the forefront of the contemporary jazz scene. His 1992 'comeback' album Lush Life: The Music of Billy Strayhorn was a commercial and critical success and followed by tribute albums to Miles Davis, Antonio Carlos Jobim and a rendition of the George Gershwin opera Porgy and Bess.
On June 30, 2001, Joe Henderson died in San Francisco, California, as a result of heart failure after a long battle with emphysema.[4]
Jazz great Henderson gets musical start in Lima the419 | Our Founders
Original liner notes to Page One by Kenny Dorham
Mel Martin, Interview with Joe Henderson, in The Saxophone Journal, March/April 1991. Retrieved April 24, 2007.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Henderson
Joe Henderson
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Joe Henderson | |
|---|---|
Joe Henderson with Neil Swainson
|
|
| Background information | |
| Born | April 24, 1937 Lima, Ohio, United States |
| Died | June 30, 2001 (aged 64) San Francisco, California, United States |
| Genres | Hard bop Post-bop Soul-jazz Mainstream jazz Jazz fusion |
| Years active | 1960–1998 |
| Labels | Blue Note, Verve, Milestone |
| Associated acts | Kenny Dorham, Andrew Hill, Grant Green, Freddie Hubbard, Herbie Hancock, McCoy Tyner, Horace Silver, Charlie Haden, Ron Carter, Elvin Jones, Bobby Hutcherson, Lee Morgan, Richard Davis, Chick Corea, John Scofield, Flora Purim, Bob Cranshaw, Wynton Marsalis |
| Website | http://www.joehendersonsax.com/ |
| Notable instruments | |
| Tenor saxophone | |
Joe Henderson (April 24, 1937 – June 30, 2001) was an American jazz tenor saxophonist. In a career spanning more than forty years Henderson played with many of the leading American players of his day and recorded for several prominent labels, including Blue Note.
Contents
Biography
Early life
From a very large family with five sisters and nine brothers, Henderson was born in Lima, Ohio, and was encouraged by his parents Dennis and Irene (nee Farley)[1] and older brother James T. to study music. He dedicated his first album to them "for being so understanding and tolerant" during his formative years. Early musical interests included drums, piano, saxophone and composition. According to Kenny Dorham, two local piano teachers who went to school with Henderson's brothers and sisters, Richard Patterson and Don Hurless, gave him a knowledge of the piano.[2] He was particularly enamored of his brother's record collection. It seems that a hometown drummer, John Jarette, advised Henderson to listen to musicians like Lester Young, Stan Getz, Dexter Gordon and Charlie Parker.[2] He also liked Flip Phillips, Lee Konitz and the Jazz at the Philharmonic recordings. However, Parker became his greatest inspiration. His first approach to the saxophone was under the tutelage of Herbert Murphy in high school. In this period of time, he wrote several scores for the school band and rock groups.By eighteen, Henderson was active on the Detroit jazz scene of the mid-1950s, playing in jam sessions with visiting New York stars. While attending classes of flute and bass at Wayne State University, he further developed his saxophone and compositional skills under the guidance of renowned teacher Larry Teal at the Teal School of Music. In late 1959, he formed his first group.[2] By the time he arrived at Wayne State University, he had transcribed and memorized so many Lester Young solos that his professors believed he had perfect pitch. Classmates Yusef Lateef, Barry Harris and Donald Byrd undoubtedly provided additional inspiration.[3] He also studied music at Kentucky State College.
Shortly prior to his army induction in 1960, Henderson was commissioned by UNAC to write some arrangements for the suite "Swings and Strings", which was later performed by a ten-member orchestra and the local dance band of Jimmy Wilkins.[2]
Early career
Henderson spent two years (1960–62) in the U.S. Army: first in Fort Benning, where he even competed in the army talent show and won first place, then in Fort Belvoir, where he was chosen for a world tour, with a show to entertain soldiers. While in Paris, he met Kenny Drew and Kenny Clarke. Then he was sent to Maryland to conclude his draft. In 1962, he was finally discharged and promptly moved to New York. He first met trumpeter Kenny Dorham, an invaluable guidance for him, at saxophonist Junior Cook's place. That very evening, they went see Dexter Gordon playing at Birdland. Henderson was asked by Gordon himself to play something with his rhythm section; needless to say, he happily accepted.[2]Although Henderson's earliest recordings were marked by a strong hard-bop influence, his playing encompassed not only the bebop tradition, but R&B, Latin and avant-garde as well. He soon joined Horace Silver's band and provided a seminal solo on the jukebox hit "Song for My Father". After leaving Silver's band in 1966, Henderson resumed freelancing and also co-led a big band with Dorham. His arrangements for the band went unrecorded until the release of Joe Henderson Big Band (Verve) in 1996.
Blue Note
From 1963 to 1968, Henderson appeared on nearly thirty albums for Blue Note, including five released under his name. The recordings ranged from relatively conservative hard-bop sessions (Page One, 1963) to more explorative sessions (Inner Urge and Mode for Joe, 1966). He played a prominent role in many landmark albums under other leaders for the label, including most of Silver's Song for My Father, Herbie Hancock's dark and densely orchestrated The Prisoner, Lee Morgan's hit album The Sidewinder and "out" albums with pianist Andrew Hill (Black Fire 1963 and Point of Departure, 1964) and drummer Pete La Roca (Basra, 1965).In 1967, there was a brief association with Miles Davis's quintet featuring Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter and Tony Williams, although the band was never recorded. Henderson's adaptability and eclecticism would become even more apparent in the years to follow.
Milestone
Signing with Orrin Keepnews's fledgling Milestone label in 1967 marked a new phase in Henderson's career. He co-led the Jazz Communicators with Freddie Hubbard from 1967 to 1968. Henderson was also featured on Hancock's Fat Albert Rotunda for Warner Bros. It was during this time that Henderson began to experiment with jazz-funk fusion, studio overdubbing, and other electronic effects. Song and album titles such as Power to the People, In Pursuit of Blackness, and Black Narcissus reflected his growing political awareness and social consciousness, although the last album was named after the Powell and Pressburger film of 1947.After a brief association with Blood, Sweat & Tears in 1971, Henderson moved to San Francisco and added teaching to his résumé.
Later career and death
Though he occasionally worked with Echoes of an Era, the Griffith Park Band and Chick Corea, Henderson remained primarily a leader throughout the 1980s. An accomplished and prolific composer, he began to focus more on reinterpreting standards and his own earlier compositions. Blue Note attempted to position the artist at the forefront of a resurgent jazz scene in 1986 with the release of the two-volume State of the Tenor recorded at the Village Vanguard in New York City. The albums (with Ron Carter on bass and Al Foster on drums) revisited the tenor trio form used by Sonny Rollins in 1957 on his own live Vanguard albums for the same label. Henderson established his basic repertoire for the next seven or eight years, with Thelonious Monk's "Ask Me Now" becoming a signature ballad feature.It was only after the release of An Evening with Joe Henderson, a live trio set (featuring Charlie Haden and Foster) for the Italian independent label Red Records that Henderson underwent a major career change: Verve took notice of him and in the early 1990s signed him. That label adopted a 'songbook' approach to recording him, coupling it with a considerable marketing and publicity campaign, which more successfully positioned Henderson at the forefront of the contemporary jazz scene. His 1992 'comeback' album Lush Life: The Music of Billy Strayhorn was a commercial and critical success and followed by tribute albums to Miles Davis, Antonio Carlos Jobim and a rendition of the George Gershwin opera Porgy and Bess.
On June 30, 2001, Joe Henderson died in San Francisco, California, as a result of heart failure after a long battle with emphysema.[4]
Discography
Main article: Joe Henderson discography
References
- Scott Yanow, Allmusic Biography Retrieved June 25, 2009.
External links
- The Joe Henderson Discography
- Joe Henderson Discography & Chronology. Retrieved November 25, 2012
- Twelve Essential Joe Henderson Tracks by S. Victor Aaron (Jazz.com)
- Javier Arau. "Joe Henderson "Lush Life" solo: Transcription and analysis". Retrieved 2015-09-17.
