SOUND PROJECTIONS
AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE
EDITOR: KOFI NATAMBU
SUMMER, 2020
VOLUME NINE NUMBER ONE
BRIAN BLADE
Featuring the Musics and Aesthetic Visions of:
SULLIVAN FORTNER
Eddie Henderson
(b. October 26, 1940)
Artist Biography by Matt Collar
Born Edward Jackson Henderson in New York City in 1940, Henderson grew up in a family steeped in the jazz tradition. His mother was a professional dancer at the Cotton Club, while his father was a member of the legendary Charioteers vocal group. Encouraged to play music, he first picked up the trumpet around age nine, and famously received an early lesson from Louis Armstrong, whom his mother knew from her days in Harlem. During his teens, Henderson moved to San Francisco with his family, where he continued to progress as a musician. A driven, highly disciplined student while in high school, he balanced his music practice, with studying, playing sports, and participating in competitive figure skating. It was during these years that he first met his longtime idol Miles Davis, who stayed at his parent's house when playing in the Bay Area. From the late '50s on, Davis was a heavy influence on the trumpeter's approach to jazz. It was also through Davis that Henderson first met future boss and bandmate Herbie Hancock.
After a stint in the Air Force, Henderson enrolled for medical school, earning his undergraduate degree at the University of California, and later finishing his medical studies at Howard University where he graduated in 1968. During his time at Howard, he would often spend the weekends driving from Washington, D.C. to New York to study with Freddie Hubbard and Lee Morgan. After earning his M.D., he then returned to the Bay Area where he served out a psychiatric residency and played jazz in his off-hours. While there, he was asked to join Herbie Hancock's innovative funk and fusion-based Mwandishi ensemble for a week-long run of shows in San Francisco. This led to a full-time appointment, and from 1970 to 1973, Henderson toured and recorded with the group, appearing on the influential 1973 album Sextant.
Eddie Henderson
Eddie Henderson is one of today's top and most original jazz trumpet players. Henderson was born in New York City October 26, 1940. His father sang with the Charioteers, and his mother danced as one of the Brown twins at the Cotton club. Louis Armstrong gave Eddie his first few trumpet lessons at the age of nine.
Eddie moved with his family to San Francisco when he was 14 years old. He studied at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music from 1954 to '56. Around 1956, Miles Davis was guest at Eddie Henderson's home during a black Hawk Jazz Club gig and was impressed with Eddie's ability to perform his famous “Sketches of Spain” without a fluff but encouraged Henderson to seek his own originality.
Following Air Force service from 1958 to '61, Eddie became the first African American to compete for the National figure skating Championship, winning the pacific and Midwestern titles.
The year 1961 was the beginning of Eddie pursuing dual careers-medicine and music. After receiving a bachelor of science in Zoology at the University of California at Berkeley in 1964,he got his M.D. at Howard university Medical School in 1968. Eddie interned at San Francisco's French Hospital during 1968 and '69 and undertook a two-year residency in psychiatry at the University of California hospital from 1969 to '71.
Henderson first got worldwide recognition for his jazz- trumpet playing from the popular recordings he made with Herbie Hancock's Mwandishi group during the early '70s. other jazz performers Eddie has played with include Pharoah Sanders, Art Blakey, Elvin Jones, Johnny Griffin, Slide Hampton, McCoy Tyner, Benny Golson, Max Roach, Jackie McClean, Dexter Gordon, Roy Haynes, Joe Henderson etc.
Henderson has been on the faculty at Juillard School of Music since 2007.
https://ofa.fas.harvard.edu/blog/eddie-henderson-mark-jazz-musician
Eddie Henderson:
The mark of a jazz musician
by Andrew Chow '14
Harvard University
If there was ever a Forrest Gump of jazz, it would be trumpeter Eddie Henderson.
Of course, the main difference is brainpower: Whereas Tom Hanks’ 1992 character Gump is a simpleton, Henderson is a fully licensed physician who practiced medicine for 13 years. As with Gump, Henderson has lived through a large part of the 20th century, experiencing and even playing a major role in the landmark moments of of jazz culture. At age 9, he blew his first notes into Louis Armstrong’s trumpet. He hung out with Miles Davis as a teenager and joined Herbie Hancock’s trailblazing Mwandishi band in the 1970s.
He will be featured in the Learning from Performers series (3 p.m., November 14 at the Thompson Room in the Barker Center) and then play a concert with the Harvard Jazz Bands (8 p.m., November 16 in Lowell Lecture Hall). Below are excerpts from our conversation about his incredible journey.
Beginnings
"My mother was a dancer at the [prominent Jazz Age Harlem venue] Cotton Club. My father was a singer for a gospel group. So by virtue of both of them being in show business, they knew all the big names. My mother’s roommate, when she was at the Cotton Club, was Billie Holiday. Her best friends were Lena Horne and Sarah Vaughan. All of these people, like Duke, Count Basie and Louis Armstrong, used to come over to the house. Boxer Joe Louis and Sugar Ray Robinson, they were friends of my mother, and I met all these people. I just thought they were average people. I was wrong."
On his first love
"When I was 14, my family moved to San Francisco. I had no friends because I didn’t know anybody. So my stepfather bought me a ticket for the Ice Follies, and I immediately fell in love with ice skating. I started practicing seriously. I’m the first black person on this planet to ever compete and win a national championship in figure skating. I thought that was my calling in life."
On learning the trumpet
"When I was in the 5th grade, my mom took me to the Apollo Theater to hear Louis Armstrong and took me backstage after the show. I didn’t really know who he was--I was just 9-years-old!--but I met him and he taught me how to make a sound on his trumpet. Then I started taking private lessons on the instrument. I started high school in San Francisco when I was 14, where my stepfather was a doctor. When I was 17, one of my stepfather’s patients, Miles Davis, stayed at the house the whole week. He took me to his gig to one night. He had John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley in his band, a bunch of greats from the era. When I heard that music, that’s when the light went on. I said to myself, 'That’s what I want to do with the rest of my life.’ I started trying to learn how to play jazz from that point on."
On joining Herbie Hancock’s band
"After college, I went to medical school and became a doctor. However, I was playing the trumpet all the time, and my heart really was in jazz. Then I heard that Herbie needed a trumpet player. I knew him through Miles. He knew I played trumpet, but he didn’t take me seriously. But I was serious about music. So when he hired me for one week, that one week turned into the rest of my life. That group was way ahead of its time. Herbie had a group before me, playing music like Fat Albert Rotunda. And it was nice. But when he changed personnel, just like in chemistry, when you add different elements, sometimes you can have an explosion, a precipitate. With the Mwandishi group, it was a magical formula. Sometimes the music would jump off the paper and things would take place. We worked together three-and-a-half years, 10 months a year. Everybody got paid only $300 dollars a week. We’d usually travel by van across the country, and you had to pay your own hotel bill on the road. That was big money in those days for a jazz musician."
On self-evolution
"Music is a language. The more idioms and vocabulary the musician learns, the more eloquently he can speak through his instrument. When I got into funk and even disco in the late '70s and '80s, it was a learning experience for me, step by step. The mark of a jazz musician is to play one note, and everyone knows your sound. You just don’t want to be lost in the crowd. When I was younger, I used to imitate people, just like Ray Charles would imitate Nat King Cole. I used to imitate Miles, Lee Morgan, Freddie Hubbard. After a while, I said, ‘Oh, who am I?’ My style is as collection of styles that I had scotch taped together. I just do it a little different. That’s my style."
[Caption: Eddie Henderson]
https://jazztimes.com/archives/eddie-henderson-dr-trumpet/
Eddie Henderson: Dr. Trumpet
There was a stretch of 10 years in San
Francisco, between 1975 and 1985, when trumpeter Eddie Henderson was
juggling two extremely demanding disciplines: practicing medicine and
playing the trumpet. In 1973, Henderson had finished a rewarding stint
with Herbie Hancock’s Mwandishi band, which produced the exceptional,
exploratory records Mwandishi, Crossings and Sextant, and relatively
soon after he felt compelled to return to his other field of study.
I got my M.D. in 1968 but I didn’t start practicing medicine until
1975,” says Henderson. “It was only four hours a day, part time, so I
was always still playing too. I had the fortune to be at a clinic in
San Francisco where the head of the clinic knew I was heavily involved
in music, so whenever I’d get tours or whatever he would let me come and
go as I pleased. So it was the perfect lifestyle. But music was my
number one thing emotionally, even though I was practicing medicine at a
very skilled level.”
Between practicing medicine and keeping his trumpet chops in check, all
of Henderson’s waking hours were consumed during that busy time. “But
it was cool-just a matter of focus and discipline,” he says. “I’ve
always been like that because in high school I was a competitive figure
skater. I think that’s where I really got my discipline, on the ice.
During the summer I was on the ice at least 10 hours a day, from 5:30 in
the morning until the evening. And at the same time I was going to the
[San Francisco Conservatory of Music], going to high school, playing
basketball, too. So I was always pretty focused. And by virtue of that
discipline I got going, everything else that came later was a breeze.
My undergraduate degree at the University of California-that was a
breeze. Also, medical school was a breeze for me, because I was very
focused. I had good study habits, good organization skills. A lot of
the other guys, they wouldn’t come to class for months because they’d be
out partying. But I never missed a class in my life and studied every
day. Those other guys tried to cram and you just can’t do that and
retain information, not the last week before the finals.”
In 1985, Henderson moved to New York to pursue his musical path while
continuing to practice medicine in the early stages of his relocation.
“I practiced medicine here in New York a bit,” he says. “I worked for
the Transit Authority for three months and then at a little clinic for
about a year or two, just a couple hours a day. I moved here for music,
not to practice medicine. And now I have not practiced medicine in
about 11 years.”
For Henderson, music and medicine go hand-in-hand. “Music and medicine
are both divine disciplines,” he explains. “You’re dealing with the
human body, which is a divine creation, on one hand. And then you’re
dealing with the divine creation of music. The universe is made of
music. Everybody’s billions of cells in their bodies-those are
vibrations, the vibrations of the solar system, the movement;
everything’s in a constant flux. And I’m dealing with both of them.
They’re just very different mediums through which you can see yourself.
“But for me, that old adage of ‘physician, heal thyself’ means that I
can’t help anybody else until I’m cool. And music is what cools me out.
I know that music heals me. And I hope my music is healing in some
respect to the listeners too. I try to think of that when I’m playing.
I want to heal people, soothe people. They come out to hear music,
they don’t wanna go away all jagged, you know.”
The soothing title track of Henderson’s latest as a leader, Oasis
(Sirocco Jazz), is a good case in point. A dark, mysterious ballad
performed on flugelhorn, Henderson’s warm-toned, plaintive lines are
echoed by vibist Joe Locke and underscored by pianist Kevin Hays’ gentle
arpeggios as the rhythm tandem of Billy Drummond and Ed Howard creates
subtle and spacious percussive colors underneath. On the other side of
the dynamic coin, “Sandstorm” captures all the kinetic energy of an
express train hurtling along the subway track at breakneck speed.
Drummond’s playing comes alive here with a bristling Max Roach-inspired
ride-cymbal pulse while Howard pushes the forward momentum with his
insistent walking bass lines as Hays delves into serious bebop mode.
Locke wails on top of this uptempo romp with blazing dexterity, while
Henderson’s bold, bright playing here speaks of his trumpet heroes:
Miles Davis, Freddie Hubbard, Clifford Brown. It’s a soundtrack to a
city-New York, not San Francisco.
Always mindful of providing tension and release, Henderson segues from
“Sandstorm”‘s aggressively boppish ride to a beautiful interpretation of
Wayne Shorter’s “Lost.” On Kevin Hays’ “Siddhartha,” he follows the
calming, Zenlike flow of that spacious melody with a dramatic use of
space on muted trumpet. The effect is very Miles-inspired, à la
“Flamenco Sketches” from Kind of Blue. Henderson’s own expansive,
open-ended “Desert Sun” recalls some of the sonic explorations from his
Mwandishi phase with Hancock. “That tune reflects the influence that I
got, in terms of concept, from the old Herbie Hancock sextet. I wanted
some of that aspect represented on this record.”
Elsewhere on Oasis-his seventh recording with the core group of Locke,
Hays and Howard, with Drummond replacing Lewis Nash in the
lineup-Henderson and crew turn in evocative renditions of George Cables’
gentle “Why Not,” Lee Morgan’s “Melancholy” and Herbie Hancock’s
“Cantaloupe Island,” done up in funky fashion with some noticeably
reconfigured harmonies. “I always try to use other people’s tunes,”
says Henderson. “Some records are just that artist, only his
compositions. But I like to incorporate other people’s tunes so that
the album has more balance and scope rather than just my one way of
looking at things. I like more or less collective input rather than a
self-portrait.”
His dramatic arrangement of “Melancholy” has a heavy spiritual vibe
running through it, almost in a “Go Down Moses” vein. “Well, I knew Lee
Morgan personally and I used to practice with him,” says Henderson.
“On this tune I was really trying to reflect that side of Lee. He could
be spirited and fiery but he also had this real beautiful, thoughtful
side.”
The earthy cover of “Cantaloupe Island,” he explains, came out of some
recent playing experiences with Hancock during his Gershwin’s World
tour. “We went out for about a year and a half and the tour finally
ended last September. It was supposed to be the Gershwin Project
representing his album, but the music really evolved way past that. By
the end of the tour it really reminded me of the old Herbie Hancock and
Mwandishi band that I played in about 30 years ago. The music went off
the music paper to where you’re experimenting like explorers or
travelers. It was a wonderful experience.”
The original Mwandishi band recently played a rare reunion concert in
San Francisco as a benefit for trombonist Julian Priester, who underwent
a liver transplant a year ago and exhausted his funds in the process.
(A review of the concert is posted on the “Live” section of www.jazztimes.com.)
As Henderson explains, “It was the old Herbie Hancock sextet: Buster
Williams, Julian, Benny Maupin, myself and Herbie. The one difference
was that Billy Hart wasn’t there, because he was in Japan, but Terri
Lynne Carrington filled in for him. And it was great. We hadn’t played
together in 27 years and it was like we never stopped.”
Henderson had originally met Hancock in the mid-1960s, when the pianist
was making jazz history with the Miles Davis quintet that also featured
Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter and Tony Williams. “I knew Herbie when he was
with Miles and all we talked about back then was cars because I loved
sports cars and he did too. And then in late 1969, when Herbie had his
sextet with Joe Henderson, Johnny Coles, Garnett Brown, Buster Williams
and Tootie Heath, he came to San Francisco to play a weeklong
engagement. And Johnny Coles was going on a sabbatical with Ray Charles
for six months so Herbie needed a trumpeter. He heard that I played
trumpet but I don’t think he took it seriously at first. But then he
tried me for that one week in San Francisco that they had, and it went
well because I was familiar with all of his music and he seemed to
appreciate the way I played. And that opened the door for me.”
Hancock must’ve intuitively sensed the Miles Davis influence in
Henderson’s playing. Henderson had, in fact, absorbed Miles’ repertoire
from the time he was a teenager and actually had gotten some valuable
trumpet playing tips from the maestro himself. “He used to stay at my
parents’ house when I was in high school,” says Henderson. “This was
when Miles had Cannonball and Coltrane in the band. I was studying
trumpet at the conservatory in San Francisco but when he took me to the
gig at the Blackhawk and I heard Trane and Cannonball with Philly Joe,
Paul Chambers and Wynton Kelly-it blew my mind. That was my first real
eye-opener to modern jazz. And I’ve been on the trail ever since.”
Henderson did have a previous eye-opening lesson or two with another
trumpet legend. “My first trumpet teacher in life was Louis Armstrong,”
he recalls. “My mother knew him because she was at the original Cotton
Club as a dancer. If you’ve ever seen that videotape of Fats Waller
playing and a real pretty lady is sitting on the piano bench with him,
singing ‘Ain’t Misbehavin” to him, that’s my mother. She knew everybody
in show business and she took me down to the Apollo in 1949 to meet
Louis Armstrong. I was just nine years old at the time and I didn’t
realize who he really was until I got older. But that’s how I started
playing the trumpet.”
But it was Miles who would make the biggest impression on Henderson.
“When I met Miles when I was 17 or 18, I played for him by ear
everything off Sketches of Spain. I had been practicing with the record
and when I finally played it for him I didn’t miss a note. I was so
proud of myself and when I finished I asked him, ‘How did you like
that?’ And he said, ‘You sound good, but that’s me!’ Which was another
eye-opener. That awareness was very important. And then he sat down
and showed me a few things, wrote on a little napkin certain
relationships about chords and things. But the most important part of
my learning from him was by listening to him and observing him, to
understand the etiquette of what you do and what you don’t do-and how to
leave space. A lot of good players are very good technically, but you
know-you can’t play all the time. You gotta take a breath or you’ll
overload the audience. That space is the pause that refreshes. And
also it energizes. It gives the music life-in-breathing and
out-breathing. That’s the key.”
In the ’70s, like his mentor Miles, Henderson got way into the fusion
thing by incorporating electronic exploration into the fabric of his
playing. That quality is readily apparent through his reverb-soaked
trumpet playing on Hancock’s Sextant album from 1972, but Henderson
pushes the envelope on his own mid-’70s recordings for Blue Note,
Sunburst and Heritage. “I played trumpet with wah-wah and all of those
albums and I really enjoyed it,” he says. “In fact, an album recently
came out in England (on Soul Brother Records) called Anthology, which is
a compilation of all of my hits from the fusion era. It’s funny but in
England, I’m like a rock star. I didn’t even know that but I did a
tour over there about a month and a half ago and it was amazing. I sold
out the biggest venue in London; there were mobs of people-just
unbelievable. For that tour they got an Echoplex for me, a phase
shifter, a wah-wah pedal. I like to use technology. I’ll use any tools
I can to explore the possibilities of sound.”
Henderson says his recent tour of England in support of the
fusion-oriented Anthology made him consider the possibility of
resurrecting the wah-wah sound once again. “That whole tour opened my
eyes to the fact that I don’t really want to be stuck in just one genre.
So I’m considering maybe updating some of those fusion things because
there’s a big audience for that still. And besides, I like to take
chances and use my imagination. I don’t want to just play jazz in a
traditional sense all the time. That’s cool too, but I also want to
represent that other side of me too.”
The medical practice might have to wait a little longer.
Gearbox
“For a while I was endorsing Selmer trumpets. I have two or three
Selmers and I also have two Martins, a Bach and a Schilke. All horns
are good but some people get fanatical about this mouthpiece or that
mouthpiece. An analogy that I like to make is something that Art Blakey
once told Clifford Brown. See, Clifford had chewing gum patching up
one of the middle valve casings and had a rubber band for the third
valve slide, and that’s the horn that sounded so golden! And one day
Blakey said, ‘Clifford, here’s $300, go get yourself a nice new shiny
horn.’ So Clifford said, ‘Thank you Mr. Blakey but the problem’s not
with the horn, the problem’s with me.’ Check that out! You have to
realize that you play the instrument, the instrument doesn’t play you.
Some people search a lifetime trying to find the top-of-the-line horn
but that’s wasting a lot of time. They should get home and be
practicing and stop worrying about the horn.
“Mouthpiece-wise, what I’ve been playing all my life feels comfortable
to me: a Bach 7C, Mount Vernon model. And only recently this mouthpiece
maker named Scott Holbert laid something on me. He’s a trumpet player
and he’s one of my fans so he looked at my mouthpiece and made me a new
one and sent it to me. And it really enhanced the sound. It’s similar
to the one I was always using but it’s state-of-the-art now. So that’s
cool, but I really don’t go around shopping for things.”
Listening Pleasures
“When I was coming up I used to listen to records and cop things off the
records all the time-innuendos, phrasings and licks and stuff. But I
don’t listen to records anymore. I do love classical music, which I
listen to on the radio. When I was competitive figure skating, the
music was always Stravinsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, things like that. I love
all types of music-Indian music, Chinese music, Japanese music,
Brazilian, Latin. The more music you’re exposed to the more it enhances
one’s vocabulary. I don’t just want to listen to, quote-unquote,
bebop. No, I love all kinds of music. But I don’t buy records anymore.
And I’m lucky enough to travel so much these days so when I’m in
different countries I like to go out and hear the musicians from that
country playing their music authentically.”
http://21cm.org/magazine/artist-exclusives/2018/03/08/a-conversation-with-dr-eddie-henderson/
A Conversation with Dr. Eddie Henderson
There’s a legend walking among us, and his name is Eddie Henderson.
Jazz aficionados will be familiar with Henderson and his associations with iconic artists, most notably Herbie Hancock throughout the 1970s. Known as “The Funk Surgeon,” Henderson also led a number of groups that played electric jazz and fusion – although the man eschews the kind of sub-categorizations to which jazz is prone; he prefers to think of it all under the umbrella of “ethnic improvised music.”
As impressive as Henderson’s playing is his seemingly endless supply of mind-boggling life stories. He grew up in the midst of the Harlem Renaissance with a mother who danced at the Cotton Club and a father who sang in The Charioteers. He took his first trumpet lesson with Louis Armstrong. He claims the title of the first African-American to compete in national figure skating championships. What else? He was also a practicing medical doctor throughout his early years of playing and touring with jazz greats.
During a recent visit to DePauw University, 21CM director Mark Rabideau got the chance to sit down with Eddie Henderson and hear some of his stories first-hand.
INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS
On Eddie Henderson’s first trumpet lesson with Louis Armstrong…
My mother’s friends Lena Horne and Sarah Vaughan – I think they both took me to the Apollo Theater to hear Louis Armstrong. I really hadn’t heard of him. I do remember I could see [him] behind the curtain warming up. I thought, “Wow! He really has a big sound!”
So my mother took me backstage. That was my first lesson on the trumpet, on Louis Armstrong’s horn and his mouthpiece. He taught me how to make a sound.
My uncle Louie gave me his trumpet. I took lessons every week and studied very hard. After about a year I could play “Flight of the Bumblebee.” So my mother took me back to see Louis Armstrong. I remember his voice. He said, “Hey little Eddie, you still playing?” I grabbed his horn and played “Flight of the Bumblebee.” Louis Armstrong shrieked and fell out of his chair. He got up and said, “Hey little Eddie, that’s some of the baddest stuff I ever heard in my life!” Meaning good – I hope.
He told his wife to bring a book of ten of his solos transcribed. He wrote at the top, “To little Eddie, this is to warm your chops up. You sound wonderful, keep playing. Love, Satchmo.”
On a profound, early experience with Herbie Hancock…
After I finished medical school, I did my internship. The other doctors were going into specializations where you had four more years of being on call every other night. I was still playing every night. I came across psychiatry, which had an on-call schedule of one day every 45 days. So I picked psychiatry.
I did two years of that. In my last year – it was a three-year residency – Herbie Hancock, who I knew, came through San Francisco. He needed a trumpet player for a week. Somebody recommended me. He said, “Oh no, he’s a doctor.” They said, “Well, just give him a try.” That one week opened the door for me. All the musicians that I revered figured, well, Eddie plays with Herbie. His credentials must be in order. People like Dexter Gordon, Art Blakey, Elvin Jones, McCoy Tyner, Joe Henderson. They all started hiring me by virtue of the fact that I was affiliated with Herbie Hancock. So that changed my whole life. I went with Herbie – it was supposed to be one week. It turned into three and a half years.
I moved back to San Francisco and got a job at this doctor’s office. He gave me the option that I could work five days a week, four hours a day. If I got tours, I could go. He still paid me even though I wasn’t there. I had my cake and ate it. I was playing every night and practicing medicine four or five hours a day. I did that for 11 or 12 years.
On emulating your heroes and finding your own voice…
[Finding my voice] was a slow process. When I first met Miles Davis, I asked, “How do you play?” I had been imitating his solos. I asked him to listen to me. I put on his record and played with it. He said, “You sound good, but that’s me.” So, it’s fine to have influences. That’s the way he learned. But then you reach a point in life where you realize, who am I?
The next time Miles came to town, he said, “Hey Eddie, you still trying to sound like me?” But in the interim, I found out that his hero, who he imitated when he was just beginning, was a gentleman named Freddie Webster. Miles’s sound, style, conception, everything, was a sad carbon copy. So when [Davis] asked me [that], I said, “You mean Freddie Webster?”
The look on Miles Davis’s face was shock. He said, “Oh man, I didn’t know you was hip to that.” Then he smiled and said, “Everybody’s a thief. I just made a short-term loan.”
Everybody is a derivative of their predecessors. It’s so important to study the past before you can think about forging ahead. It’s a cumulative process. It’s a lineage.
On being a bandleader…
In the five years I played with Herbie [Hancock], he never told anybody how to play. If you have to tell them how to play, why hire them? If you hire race horses, let them run. That’s what I took away from my greatest experience, and the lesson given to me about going on in my future career. If you hire people, let them be themselves. Evolve together. It’s a collective effort when people play together. One person dictating – that limits it.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Trumpet Great Eddie Henderson with All-Star Quintet Mixes Burners and Ballads to Perfection Via ‘Shuffle and Deal’ (ALBUM REVIEW)
http://jazzbluesnews.com/2020/08/10/cd-review-eddie-henderson-shuffle-and-deal-2020-video-cd-cover/
CD review: Eddie Henderson – Shuffle and Deal 2020: Video, CD cover
It’s never been wise to bet against Eddie Henderson. Not that the trumpet great is a gambling man, despite what the jackpot ride and shades-masked poker face on the cover of his invigorating new album, Shuffle and Deal, might imply. “I play War, but that’s about it,” Henderson jokes. “I’m not sophisticated enough for more than ‘high card wins.’”
Henderson’s storied biography suggests otherwise. The son of a vocalist father and a mother who danced at the Cotton Club, young Eddie received his first trumpet lesson from Louis Armstrong. His parents’ coterie of friends included Miles Davis, who provided the fledgling trumpeter with some typically sharp-toned mentorship. Henderson’s own remarkable career has included tenures with Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers and Herbie Hancock’s Mwandishi band along with his successful parallel life as a psychiatrist in the Bay Area.
Due out July 31 via Smoke Sessions Records, Shuffle and Deal finds Henderson turning over yet another winning hand. It doesn’t hurt that he arrived with four aces up his sleeve – namely, the members of his stellar quintet: pianist Kenny Barron, alto saxophonist Donald Harrison, bassist Gerald Cannon and drummer Mike Clark. Add the leader into the mix and you end up with an unbeatable royal flush.
The album features a mix of familiar standards and original compositions by both Henderson’s musical and actual families – in addition to pieces by Barron and Harrison, the repertoire also includes pieces by the trumpeter’s wife Natsuko Henderson and his daughter, musician and educator Cava Menzies. The collection adds up to a blend of identities and voices that Henderson likes to refer to as a “collective portrait.”
Released just in time for Henderson’s landmark 80th birthday, Shuffle and Deal reveals a master at the height of his powers, able to unleash blistering, agile runs on bop burners as well as explore ballads with an exquisite fragility (yet more evidence that a lack of sophistication isn’t what’s keeping him away from the card table). If anything about this date looks backwards through the trumpeter’s eight-decade history, it’s not the vitality of the playing but the structure of the program, which keeps an engaged audience firmly in mind throughout.
“I want the audience to really feel the music and start moving,” Henderson insists. “Jazz started as dance music in the first place, so I want to bring that element back into the music. The telltale common denominator when people are really enjoying themselves is when they feel like they want to get up and dance. Not the European concept of listening to music, just sitting still and static, shushing people and politely clapping at the end of the tune. No! I thought it was supposed to be fun. That’s the way I grew up.”
Henderson’s newly penned title track should do the trick from the outset, jolting listeners out of their chairs with its insinuating shuffle beat (the actual source of the album’s title). The feel of the tune was inspired by Henderson’s early mentor, in particular Miles’ shadowboxing rhythmic feel on Jack Johnson.
“Miles just had this aura when he played,” Henderson explains, citing the goal he envisioned when playing the tune. “In the liner notes to My Funny Valentine they used the word ‘duende,’ which refers to the presence that matadors have, like they could walk on eggshells without breaking them. It’s a master’s approach; it leaves an indelible imprint on your memory. I always have some ideal in my mind when I play. I close my eyes and there’s a blank screen, but I envision elegance and purity. So I know where I want to go, but I don’t know how I’m going to get there.”
Henderson described a similar approach to “Over the Rainbow,” which he was inspired to play after seeing Judy Garland perform the song in a documentary. The tragic life imbued the song with a very different meaning than it possessed in the more innocent and whimsical context of her original version in The Wizard of Oz. That emotional resonance makes it a perfect companion piece with “God Bless the Child,” which is impossible to imagine separate from Billie Holiday’s emotion-laden voice. Both are rendered with aching tenderness by Henderson and the quintet, held aloft by Clark’s delicate yet foundational brushwork.
Barron contributed two pieces to the album. The barbed “Flight Path” was the title track to the 1983 second album by his Monk-inspired quartet Sphere, while “Cook’s Bay” was originally recorded for 2000’s Spirit Song with Henderson on trumpet. The two men share a long history and a matchless chemistry, nowhere more gorgeously evident than on their intimate album-closing duet on Charlie Chaplin’s “Smile.”
“Kenny Barron is invaluable to me,” Henderson says. “He’s always right there, always supportive and knowing exactly what I need. It’s just like breathing in and breathing out with Kenny. It’s like he’s part of my thoughts.”
The album’s final standard is a lyrical evocation of the classic “It Might As Well Be Spring.” Menzies’ offering for the album is the smoldering, dark-hued “By Any Means,” which echoes the tone of “Nightride,” her contribution to Henderson’s previous album, Be Cool. “Both those tunes are mysterious,” her father laughs. “I guess she got the mysterious side of her character from me.”
A crisp call-and-response between Cannon and Clark ignites “Boom,” Natsuko Henderson’s soulful new piece. It’s as aptly named as “Burnin’,” reprised by Harrison from his own 2001 album Paradise Found (which introduced his young nephew Christian Scott on trumpet). Like much of the album, the tune was nailed in a single take – in this case, an off-the-cuff rendition captured when Harrison was unaware that tape was even rolling. “I thought we were just rehearsing,” he says, shrugging off the effortless brilliance of his sharp solo. “I thought we were just jiving around but everybody else thought it was killing.”
That modesty, belied by the compelling beauty of his playing on Shuffle and Deal, is typical of Henderson, who has always preferred to keep his cards close to his chest. That doesn’t seem likely to change as the trumpet maestro turns 80. “That just happens to be another inch along the way,” he says. “I’m not close to finished. I feel like I’m just beginning.”
01. Shuffle and Deal (5:30)
02. Flight Path (5:15)
03. Over the Rainbow (8:11)
04. By Any Means (3:15)
05. Cook’s Bay (7:20)
06. It Might as Well Be Spring (9:23)
07. Boom (4:04)
08. God Bless the Child (6:53)
09. Burnin’ (4:57)
10. Smile (4:14)
Eddie Henderson – trumpet
Donald Harrison- alto sax
Kenny Barron -piano
Gerald Cannon – bass
Mike Clark – drums
https://downbeat.com/reviews/detail/collective-portrait
Eddie Henderson was a formidable presence in San Francisco’s thriving fusion scene in the 1970s. Known back then as “Dr. Trumpet” (he worked part-time as a psychiatrist when not on tour with the likes of Herbie Hancock and Art Blakey), Henderson has long since given up his medical practice, but he hasn’t finished experimenting. On Collective Portrait, the fiery-toned trumpeter revisits 10 fusion classics in an intimate, small-ensemble setting. By removing these tunes from their familiar context, the musicians—Gary Bartz on alto saxophone, George Cables on piano and Fender Rhodes, Doug Weiss on bass and Carl Allen on drums—are able to freely explore the melodic aspects of the material. This is no easy task because fusion, with its high-energy vamps and complex melodies, almost beckons for electronic enhancement. But here, Henderson and his crew provide all the power needed. A new version of Cables’ “Morning Song,” originally recorded in 1979 with electric piano and electric bass, sustains a groove courtesy of Weiss’ upright acoustic bass and Cables’ bouncy left-hand piano line. On the Woody Shaw tune “Zoltan,” it’s Allen who serves as band’s dynamo, weaving together three distinct rhythms with equal poise: a rat-a-tat shuffle, a Latin-funk groove and straightahead swing. Solo turns by each of the members provide another jolt of energy. Henderson’s take on “Beyond Forever” finds the one-time hard-bopper leaping through the upper registers of his horn, and Bartz’s blend of bebop and modal idioms on “Gingerbread Boy” floats effortlessly atop the tune’s driving swing feel. Even the album’s slower tracks—the ballads “You Know I Care,” “Together” and “Spring”—are brimming with energy, though on a quieter, more refined scale. With Collective Portrait, Henderson demonstrates that in the right hands, and with the right touch, any song can become timeless.
Eddie Henderson (musician)
Role: Jazz trumpeter
May 7, 2018
Alchetron
Education San Francisco Conservatory of Music, Howard University, University of California, Berkeley
Eddie Henderson (born October 26, 1940) is an American jazz trumpet and flugelhorn player. He came to prominence in the early 1970s as a member of pianist Herbie Hancock's band, going on to lead his own electric/fusion groups through the decade. Henderson earned his medical degree and worked a parallel career as a psychiatrist and musician, turning back to acoustic jazz by the 1990s.
Henderson's influences include Booker Little, Clifford Brown, Woody Shaw, and Miles Davis.
Ronald D. Henderson (deceased), Kenneth C. Henderson of Norwalk Connecticut, Cava Menzies of Oakland California
Family influence and early music history
Henderson's
mother was one of the dancers in the original Cotton Club. She had a
twin sister, and they were called The Brown Twins. They would dance with
Bill "Bojangles" Robinson and the Nicholas Brothers. In the film
showing Fats Waller playing "Ain't Misbehavin'", Henderson's mother sat
on the piano whilst Waller sang to her. His father sang with Billy
Williams and The Charioteers, a popular singing group
 |
At the age of nine he was given an informal lesson by Louis Armstrong, and he continued to study the instrument as a teenager in San Francisco, where he grew up, after his family moved there in 1954, at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. As a young man, he performed with the San Francisco Conservatory Symphony Orchestra.
Henderson was
influenced by the early fusion work of jazz musician Miles Davis, who
was a friend of his parents. They met in 1957 when Henderson was aged
seventeen, and played a gig together
After completing his medical education, Henderson went back to the Bay area for his medical internship and residency - and the break that thrust him fully into music. It was a week-long gig with Herbie Hancock's Mwandishi band that led to a three-year job, lasting from 1970-73. In addition to the three albums recorded by the group under Hancock's name, Henderson recorded his first two albums, Realization (1972) and Inside Out (1973), with Hancock and the Mwandishi group.
After leaving Hancock, the trumpeter worked extensively with Pharoah Sanders, Mike Nock, Norman Connors, and Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, returning to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1975 where he joined the Latin-jazz group Azteca, and fronted his own bands. He also recorded with Charles Earland (popular for his version of "Let the Music Play" in 1978), and later, in the 1970s, led a rock-oriented group. While he gained some recognition for his work with the Herbie Hancock Sextet (1970–1973), his own records were considered too "commercial".
Medical Career
After three years in the Air Force, Henderson enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, graduating with a B.S. in zoology in 1964. He then studied medicine at Howard University in Washington D.C., graduating in 1968. Though he undertook his residency in psychiatry, he practiced general medicine from 1975 to 1985 in San Francisco, part-time for about four hours a day working at a small clinic. Henderson said, "The head doctor knew I was into music and he hired me with the stipulation that whenever I get tours I can go and come as I please. They would even pay me when I was gone. It was lovely", he recalled. "I just wanted to play music. But I never in my wildest dreams thought I'd ever have a chance to play with the big guys."
In the 1970s, Henderson recorded a series of fusion albums during the disco era that were later re-released. He recorded two albums on the Blue Note label, Sunburst (1975) and Heritage (1976); three for Capitol Records, Comin' Thru (1977), Mahal (1978) and Runnin' to Your Love (1979); and two for Capricorn Records, Realization (1973) and Inside Out (1974).
UK Success
Henderson's only UK hit was the single "Prance On" recorded for Capitol which reached No. 44 in the UK Singles Chart in November 1978. The newly introduced 12" vinyl single format for this track helped promote it on the disco/club scene at the time. His previous single recorded in 1977, "Say You Will" / "The Funk Surgeon" failed to chart in the UK. "Cyclops" was an instrumental LP track only, although it was so popular at the wrong speed that Capitol pressed a 12" vinyl single with the regular version, and the fast version, back to back.
Recent work and influences
In the 1990s, he returned to playing acoustic hard bop, touring with Billy Harper in 1991 while also working as a physician.
In
recent years Henderson has played at festivals in France and Austria.
In May 2002, Henderson recorded an album of Miles Davis compositions,
called So What?. The group included Bob Berg on sax, Dave Kikoski on piano, Ed Howard on bass and Victor Lewis on drums.
Henderson's fusion period has also been revisited in a live setting in the last few years, having played the UK and Europe to positive reviews, most notably his two night stint at the Jazz Café in London being cited by Blues & Soul Magazine as one of the concerts of the year. His backing band for these concerts was a UK band called Mr. Gone. The musicians in the band, at various points, included Simon Bramley on electric bass, Phil Nelson on drums, Tommy Emmerton on guitar, Neil Burditt on keyboards, Robin Jones on percussion and Jamie Harris on saxophone.
Recent recordings by Henderson have included Oasis (2001 on Sirocco Jazz Limited label), So What?, a tribute to Miles Davis (2002, EPC, Sony, Columbia), Time and Spaces (2004 Sirocco Jazz Limited), Manhattan Blue (2005, unreleased), Precious Moment (2006 on the Kind of Blue label) and For All We Know (2010 Furthermore Recordings).
The composer of Tender You, Precious Moment, Around the World in 3/4 and Be Cool is his wife, Natsuko Henderson.
Henderson is a faculty member of Juilliard music school since 2007 and is Associate Professor of Trumpet at the Oberlin Conservatory jazz department, beginning in 2014.
As leader
Compilations
As sideman
References
After completing his medical education, Henderson went back to the Bay area for his medical internship and residency - and the break that thrust him fully into music. It was a week-long gig with Herbie Hancock's Mwandishi band that led to a three-year job, lasting from 1970-73. In addition to the three albums recorded by the group under Hancock's name, Henderson recorded his first two albums, Realization (1972) and Inside Out (1973), with Hancock and the Mwandishi group.
After
leaving Hancock, the trumpeter worked extensively with Pharoah Sanders,
Mike Nock, Norman Connors, and Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, returning
to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1975 where he joined the Latin-jazz
group Azteca, and fronted his own bands. He also recorded with Charles
Earland (popular for his version of "Let the Music Play" in 1978), and
later, in the 1970s, led a rock-oriented group. While he gained some
recognition for his work with the Herbie Hancock Sextet (1970–1973), his
own records were considered too "commercial".
Medical Career
After three years in the Air Force, Henderson enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, graduating with a B.S. in zoology in 1964. He then studied medicine at Howard University in Washington D.C., graduating in 1968. Though he undertook his residency in psychiatry, he practiced general medicine from 1975 to 1985 in San Francisco, part-time for about four hours a day working at a small clinic. Henderson said, "The head doctor knew I was into music and he hired me with the stipulation that whenever I get tours I can go and come as I please. They would even pay me when I was gone. It was lovely", he recalled. "I just wanted to play music. But I never in my wildest dreams thought I'd ever have a chance to play with the big guys."
In the 1970s, Henderson recorded a series of fusion albums during the disco era that were later re-released. He recorded two albums on the Blue Note label, Sunburst (1975) and Heritage (1976); three for Capitol Records, Comin' Thru (1977), Mahal (1978) and Runnin' to Your Love (1979); and two for Capricorn Records, Realization (1973) and Inside Out (1974).
UK Success
Henderson's only UK hit was the single "Prance On" recorded for Capitol which reached No. 44 in the UK Singles Chart in November 1978. The newly introduced 12" vinyl single format for this track helped promote it on the disco/club scene at the time. His previous single recorded in 1977, "Say You Will" / "The Funk Surgeon" failed to chart in the UK. "Cyclops" was an instrumental LP track only, although it was so popular at the wrong speed that Capitol pressed a 12" vinyl single with the regular version, and the fast version, back to back.
Recent work and influences
In the 1990s, he returned to playing acoustic hard bop, touring with Billy Harper in 1991 while also working as a physician.
In recent years Henderson has played at festivals in France and Austria. In May 2002, Henderson recorded an album of Miles Davis compositions, called So What?. The group included Bob Berg on sax, Dave Kikoski on piano, Ed Howard on bass and Victor Lewis on drums.
https://www.namm.org/library/oral-history/eddie-hendersonThe 2 Lives of Eddie Henderson
by Mike Zwerin
International Herald Tribune
Eddie Henderson was 9 and was practicing scales on his trumpet one day when Louis Armstrong came by to visit his folks. Satchmo taught the kid a few tricks.
By the time he came around again a year or so later, Eddie was playing "The Flight of the Bumble Bee." Armstrong was so impressed that he fell backward into a chair, laughing. Exclaiming some version of "that's some of the baddest stuff I ever heard," he dedicated a copy of a transcribed collection of his solos: "To little Eddie. You sure sound good. This is to warm your chops up." Henderson still has the book.
His mother was in the original Cotton Club Revue in Harlem, billed with her twin sister as the Brown Twins, and she was Bill (Bojangles) Robinson's dancing partner. His father, Billy Williams, led a group called The Charioteers. As a child, Henderson thought celebrities like Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Fats Waller, who would visit his parents when they were in New York, were "just normal people."
Do not confuse Eddie Henderson with (no relation) notables with the same surname, like Fletcher, Horace and Joe. Musically, Eddie combines an unmistakable personality with, at the age of 57, an unusual supply of vim and vigor. And biographically his is not exactly a "normal" tale. At first he'd wanted to play the clarinet, but his school only had violins and accordions. He said "the heck with that stuff." His mother's brother owned a trumpet.
His father died, and when his mother married a doctor in San Francisco some years later, they moved out west. His stepfather had many musician patients, Miles Davis among them. The patients were often houseguests. Miles asked Eddie what he wanted to do in life. "I play the trumpet," he answered. Miles lay back and looked him over. "I bet you do," he said.
When he was 18, Miles took him to a concert. It was the band with Coltrane, Cannonball, Philly Joe Jones, Paul Chambers and Wynton Kelly. Henderson had never heard "the real deal" up close like that.
Then he learned the trumpet solos on "Sketches of Spain" and "Kind of Blue," playing them by ear along with the records, and by the time Miles returned to San Francisco, he knew them by heart. "How did you like that?" the cocky teenager asked after not missing a note. Miles looked at him and said: "You sound good. But that's me."
It was like being hit on the head by a baseball bat. All of a sudden, he knew the meaning of paying dues, and he he had not even started yet. His stepfather influenced him to study medicine.
After undergraduate work at the University of California at Berkeley, he went on to medical school at Howard University in Washington, following that with a residency in psychiatry. While studying at Howard, he would run up to New York on weekends to talk trumpet and play with Freddie Hubbard and Lee Morgan. He only graduated from med school "by the grace of God."
"People ask me, 'How can you be a doctor and a musician at the same time?' It boils down to good study habits, organization, self-discipline and energy. I went to sleep at 5 and got up at 7. I was just 23. I never missed a class. Not one. You might say I was focused."
He played with Herbie Hancock and Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers but "the money was funny" with the latter so he quit and moved back to San Francisco. He practiced medicine for 10 years in this little clinic a surgeon friend of his ran: "It was like four hours a day. I could come and go as I wanted when I had a gig or a tour."
There is only a smidgeon of a smile as he says: "A monkey could be a doctor. I'm not kidding. You just have to go to school. But I also have a personality. I'm not just a doctor, I am an individual. I want to express . . . me, myself. You cannot learn that in school. Music was always my main thing.
"You know that old adage? 'Physician, heal thyself'? How can I help anybody else unless I'm cool with myself? And music is what cools me out. When I had a chance to go with Herbie Hancock, I said 'Yeah!' There was no question in my mind, no hesitation: 'I'm going. Right away."'
He never practiced psychiatry as a specialty: "That's like doing construction work. It's emotionally and physically depleting. But I did have a residency for awhile. I would ask patients, 'What seems to be wrong today?' and they'd say, 'Well, you're the doctor. You tell me.' They played all those mind games.
"Basically, I just wanted people to come in and say 'ah' and not bother me. I didn't have any time for head trips. Everybody in San Francisco knew I played music. People would come to my office and the nurse's aid would say: 'He's in the back practicing. He's got a gig tonight. Don't bother him. If his chops aren't right he's unhappy.' That's the kind of lifestyle I had."
Meanwhile, on the free-market end of the great wide world of jazz, Henderson was discussing Ferraris with Miles Davis. Miles owned one. He owned three ("I've never had trouble with bread"). Practicing medicine in his surgeon friend's clinic four hours a day while playing with people like Jackie McLean and Roy Haynes was "like a dream."
He has just finished a Gershwin recording with Hancock and next month he'll play for two weeks with Elvin Jones during the Umbria Jazz Festival in Perugia, Italy.
When people ask him: "Do you still practice, Eddie?" they mean medicine. But when he answers "Yeah, every day," he's talking about the trumpet.
Throughout history, music always reflects what is happening in society at that time."
Eddie Henderson: Dr. Jazzman
Eddie Henderson is one of today's top and most original jazz trumpet players. Henderson was born in NYC in 1940. His father sang with the Charioteers, and his mother danced as one of the Brown twins at the Cotton club. Louis Armstrong gave Eddie his first few trumpet lessons at the age of nine. Eddie moved with his family to San Francisco when he was 14 years old. He studied at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music from 1954 to '57. Around 1956, Miles Davis was guest at Eddie Henderson's home during a black Hawk Jazz Club gig and was impressed with Eddie's ability to perform his famous "Sketches of Spain" without a fluff but encouraged Henderson to seek his own originality. Following Air Force service from 1958 to '61, Eddie became the first African American to compete for the National figure skating Championship, winning the pacific and Midwestern titles. The year 1961 was the beginning of Eddie pursuing dual careers-medicine and music. After receiving a bachelor of science in Zoology at the University of California at Berkeley in 1964,he got his M.D. at Howard university Medical School in 1968.
Eddie interned at San Francisco's French Hospital during 1968 and '69 and undertook a two-year residency in psychiatry at the University of California hospital from 1969 to '71. Henderson first got worldwide recognition for his jazz-trumpet playing from the popular recordings he made with Herbie Hancock's Mwandishi group during the early '70s. other jazz perfomers Eddie has played with include Pharoah Sanders, Art Blakey, Elvin Jones, Johnny Griffin, Slide Hampton, McCoy Tyner, Benny Golson, Max Roach, Jackie McClean, Dexter Gordon, Roy Haynes, Joe Henderson etc. Henderson has been on the faculty at Juillard school of music since 2007 and Oberlin University jazz department faculty since 2014. His discography consists of albums under his name on Capricorn, Blue Note, Capital, Columbia, Steeplechase, Sirocco, Kind of Blue, Furthermore and Smoke records.
Special Thanks: Natsuko Henderson
How has the Jazz music (and people of) influenced your views of the world and the journeys you’ve taken?
It has opened my eyes to the possibilities in life.
How do you describe your sound and music philosophy? What touched (emotionally) you from the sound of trumpet?
First of all, Miles Davis' sound inspired me. Then I became attracted to Freddie Hubbard and Lee Morgan's sound. I tried to make my sound combination of all three.
Which meetings have been the most important experiences for you? What was the best advice anyone ever gave you?
My first experience to play with Herbie Hancock's sextet. The best advice I've received was from Miles Davis when he told me to get my own style.
Are there any memories from gigs, jams, tours and studio sessions which you’d like to share with us?
All of the above have contributed to my development as an artist.
What do you miss most nowadays from the Jazz of the past? What are your hopes and fears for the future of?
In the past, musicians shared ideas and more than they do nowadays. My hopes are that there are more opportunities for musicians coming out of the various music schools.
"My first experience to play with Herbie Hancock's sextet. The best advice I've received was from Miles Davis when he told me to get my own style."
(Photo: Eddie Henderson)
What are some of the most important lessons you have learned from your experience in music paths?
Practice makes perfect and it is most important to play with best musicians possible.
What is the impact of Jazz on the socio-cultural implications? How do you want it to affect people?
Throughout history, music always reflects what is happening in society at that time.
The Doctor Is In: Eddie Henderson On Life As 'The Funk Surgeon'
Eddie Henderson has just released what he considers an audio autobiography, an album that covers many of the tunes he's played through his career. It's called Collective Portrait, and as he tells NPR's Arun Rath, it's brought out a lot of old memories –- like the time when he was 9 years old and his mother and Sarah Vaughan took him to see Louis Armstrong at The Apollo Theater.
"They took me backstage; Louis Armstrong gave me my first lesson, on his horn and mouthpiece, of how to make a sound on the trumpet," he says. "I had no idea of the stature of this gentleman; you know, I was just 9 years old. I really didn't know that trumpet was gonna turn into the rest of my life."
People hearing Henderson for the first time on Collective Portrait might get the impression that he's a fairly traditional jazz musician. Fans, however, have known him to get into some pretty funky electric music. When he answered a call from Herbie Hancock for a one-week gig, he ended up as part of the Mwandishi group Hancock would lead through the early 1970s.
Henderson's nickname, The Funk Surgeon, owes to that side of his career — and to the fact that he actually holds a medical degree. After the Mwandishi group broke up, he got a job at a doctor's office in San Francisco, though he did set one condition: "I told him I would like to work at his office and help him, but my real love was music, and if I ever got a tour I'd have to go."
As it turned out, the music came to him. Henderson ended up treating the jazz great Thelonious Monk as a patient, when the latter was struggling with his mental health.
"They
really didn't know what to do with this gentleman. He gave them a fit,"
Henderson says. "After they found out that I knew who he was, they
allowed me to take him to his gigs. It was just a little bizarre; that's
the best way I can put it."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Henderson_(musician)
Eddie Henderson (musician)
Eddie Henderson (born October 26, 1940) is an American jazz trumpet and flugelhorn player. He came to prominence in the early 1970s as a member of pianist Herbie Hancock's band, going on to lead his own electric/fusion groups through the decade. Henderson earned his medical degree and worked a parallel career as a psychiatrist and musician, turning back to acoustic jazz by the 1990s.
Henderson's influences include Booker Little, Clifford Brown, Woody Shaw, and Miles Davis.
Family influence and early music history
Henderson's mother was one of the dancers in the original Cotton Club. She had a twin sister, and they were called The Brown Twins. They would dance with Bill "Bojangles" Robinson and the Nicholas Brothers. In the film showing Fats Waller playing "Ain't Misbehavin'", Henderson's mother sat on the piano whilst Waller sang to her. His father sang with Billy Williams and The Charioteers, a popular singing group.
At the age of nine he was given an informal lesson by Louis Armstrong, and he continued to study the instrument as a teenager in San Francisco, where he grew up, after his family moved there in 1954, at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.[1] As a young man, he performed with the San Francisco Conservatory Symphony Orchestra.
Henderson was influenced by the early fusion work of jazz musician Miles Davis, who was a friend of his parents.[1] They met in 1957 when Henderson was aged seventeen, and played a gig together.
After completing his medical education, Henderson went back to the Bay area for his medical internship and residency - and the break that thrust him fully into music. It was a week-long gig with Herbie Hancock's Mwandishi band that led to a three-year job, lasting from 1970-73. In addition to the three albums recorded by the group under Hancock's name, Henderson recorded his first two albums, Realization (1972) and Inside Out (1973), with Hancock and the Mwandishi group.
After leaving Hancock, the trumpeter worked extensively with Pharoah Sanders, Mike Nock, Norman Connors, and Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, returning to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1975 where he joined the Latin-jazz group Azteca, and fronted his own bands. He also recorded with Charles Earland (popular for his version of "Let the Music Play" in 1978), and later, in the 1970s, led a rock-oriented group. While he gained some recognition for his work with the Herbie Hancock Sextet (1970–1973), his own records were considered too "commercial".[2]
Medical career
After three years in the Air Force, Henderson enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, graduating with a B.S. in zoology in 1964. He then studied medicine at Howard University in Washington D.C., graduating in 1968. Though he undertook his residency in psychiatry, he practiced general medicine[3] from 1975 to 1985 in San Francisco, part-time for about four hours a day working at a small clinic. Henderson said, "The head doctor knew I was into music and he hired me with the stipulation that whenever I get tours I can go and come as I please. They would even pay me when I was gone. It was lovely", he recalled. "I just wanted to play music. But I never in my wildest dreams thought I'd ever have a chance to play with the big guys."
In the 1970s, Henderson recorded a series of fusion albums during the disco era that were later re-released. He recorded two albums on the Blue Note label, Sunburst (1975) and Heritage (1976); three for Capitol Records, Comin' Thru (1977), Mahal (1978) and Runnin' to Your Love (1979); and two for Capricorn Records, Realization (1973) and Inside Out (1974).
UK success
Henderson's only UK hit was the single "Prance On" recorded for Capitol which reached No. 44 in the UK Singles Chart in November 1978.[4] The newly introduced 12" vinyl single format for this track helped promote it on the disco/club scene at the time. His previous single recorded in 1977, "Say You Will" / "The Funk Surgeon" failed to chart in the UK. "Cyclops" was an instrumental LP track only, although it was so popular at the wrong speed that Capitol pressed a 12" vinyl single with the regular version, and the fast version, back to back.[citation needed]
In the 1990s, he returned to playing acoustic hard bop, touring with Billy Harper in 1991 while also working as a physician. In May 2002, he recorded So What?, an album of Miles Davis compositions, with Bob Berg on sax, Dave Kikoski on piano, Ed Howard on bass, and Victor Lewis on drums.
Discography
As leader
- Realization (Capricorn, 1973)
- Inside Out (Capricorn, 1974)
- Sunburst (Blue Note, 1975)
- Heritage (Blue Note, 1976)
- Comin' Through (Capitol, 1977)
- Mahal (Capitol, 1978)
- Runnin' to Your Love (Capitol, 1979)
- Phantoms (SteepleChase, 1989)
- Think On Me (SteepleChase, 1990)
- Colors of Manhattan with Laurent De Wilde (Gazebo, 1990)
- Flight of Mind (SteepleChase, 1991)
- Manhattan in Blue (Videoarts, 1994)
- Inspiration (Milestone, 1995)
- Tribute to Lee Morgan with Joe Lovano, Cedar Walton, Grover Washington Jr. (NYC, 1995)
- Dark Shadows (Milestone, 1996)
- Reemergence (Sharp Nine, 1998)
- Oasis (Sirocco, 2001)
- So What (Eighty-Eight's, 2002)
- Time & Spaces (Sirocco, 2004)
- Echoes (Marge, 2004)
- Precious Moment (Kind of Blue, 2006)
- Dreams of Gershwin (Videoarts, 2010)
- For All We Know (Furthermore, 2010)
- Collective Portrait (Smoke Sessions, 2015)
- Be Cool (Smoke Sessions, 2018)
- Shuffle and Deal (Smoke Sessions, 2020)
As sideman
With Kenny Barron
- Live at Fat Tuesdays (Enja, 1988)
- Quickstep (Enja, 1991)
- Things Unseen (Gitanes Jazz, 1997)
- Spirit Song (Verve, 2000)
With Gary Bartz
- Dance of Magic (Cobblestone, 1975)
- Music Is My Sanctuary (Capitol, 1977)
- Reflections On Monk (SteepleChase, 1989)
- The Red and Orange Poems (Atlantic, 1994)
With Norman Connors
- Dance of Magic (Cobblestone, 1972)
- Dark of Light (Cobblestone, 1973)
- Love from the Sun (Buddah, 1973)
- Slew Foot (Buddah, 1974)
- Saturday Night Special (Buddah, 1975)
- Invitation (Arista, 1979)
With The Cookers
- Cast the First Stone (Plus Loin Music, 2010)
- Warriors (Jazz Legacy, 2011)
- Believe (Motema, 2012)
- Time and Time Again (Motema, 2014)
- The Call of the Wild and Peaceful Heart (Smoke Sessions, 2016)
With Stanley Cowell
- Talkin' 'Bout Love (Galaxy, 1977)
- New World (Galaxy, 1981)
- Setup (SteepleChase, 1994)
With Benny Golson
- I Remember Miles (Alfa, 1993)
- Terminal 1 (Concord Jazz, 2004)
- New Time, New 'Tet (Concord Jazz, 2009)
With Herbie Hancock
- Mwandishi
- Crossings (Warner Bros. 1972)
- Sextant (CBS, 1973)
- V.S.O.P. (Columbia, 1977)
- Gershwin's World (Verve, 1998)
With Billy Harper
- Live on Tour in the Far East (SteepleChase, 1992)
- Live on Tour in the Far East Vol. 2 (SteepleChase, 1993)
- Somalia(Omagatoki, 1994)
- Live on Tour in the Far East Vol. 3 (SteepleChase, 1995)
- Destiny Is Yours (SteepleChase, 1990)
- If Our Hearts Could Only See (DIW, 1997)
- Soul of an Angel (Metropolitan, 2000)
With others
- Mina Aoe, The Shadow of Love (Victor, 1993)
- Dale Barlow, Hipnotation Spiral (Scratch, 1991)
- Bill Barron, Higher Ground (Joken 2 1993)
- T. K. Blue, Another Blue (Arkadia Jazz, 1999)
- Donald Brown, Sources of Inspiration (Muse, 1990)
- George Cables, Morning Song
- Joe Chambers, Mirrors (Blue Note, 1998)
- Jimmy Cobb, Remembering Miles (Eighty-Eight's, 2011)
- Michael Davis, Trumpets Eleven (Hip-Bone, 2003)
- Richard Davis, Fancy Free (Galaxy, 1977)
- Richard Davis, Way Out West (Muse, 1980)
- Steve Davis, Say When (Smoke Sessions, 2015)
- Laurent de Wilde, Off the Boat (Ida, 1988)
- Dilba, Dilba (WEA, 1996)
- Will Downing, A Dream Fulfilled (Island, 1991)
- Ray Drummond, Maya's Dance (Nilva, 1989)
- Charles Earland, Leaving This Planet (Prestige, 1974)
- Charles Earland, The Dynamite Brothers (Prestige, 1974)
- Ilhan Ersahin, She Said (Pozitif Muzik Yapim 1996)
- Ilhan Ersahin, Silver (Nublu, 2019)
- Pete Escovedo & Sheila Escovedo, Happy Together (Fantasy, 1978)
- Joe Farnsworth, Beautiful Friendship (Criss Cross, 1998)
- John Farnsworth, The Good Life (Smoke Sessions, 2010)
- Sonny Fortune, From Now On (Blue Note, 1996)
- Rick Germanson, Live at Smalls (SmallsLIVE, 2011)
- Winard Harper, Be Yourself (Epicure, 1994)
- Billy Hart, Enchance (Horizon, 1977)
- Billy Hart, Rah (Gramavision, 1988)
- Kevin Hays, Sweet Ear (SteepleChase, 1991)
- Bertha Hope, Elmo's Fire (SteepleChase, 1991)
- J. J. Johnson, The Brass Orchestra (Verve, 1997)
- Willie Jones III, Groundwork (WJ3, 2015)
- Willie Jones III, My Point Is... (WJ3, 2017)
- Azar Lawrence, Mystic Journey (Furthermore, 2010)
- Babatunde Lea, Levels of Conciousness (Theresa, 1979)
- The Leaders, Spirits Alike (Double Moon, 2006)
- Victor Lewis, Know It Today, Know It Tomorrow (Red 1993)
- Bennie Maupin, Slow Traffic to the Right (Mercury, 1977)
- Ron McClure, Never Forget (SteepleChase, 1991)
- Mingus Big Band, Live in Tokyo (Sunnyside, 2006)
- Butch Morris, Nublu Orchestra Conducted by Butch Morris (Nublu, 2006)
- Mulgrew Miller, Hand in Hand (BMG/RCA, 1993)
- Nicholas Payton, Lew Soloff, Tom Harrell, Eddie Henderson, Trumpet Legacy (Milestone, 1998)
- Courtney Pine, Modern Day Jazz Stories (Antilles, 1995)
- Martha Reeves, Gotta Keep Moving (Fantasy, 1980)
- Justin Robinson, Just in Time (Verve, 1992)
- Pharoah Sanders, Journey to the One (Theresa, 1980)
- Sonny Simmons, Mixolydis (Marge, 2002)
- Archie Shepp, Something to Live For (Timeless, 1997)
- Jarek Smietana, Live at the Jazz Jamboree (GOWI, 1996)
- Jarek Smietana, Autumn Suite (JSR, 2006)
- Bill Stewart, Snide Remarks (Blue Note, 1995)
- Buddy Terry, Lean On Him (Mainstream, 1972)
- Buddy Terry, Pure Dynamite (Mainstream, 1972)
- John Thompson, Romantic Night (AMH 2002)
- McCoy Tyner, Journey (Verve/Birdology 1993)
- Roseanna Vitro, Catchin' Some Rays (Telarc, 1997)
- Mal Waldron, My Dear Family (Alfa, 1994)
- Tim Warfield, Spherical (Criss Cross, 2015)
- Grover Washington Jr., All My Tomorrows (Columbia, 1994)
- Wax Poetic, Three (Doublemoon, 1998)
- Buster Williams, Dreams Come True (Buddah, 1980)
- Lenny Williams, Rise Sleeping Beauty (Motown, 1975)
- Gerald Wilson, New York, New Sound (Mack Avenue, 2003)
- Gerald Wilson, In My Time (Mack Avenue, 2005)
- Leon Thomas Precious Energy (Mapleshade, 1990)
- Pete Yellin, Dance of Allegra (Mainstream, 1972)
- Pete Yellin, Mellow Soul (Metropolitan, 1998)
- Denny Zeitlin, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (United Artists, 1978)
References
- Roberts, David (2006). British Hit Singles & Albums (19th ed.). London: Guinness World Records Limited. p. 250. ISBN 1-904994-10-5.
External links
- Eddie Henderson discography at Discogs
Music Review
Looking Back, a Horn Player Dips Into Every Mood
Past the midpoint of his second set at Smoke on Friday night, the trumpeter Eddie Henderson announced the first composition he ever wrote, a dose of drifting intrigue titled “Dreams.” His preamble almost could have seemed sheepish, coming from someone else: “I’m not really a composer,” he said. “I just write sketches, and let the band fill them in.”
But then Mr. Henderson doesn’t do sheepish. A jazz-funk paragon, a hard-bop survivor and an inveterate swashbuckler on the horn, he also carries himself with a confidence born of other ventures, like his years as a doctor, and his youthful distinction as a trailblazing African-American figure skater. At 74, he exudes a self-secure authority rooted in experience on and off the stage.
He has a strong new studio album — “Collective Portrait,” due out Tuesday on the Smoke Sessions label — that can be understood as a selective rumination on the breadth of his career. It makes no allusion to his roles in Mwandishi, Herbie Hancock’s lionized early fusion band, or the Cookers, a present-day postbop superhero squad. But its track list includes “Dreams,” along with several pieces from Mr. Henderson’s crossover albums of the 1970s, and tunes associated with his chief trumpet lodestars, Freddie Hubbard, Miles Davis and Woody Shaw.
Perhaps more significant, its personnel features the impeccable pianist George Cables and the intently soulful alto saxophonist Gary Bartz, working colleagues of Mr. Henderson’s for about the last 40 years. Both were on hand for his weekend run at Smoke, in a quintet expertly anchored by Doug Weiss on bass and Billy Drummond on drums. (Mr. Weiss appears on the album, with another fine drummer, Carl Allen.)
This set opened with “Sunburst,” the title track of a jazz-funk album Mr. Henderson released on Blue Note in 1975. The only concession to that lineage in this new arrangement was a Fender Rhodes piano played, with chiming cool, by Mr. Cables. And the following tune — “Morning Song,” a funk ballad by Mr. Cables, first heard on Mr. Henderson’s 1977 crossover album “Comin’ Through” — was remade as an acoustic soul-jazz number, buoyant and bittersweet.
On these and the other tunes in the set, including the Duke Pearson ballad “You Know I Care,” the older musicians in the band gave what amounted to a master class. Mr. Bartz played the seeker, turning most of his solos into fluttery expeditions, with a phrasing that conveyed momentum even when it sat behind the beat. Mr. Cables took an adaptable approach, flowing through the material with eloquent refinement and not a small amount of the blues.
And Mr.
Henderson kept his ironclad composure, whether he was charging through
his postbop cadences or tracing a more delicate melodic arc. There was
too much reverb on his microphone, and he occasionally reverted to
trusted patterns in his improvising. But he cut a commanding figure
whenever he played — and no less when he was just standing and nodding
in the background, watching the action unfold.
http://jazztrumpetproject.blogspot.com/2010/07/my-lesson-with-eddie-henderson.html
MONDAY, JULY 26, 2010
My Lesson with Eddie Henderson
Finally, my first lesson for the blog!
I've long been a fan of trumpeter Eddie Henderson. In addition to being a creative improviser, I've always admired his crisp, clean attack and dark, centered trumpet sound. Henderson's notes really pop, giving him a rhythmic intensity that reminds me quite a bit of Freddie Hubbard. This clean, controlled approach to jazz trumpet playing gives him the ability to play fast, fluid passages with a high degree of clarity. I recently ran into Eddie at a gig I was playing at Smoke and asked him for a lesson. He was very gracious and we set up a time. A couple of weeks later, I jumped on the Metro North to visit his apartment in Mamaraneck. Before I talk about what I learned, I should talk a little about his career for those of you who aren't familiar with his playing.
Born here in New York City in 1940, Eddie Henderson came up in a family connected to the jazz world. His mother was one of the dancers in the original Cotton Club and his father sang with the popular vocal act, Bill Williams and the Charioteers. On top of that, his stepfather was a doctor to jazz greats such as Miles Davis, Duke Ellington and John Coltrane. If that's not enough of a head start in jazz, Eddie got to take his very first trumpet lesson at age 9 from none other than Louis Armstrong!
You would think with a background like that, Eddie would be destined for a life in jazz. But like a lot of young people in the arts, he went in pursuit of a "real job" and ended up in the Air Force for three years. Then he enrolled at U.C. Berkeley, graduating with a B.S. in zoology in 1964. He followed this with med school at Howard University in Washington, DC, but his passion for playing jazz never left him. In fact, he regularly drove up to New York on the weekends during med school to hang at Freddie Hubbard's house and practice with him. He'd tag along with Hubbard to his gigs on Saturday night and then get up and and go to Lee Morgan's house to practice with him on Sunday. It's one thing to know these great trumpeters and to hear them play, but to actually practice with them must have been incredible. In my eyes, this makes Eddie Henderson an invaluable resource pedagogically speaking. Fortunately, Eddie showed me some of the things he saw these guys shedding (more on that later).
After med school, Eddie moved back to the west coast to do his medical internship and residency, all the while continuing to practice and gig. It was then that he landed a gig with Herbie Hancock's Mwandishi band that lasted for three years. The experience changed his life and opened doors to gigs with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, Dexter Gordon, Roy Haynes, Jackie McLean, Joe Henderson, and McCoy Tyner. At this point, he realized he had built a significant career as a jazz musician. While he kept practicing medicine part time for a while, he has now devoted himself solely to music and continues to play in New York and all over the world.
Although Eddie came up playing straight-ahead jazz, he made his first splash on the jazz scene as a sideman on Herbie Hancock's Sextant recordings. Therefore, it was natural that he would continue along this trajectory in his early solo recordings. These days, he's playing mostly straight-ahead and sounding as great as ever:
Now on to the lesson! As I mentioned, I've always loved Eddie's attack on the trumpet, so that was the first thing I asked him about. I thought maybe he has some special way of tonguing that gives him that pop I mentioned. As it turns out, he just uses a regular classical attack behind the front teeth. He practices this articulation with tonguing exercises, all the while thinking of the syllable "tah." Of course, this is straight out of trumpet fundamentals 101. But in an effort to vary our attacks or to play fast, a lot of jazz players lose site of proper tonguing technique and end up articulating everything a "da" sound, which can make your playing sound a little wimpy and rhythmically bland. This idea of sticking to fundamentals ended up being the main theme of my lesson with Eddie. He reinforced the idea that there are no tricks or shortcuts to trumpet playing.
We started off by talking about trumpet playing in general. Pretty much all of Eddie's philosophies on trumpet playing fall right in line with mine. Here are some bits of knowledge he discussed that might help you with your own practicing:
Practice every variation of tonguing imaginable from single to double to triple to doodle-tonguing. While we obviously don't use double or triple tonguing that much in jazz, it's great for technique because it helps with tongue coordination as well as embouchure control.
The key to practicing effectively is to play softly. In order for your embouchure to work correctly, the aperture must be in a position so that the slightest bit of air will create a buzz. If you have to blow hard to get a sound, your embouchure isn't working efficiently. Playing soft is the ultimate cure for this problem.
Practice in 20 to 25-minute increments. You always want to approach the trumpet feeling fresh. If you practice for too long, you'll become fatigued and start to make subtle adjustments to compensate. That will eventually lead you down the path to playing with bad habits. Eddie reminded me that the Orbicularis Oris muscles that we use to play the trumpet are paper thin and abusing those muscles can have serious consequences later in your career. (The man is a medical doctor, so you have to take that advice seriously.)
Like the trumpeter that I am, I had to ask Eddie about how he approaches range and endurance. Again, he emphasized practicing at a soft volume. This was something he learned directly from the master of the stratosphere himself, Jon Faddis. Faddis recommended practicing long tones, tonguing exercises and eventually lip slurs at a whisper volume, and moving them up chromatically to the limit of your range. Slowly but surely, you will increase the your range by pushing yourself to higher and higher notes, never going on until you've mastered the note before. It's no different than a body builder who has to work up from low weights to huge barbells. Eddie claimed he dramatically improved his range in a relatively short amount of time using this method. Once these notes began to come easily at a soft volume, it was just a matter of adding more air to give them more volume. But the key, he said, is to relax, not tense up over high C and to be stingy with your air.
Next we talked about improvising. Eddie gave me a packet of information he had put together called "Trumpet Jazz Techniques" that covered most of the basic information required to be a fluent improviser. Again, Eddie emphasized the fundamentals. First and foremost an improviser must know the following scales in all keys: Major, relative, harmonic and melodic minors, chromatic, diminished, whole tone and pentatonic.
Of course, scales alone are just the first step. They are merely building blocks for ideas, much in the same way that the alphabet alone will not help someone speak a language. The next step is to learn how the letters in the alphabet (or notes in a scale) can assembled to form musical ideas. The most important way to do this is to transcribe licks from recorded solos. Another way is to learn some patterns based on these scales. Eddie showed me some really great patterns that he hear players like Freddie Hubbard and Lee Morgan practicing in their down time. For instance, here is a pattern Eddie used to hear Freddie practicing:
This pattern is based on the simplest of scales, the major scale. However, it's made up of seven-note groupings, which sounds really cool over 4/4 time. According to Eddie, Freddie used to walk around his living room playing this lick in all twelve keys.
Lee Morgan, on the other hand, was really fond of the whole tone scale. Much like the diminished scale, this is a symmetrical scale, which means it has it's own built-in tonality and can be used almost anywhere. Here's one of the licks Lee used to practice and put in his solos:
Finally, here's a lick based on the chromatic scale that he learned from Donald Byrd, one of the most fluid players of the 1960s:
I would be remiss if I didn't insert a quick caveat of my own here. Patterns should be used in solos sparingly as they are only a tiny piece of the vast musical language of jazz. Think of them instead as useful exercises to gain more fluency with scales, not as a crutch to fall back on to get through the changes. Too many players become obsessed with patterns and their solos end up sounding like practice routines. Of course, when you practice patterns, they naturally come out every once in a while in your solos. But too many of them will actually make your solo sound bland and sterile. Just something to bear in mind...
Next, Eddie talked about the diminished scale. He said John Coltrane emphasized to him the importance of exploring this scale. Because it is a symmetrical scale, it offers soloists limitless possibilities harmonically and melodically. Eddie spent some time talking about how the scale could be used in solos as well as how it can be used as a means of superimposing new chord changes, but that's a topic for another post.
I ended the lesson by asking Eddie the ten questions I ask all jazz trumpeters I take lessons from. Here they are along with Eddie's answers:
When did you begin to play trumpet and when did you begin learning jazz?
I took lessons in New York from 1950-1954. My first lesson was actually with Louis Armstrong and by the age of 13, I had gone through whole Arbans book. Then my family moved to San Francisco where I studied trumpet and music theory at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and performed with the San Francisco Conservatory Symphony Orchestra until 1958. Miles was staying at my parents house at one point and I remember going to one of his gigs and becoming fascinated with jazz. I knew about jazz, but that was the first time I had heard anything on that level.
What is your practice routine?
My practice routine focuses on basic trumpet technique and includes things like long tones, scales and lip slurs. I feel it is important to always reinforce correct practice habits.
What traits of the great jazz trumpet players of the past do you value the most, and what have you done to address those aspects in your playing?
In my estimation, the greatest musicians practiced their fundamentals to an extent that they were in complete control of their instrument. This control was reflected in their personalities and confidence on stage. When they walked onto the bandstand, musicians like Lee Morgan, Freddie Hubbard and Miles Davis exuded a confidence in their playing that drew the listener in immediately. You knew something serious was about to happen.
What have you tried to do to make your playing unique?
Players who are able to find their own voice display the highest level of maturity in their playing. I strive to play in a way that conveys a connection to the tradition of the music, but with a sound and harmonic approach that is my own.
What equipment do you play and how much does equipment play a factor in your approach?
I own two Selmer Paris 80J’s, and two Selmer Paris Concept TTs. The horn is certainly important in that it needs to fit the unique needs of the player. For instance, I used to have Conn Constellation because I saw Freddie play one but it didn’t work for me. However, I do play the very same Couesnon flugel that Freddie used on his amazing solo on "Here's That Rainy Day" from his album “Straight Life.”
Do you subscribe to any particular systems of trumpet technique (Caruso, Reinhardt, etc.)?
No.
Do you practice classical music, and if so, why?
I do practice some classical music for technique, but my focus is primarily on jazz.
Do you play any other instruments? If so, how do you think that impacts your conception of jazz trumpet playing?
I am familiar with the piano, although I am not fluent enough to play gigs on it. However, it's vital for a jazz musician to be able to play chords on the piano in order to have a deeper understanding of jazz harmony.
Do you have any particular advice for aspiring jazz trumpet players?
It's a difficult time to learn jazz in that the era of apprenticeship is over. Players like Freddie Hubbard, Lee Morgan and myself earned their stripes by playing with Art Blakey. However, institutions like that are no longer available, and a lot of players lack a level of maturity because of it. Jazz has also become institutionalized by the schools and now a lot of kids come out of school and become instant headliners. However, they haven't had the time yet to develop and find their own voice. You used to be able to tell who was playing by listening to one note. These days, a lot of the players today sound like carbon copies of each other.
What do you think of the jazz scene today?
The jazz audience in the states is pretty small. I earn my living now playing in Japan and Europe. Over there, they come out to listen to the music and they respect the musicians more than the general public here in the states. I recently discovered that my electric albums are really popular in Europe, and I'm thinking about doing something in that vein again.
Until next time..
The Doctor Is In: Eddie Henderson On Life As 'The Funk Surgeon'
February 15, 2015
National Public Radio
Eddie Henderson's latest album is Collective Portrait.
Jimmy Katz/Courtesy of the artist
Eddie Henderson had no choice. His mother was a dancer at the original Cotton Club, and counted Billie Holiday, Lena Horne and Sarah Vaughan as friends. His birth father was in a major vocal group, The Charioteers. And his stepfather was a doctor to the stars: Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderly and more. With all of that talent surrounding him during childhood, he just had to turn out a jazz musician.
Eddie Henderson has just released what he considers an audio autobiography, an album that covers many of the tunes he's played through his career. It's called Collective Portrait, and as he tells NPR's Arun Rath, it's brought out a lot of old memories –- like the time when he was 9 years old and his mother and Sarah Vaughan took him to see Louis Armstrong at The Apollo Theater.
"They took me backstage; Louis Armstrong gave me my first lesson, on his horn and mouthpiece, of how to make a sound on the trumpet," he says. "I had no idea of the stature of this gentleman; you know, I was just 9 years old. I really didn't know that trumpet was gonna turn into the rest of my life."
People hearing Henderson for the first time on Collective Portrait might get the impression that he's a fairly traditional jazz musician. Fans, however, have known him to get into some pretty funky electric music. When he answered a call from Herbie Hancock for a one-week gig, he ended up as part of the Mwandishi group Hancock would lead through the early 1970s.
[https://youtu.be/YiSpSAfmT_M]
Henderson's nickname, The Funk Surgeon, owes to that side of his career — and to the fact that he actually holds a medical degree. After the Mwandishi group broke up, he got a job at a doctor's office in San Francisco, though he did set one condition: "I told him I would like to work at his office and help him, but my real love was music, and if I ever got a tour I'd have to go."
As it turned out, the music came to him. Henderson ended up treating the jazz great Thelonious Monk as a patient, when the latter was struggling with his mental health.
"They really didn't know what to do with this
gentleman. He gave them a fit," Henderson says. "After they found out that I knew who he was, they allowed me to take him to his gigs. It was just a little bizarre; that's the best way I can put it."
Transcript of interview:
https://www.npr.org/transcripts/386086679
ARUN RATH, HOST:
Trumpeter Eddie Henderson had no choice. He had to be a jazz musician. He's been surrounded by talent since he was a kid. His mother was a dancer at the original Cotton Club.
EDDIE HENDERSON: Billie Holiday was her roommate, Lena Horne was her best friend, and Sarah Vaughan was her best friend.
RATH: His birth father was in a major vocal group called Billy Williams and the Charioteers, which was the number one black singing group in America, over and above the Ink Spots or the Mills Brothers.
RATH: His stepfather was a doctor to the stars.
HENDERSON: Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderly - I could go on and on.
RATH: Eddie Henderson has released what he considers a musical autobiography, an album that covers many of the tunes he's played throughout his career - "Collective Portrait."
(SOUNDBITE OF "COLLECTIVE PORTRAIT" SONG)
RATH: For Eddie Henderson, digging through all those old songs brought out a lot of memories.
HENDERSON: When I was nine years old, my mother and Sarah Vaughan took me down to see Louis Armstrong at the Apollo Theater. They took me backstage. Louis Armstrong gave my first lesson on his horn and mouthpiece of how to make a sound on the trumpet. I had no idea of the stature of this gentleman. You know, I was just nine years old. I really didn't know that that trumpet was going to turn into the rest of my life.
RATH: Now, people hearing you for the first time on this record and hearing you and I talk about greats like Billie holiday and Louie Armstrong might get the impression you're a pretty traditional jazz musician. But your fans know you as the Funk Surgeon. You've been known for playing some pretty funky electric music.
(SOUNDBITE OF FUNK MUSIC)
HENDERSON: Well, you know, music is an evolution you go through. At first, I wanted to sound like Miles Davis. Then I wanted to be a bebop player. Herbie Hancock came through town, and he needed the trumpet player for one week. That one week turned into the rest of my life.
RATH: (Laughter).
HENDERSON: That was the Mwandishi group that Herbie Hancock had from 1970 to '73.
(SOUNDBITE OF FUNK MUSIC)
RATH: People who know about you - if they know one detail about you beyond the trumpet, they know that you are a physician. You actually pursued a medical career at the same time you were playing the horn.
HENDERSON: Yes, I did.
RATH: And everybody would want to know how on earth do you manage to combine those two very demanding professions?
HENDERSON: Well, you know, when I was going to medical school, I knew then that in my real heart, I wanted to be a musician. But I went out of my way to go to medical school
'cause my stepfather and I - who - he was a doctor. He and I didn't get along. And he told me - challenged me, said I would never be as good as him because he was a doctor, and I wasn't smart enough. So that just made me mad. I said, oh, yeah? Watch. (Laughter).
So I went out of my way to prove him wrong, to tell you the truth. And I did - after the Mwandishi group broke up, you know, I had my license to practice medicine. And I was lucky enough to get a job in San Francisco at an office - wonderful gentleman, Dr. Jackson. I told him I would like to work in his office and help him, but my real love was music, and if I ever got a tour, I'd have to go. He concurred, said, fine, Ed. Just let me be the bongo and come with you, you know.
(LAUGHTER)
HENDERSON: And so it was ideal arrangement.
RATH: So was it during that residency - was that when you famously treated the genius composer…
HENDERSON: Oh, yes.
RATH: ...Piano-player Thelonious Monk?
HENDERSON: That is true. He stayed in the hospital for about six months. And I remember I wrote the - signed his discharge diagnosis - schizophrenia, unclassified type.
RATH: What was it like treating him? Did you guys talk about music?
HENDERSON: They really didn't know what to do with this gentleman, you know. He gave them a fit. They tried Thorazine on him, took it up to the limit - 3,500 milligrams a day. I mean, 50 milligrams would knock you or I out for two days, you know. But a psychotic person - the more they absorb and it doesn't knock them out shows you how really sick they are. After they found out that I knew who he was, they allowed me to take him to his gigs, you know, and it was just a little bizarre.
(LAUGHTER)
RATH: I guess it was kind of bizarre.
HENDERSON: That's the best way I can put it.
RATH: So as you sorted through a whole lot of memories for this album, what insights do you come away from this about the person you beat ended up becoming?
HENDERSON: Well, you know, when I was with Herbie Hancock in the Mwandishi era, I was more or less very lucky to be in that position, and his music was kind of avant-garde. And to tell you the truth, I really hadn't got a good foundation in playing jazz, in terms of playing changes, at that point. The so after that band broke up, then I started playing fusion, where I didn't have the foundation of playing standard tunes as well as my peers did. And so after the fusion era, I decided to go back and learn how to clean up my deficiencies. And I think that is the difference that I have now, and I think that comes out.
(SOUNDBITE OF "COLLECTIVE PORTRAIT" SONG)
RATH: That's Eddie Henderson. His new album is called "Collective Portrait." Eddie Henderson, it has been such a privilege to speak with you. Thank you.
HENDERSON: Oh, my pleasure, sir.
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https://downbeat.com/news/detail/eddie-hendersons-cool-collective1
Eddie Henderson’s Cool Collective
by Phillip Lutz
Eddie Henderson frequently eschews original compositions
In 1970, When Eddie Henderson joined Herbie Hancock’s Mwandishi band as a substitute trumpeter, he was the least experienced member of that groundbreaking group. As a result, he was subjected to some mild hazing to test his mental toughness.
“They called me ‘rookie of the year,’” he said in April as he relaxed in his suburban New York home. “They wouldn’t let me see the music.”
But Henderson, who had just become a practicing psychiatrist, was up to it. In fact, his cool sound and creative brilliance so impressed Hancock that the gig, which was supposed to end after a week, lasted until the band broke up in 1973. By that time, Henderson was launched on an illustrious career that, at age 77, shows few signs of slowing down.
“That one week turned into the rest of my life,” Henderson said.
These days, Henderson, who looks 20 years younger than his age, is an active member of The Cookers, an all-star collective that includes Mwandishi’s drummer, Billy Hart, as well as trumpeter David Weiss, saxophonists Billy Harper and Donald Harrison, pianist George Cables and bassist Cecil McBee.
The Cookers have produced five swinging albums, most recently 2016’s The Call Of The Wild And Peaceful Heart (Smoke Sessions). But he finds his work as a leader equally satisfying. The most recent manifestation of that work is his new quintet album, Be Cool (Smoke Sessions).
Like most of his recorded output, the album—Henderson’s 30th as a leader—eschews his own tunes. “I’m not really a composer as such,” he maintained. Rather, he prefers that his albums become forums for others’ compositions. “That way I can create a collective portrait.” (His previous album on Smoke Sessions appropriately is titled Collective Portrait.)
Of the 12 tunes on Be Cool, three are by members of the band: “Smoke Screen,” by pianist Kenny Barron; “Loft Funk,” co-written by drummer Mike Clark; and “The Sand Castle Head Hunter,” by Harrison, whom Henderson recruited from The Cookers.
Two tunes are by family members: the title track, by his wife, Natsuko Henderson, and “Nightride,” by Henderson’s daughter, Cava Menzies. And two are by iconic trumpeters who were both friends and influences: “Fran-Dance” by Miles Davis, and “The Moontrane,” by Woody Shaw.
In contrast, the standard “After You’ve Gone,” typically performed with an animated kick, surprises by its almost mournful stillness. Henderson said he first played the tune last year for a woman in Hawaii who had recently lost her husband. Like that rendering, the one on the album proves that, for all its coolness, Henderson’s horn can plumb the emotional depths.
Clark, a veteran of Hancock’s Head Hunters band who appeared on Henderson’s Heritage in 1976, said the bond he and Henderson formed in those fertile days remains strong—and it comes through loud and clear on Be Cool.
“Eddie’s one of those people you have an understanding with that never goes away,” Clark said. DB
https://jazztimes.com/archives/eddie-henderson-dr-trumpet/
Eddie Henderson: Dr. Trumpet
UPDATED APRIL 25, 2019
JazzTimes
Eddie Henderson
There was a stretch of 10 years in San Francisco, between 1975 and 1985, when trumpeter Eddie Henderson was juggling two extremely demanding disciplines: practicing medicine and playing the trumpet. In 1973, Henderson had finished a rewarding stint with Herbie Hancock’s Mwandishi band, which produced the exceptional, exploratory records Mwandishi, Crossings and Sextant, and relatively soon after he felt compelled to return to his other field of study.
I got my M.D. in 1968 but I didn’t start practicing medicine until 1975,” says Henderson. “It was only four hours a day, part time, so I was always still playing too. I had the fortune to be at a clinic in San Francisco where the head of the clinic knew I was heavily involved in music, so whenever I’d get tours or whatever he would let me come and go as I pleased. So it was the perfect lifestyle. But music was my number one thing emotionally, even though I was practicing medicine at a very skilled level.”
Between practicing medicine and keeping his trumpet chops in check, all of Henderson’s waking hours were consumed during that busy time. “But it was cool-just a matter of focus and discipline,” he says. “I’ve always been like that because in high school I was a competitive figure skater. I think that’s where I really got my discipline, on the ice. During the summer I was on the ice at least 10 hours a day, from 5:30 in the morning until the evening. And at the same time I was going to the [San Francisco Conservatory of Music], going to high school, playing basketball, too. So I was always pretty focused. And by virtue of that discipline I got going, everything else that came later was a breeze. My undergraduate degree at the University of California-that was a breeze. Also, medical school was a breeze for me, because I was very focused. I had good study habits, good organization skills. A lot of the other guys, they wouldn’t come to class for months because they’d be out partying. But I never missed a class in my life and studied every day. Those other guys tried to cram and you just can’t do that and retain information, not the last week before the finals.”
In 1985, Henderson moved to New York to pursue his musical path while continuing to practice medicine in the early stages of his relocation. “I practiced medicine here in New York a bit,” he says. “I worked for the Transit Authority for three months and then at a little clinic for about a year or two, just a couple hours a day. I moved here for music, not to practice medicine. And now I have not practiced medicine in about 11 years.”
For Henderson, music and medicine go hand-in-hand. “Music and medicine are both divine disciplines,” he explains. “You’re dealing with the human body, which is a divine creation, on one hand. And then you’re dealing with the divine creation of music. The universe is made of music. Everybody’s billions of cells in their bodies-those are vibrations, the vibrations of the solar system, the movement; everything’s in a constant flux. And I’m dealing with both of them. They’re just very different mediums through which you can see yourself.
“But for me, that old adage of ‘physician, heal thyself’ means that I can’t help anybody else until I’m cool. And music is what cools me out. I know that music heals me. And I hope my music is healing in some respect to the listeners too. I try to think of that when I’m playing. I want to heal people, soothe people. They come out to hear music, they don’t wanna go away all jagged, you know.”
The soothing title track of Henderson’s latest as a leader, Oasis (Sirocco Jazz), is a good case in point. A dark, mysterious ballad performed on flugelhorn, Henderson’s warm-toned, plaintive lines are echoed by vibist Joe Locke and underscored by pianist Kevin Hays’ gentle arpeggios as the rhythm tandem of Billy Drummond and Ed Howard creates subtle and spacious percussive colors underneath. On the other side of the dynamic coin, “Sandstorm” captures all the kinetic energy of an express train hurtling along the subway track at breakneck speed. Drummond’s playing comes alive here with a bristling Max Roach-inspired ride-cymbal pulse while Howard pushes the forward momentum with his insistent walking bass lines as Hays delves into serious bebop mode. Locke wails on top of this uptempo romp with blazing dexterity, while Henderson’s bold, bright playing here speaks of his trumpet heroes: Miles Davis, Freddie Hubbard, Clifford Brown. It’s a soundtrack to a city-New York, not San Francisco.
Always mindful of providing tension and release, Henderson segues from “Sandstorm”‘s aggressively boppish ride to a beautiful interpretation of Wayne Shorter’s “Lost.” On Kevin Hays’ “Siddhartha,” he follows the calming, Zenlike flow of that spacious melody with a dramatic use of space on muted trumpet. The effect is very Miles-inspired, à la “Flamenco Sketches” from Kind of Blue. Henderson’s own expansive, open-ended “Desert Sun” recalls some of the sonic explorations from his Mwandishi phase with Hancock. “That tune reflects the influence that I got, in terms of concept, from the old Herbie Hancock sextet. I wanted some of that aspect represented on this record.”
Elsewhere on Oasis-his seventh recording with the core group of Locke, Hays and Howard, with Drummond replacing Lewis Nash in the lineup-Henderson and crew turn in evocative renditions of George Cables’ gentle “Why Not,” Lee Morgan’s “Melancholy” and Herbie Hancock’s “Cantaloupe Island,” done up in funky fashion with some noticeably reconfigured harmonies. “I always try to use other people’s tunes,” says Henderson. “Some records are just that artist, only his compositions. But I like to incorporate other people’s tunes so that the album has more balance and scope rather than just my one way of looking at things. I like more or less collective input rather than a self-portrait.”
His dramatic arrangement of “Melancholy” has a heavy spiritual vibe running through it, almost in a “Go Down Moses” vein. “Well, I knew Lee Morgan personally and I used to practice with him,” says Henderson. “On this tune I was really trying to reflect that side of Lee. He could be spirited and fiery but he also had this real beautiful, thoughtful side.”
The earthy cover of “Cantaloupe Island,” he explains, came out of some recent playing experiences with Hancock during his Gershwin’s World tour. “We went out for about a year and a half and the tour finally ended last September. It was supposed to be the Gershwin Project representing his album, but the music really evolved way past that. By the end of the tour it really reminded me of the old Herbie Hancock and Mwandishi band that I played in about 30 years ago. The music went off the music paper to where you’re experimenting like explorers or travelers. It was a wonderful experience.”
The original Mwandishi band recently played a rare reunion concert in San Francisco as a benefit for trombonist Julian Priester, who underwent a liver transplant a year ago and exhausted his funds in the process. (A review of the concert is posted on the “Live” section of www.jazztimes.com.)
As Henderson explains, “It was the old Herbie Hancock sextet: Buster Williams, Julian, Benny Maupin, myself and Herbie. The one difference was that Billy Hart wasn’t there, because he was in Japan, but Terri Lynne Carrington filled in for him. And it was great. We hadn’t played together in 27 years and it was like we never stopped.”
Henderson had originally met Hancock in the mid-1960s, when the pianist was making jazz history with the Miles Davis quintet that also featured Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter and Tony Williams. “I knew Herbie when he was with Miles and all we talked about back then was cars because I loved sports cars and he did too. And then in late 1969, when Herbie had his sextet with Joe Henderson, Johnny Coles, Garnett Brown, Buster Williams and Tootie Heath, he came to San Francisco to play a weeklong engagement. And Johnny Coles was going on a sabbatical with Ray Charles for six months so Herbie needed a trumpeter. He heard that I played trumpet but I don’t think he took it seriously at first. But then he tried me for that one week in San Francisco that they had, and it went well because I was familiar with all of his music and he seemed to appreciate the way I played. And that opened the door for me.”
Hancock must’ve intuitively sensed the Miles Davis influence in Henderson’s playing. Henderson had, in fact, absorbed Miles’ repertoire from the time he was a teenager and actually had gotten some valuable trumpet playing tips from the maestro himself. “He used to stay at my parents’ house when I was in high school,” says Henderson. “This was when Miles had Cannonball and Coltrane in the band. I was studying trumpet at the conservatory in San Francisco but when he took me to the gig at the Blackhawk and I heard Trane and Cannonball with Philly Joe, Paul Chambers and Wynton Kelly-it blew my mind. That was my first real eye-opener to modern jazz. And I’ve been on the trail ever since.”
Henderson did have a previous eye-opening lesson or two with another trumpet legend. “My first trumpet teacher in life was Louis Armstrong,” he recalls. “My mother knew him because she was at the original Cotton Club as a dancer. If you’ve ever seen that videotape of Fats Waller playing and a real pretty lady is sitting on the piano bench with him, singing ‘Ain’t Misbehavin” to him, that’s my mother. She knew everybody in show business and she took me down to the Apollo in 1949 to meet Louis Armstrong. I was just nine years old at the time and I didn’t realize who he really was until I got older. But that’s how I started playing the trumpet.”
But it was Miles who would make the biggest impression on Henderson. “When I met Miles when I was 17 or 18, I played for him by ear everything off Sketches of Spain. I had been practicing with the record and when I finally played it for him I didn’t miss a note. I was so proud of myself and when I finished I asked him, ‘How did you like that?’ And he said, ‘You sound good, but that’s me!’ Which was another eye-opener. That awareness was very important. And then he sat down and showed me a few things, wrote on a little napkin certain relationships about chords and things. But the most important part of my learning from him was by listening to him and observing him, to understand the etiquette of what you do and what you don’t do-and how to leave space. A lot of good players are very good technically, but you know-you can’t play all the time. You gotta take a breath or you’ll overload the audience. That space is the pause that refreshes. And also it energizes. It gives the music life-in-breathing and out-breathing. That’s the key.”
In the ’70s, like his mentor Miles, Henderson got way into the fusion thing by incorporating electronic exploration into the fabric of his playing. That quality is readily apparent through his reverb-soaked trumpet playing on Hancock’s Sextant album from 1972, but Henderson pushes the envelope on his own mid-’70s recordings for Blue Note, Sunburst and Heritage. “I played trumpet with wah-wah and all of those albums and I really enjoyed it,” he says. “In fact, an album recently came out in England (on Soul Brother Records) called Anthology, which is a compilation of all of my hits from the fusion era. It’s funny but in England, I’m like a rock star. I didn’t even know that but I did a tour over there about a month and a half ago and it was amazing. I sold out the biggest venue in London; there were mobs of people-just unbelievable. For that tour they got an Echoplex for me, a phase shifter, a wah-wah pedal. I like to use technology. I’ll use any tools I can to explore the possibilities of sound.”
Henderson says his recent tour of England in support of the fusion-oriented Anthology made him consider the possibility of resurrecting the wah-wah sound once again. “That whole tour opened my eyes to the fact that I don’t really want to be stuck in just one genre. So I’m considering maybe updating some of those fusion things because there’s a big audience for that still. And besides, I like to take chances and use my imagination. I don’t want to just play jazz in a traditional sense all the time. That’s cool too, but I also want to represent that other side of me too.”
The medical practice might have to wait a little longer.
“For a while I was endorsing Selmer trumpets. I have two or three Selmers and I also have two Martins, a Bach and a Schilke. All horns are good but some people get fanatical about this mouthpiece or that mouthpiece. An analogy that I like to make is something that Art Blakey once told Clifford Brown. See, Clifford had chewing gum patching up one of the middle valve casings and had a rubber band for the third valve slide, and that’s the horn that sounded so golden! And one day Blakey said, ‘Clifford, here’s $300, go get yourself a nice new shiny horn.’ So Clifford said, ‘Thank you Mr. Blakey but the problem’s not with the horn, the problem’s with me.’ Check that out! You have to realize that you play the instrument, the instrument doesn’t play you. Some people search a lifetime trying to find the top-of-the-line horn but that’s wasting a lot of time. They should get home and be practicing and stop worrying about the horn.
“Mouthpiece-wise, what I’ve been playing all my life feels comfortable to me: a Bach 7C, Mount Vernon model. And only recently this mouthpiece maker named Scott Holbert laid something on me. He’s a trumpet player and he’s one of my fans so he looked at my mouthpiece and made me a new one and sent it to me. And it really enhanced the sound. It’s similar to the one I was always using but it’s state-of-the-art now. So that’s cool, but I really don’t go around shopping for things.”
Listening Pleasures
“When I was coming up I used to listen to records and cop things off the records all the time-innuendos, phrasings and licks and stuff. But I don’t listen to records anymore. I do love classical music, which I listen to on the radio. When I was competitive figure skating, the music was always Stravinsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, things like that. I love all types of music-Indian music, Chinese music, Japanese music, Brazilian, Latin. The more music you’re exposed to the more it enhances one’s vocabulary. I don’t just want to listen to, quote-unquote, bebop. No, I love all kinds of music. But I don’t buy records anymore. And I’m lucky enough to travel so much these days so when I’m in different countries I like to go out and hear the musicians from that country playing their music authentically.”
Originally Published October 1, 2001
http://21cm.org/magazine/artist-exclusives/2018/03/08/a-conversation-with-dr-eddie-henderson/
A CONVERSATION WITH DR. EDDIE HENDERSON
MARCH 2018
There’s a legend walking among us, and his name is Eddie Henderson.
Jazz aficionados will be familiar with Henderson and his associations with iconic artists, most notably Herbie Hancock throughout the 1970s. Known as “The Funk Surgeon,” Henderson also led a number of groups that played electric jazz and fusion – although the man eschews the kind of sub-categorizations to which jazz is prone; he prefers to think of it all under the umbrella of “ethnic improvised music.”
As impressive as Henderson’s playing is his seemingly endless supply of mind-boggling life stories. He grew up in the midst of the Harlem Renaissance with a mother who danced at the Cotton Club and a father who sang in The Charioteers. He took his first trumpet lesson with Louis Armstrong. He claims the title of the first African-American to compete in national figure skating championships. What else? He was also a practicing medical doctor throughout his early years of playing and touring with jazz greats.
During a recent visit to DePauw University, 21CM director Mark Rabideau got the chance to sit down with Eddie Henderson and hear some of his stories first-hand.
INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS
On Eddie Henderson’s first trumpet lesson with Louis Armstrong…
My mother’s friends Lena Horne and Sarah Vaughan – I think they both took me to the Apollo Theater to hear Louis Armstrong. I really hadn’t heard of him. I do remember I could see [him] behind the curtain warming up. I thought, “Wow! He really has a big sound!”
So my mother took me backstage. That was my first lesson on the trumpet, on Louis Armstrong’s horn and his mouthpiece. He taught me how to make a sound.
My uncle Louie gave me his trumpet. I took lessons every week and studied very hard. After about a year I could play “Flight of the Bumblebee.” So my mother took me back to see Louis Armstrong. I remember his voice. He said, “Hey little Eddie, you still playing?” I grabbed his horn and played “Flight of the Bumblebee.” Louis Armstrong shrieked and fell out of his chair. He got up and said, “Hey little Eddie, that’s some of the baddest stuff I ever heard in my life!” Meaning good – I hope.
He told his wife to bring a book of ten of his solos transcribed. He wrote at the top, “To little Eddie, this is to warm your chops up. You sound wonderful, keep playing. Love, Satchmo.”
On a profound, early experience with Herbie Hancock…
After I finished medical school, I did my internship. The other doctors were going into specializations where you had four more years of being on call every other night. I was still playing every night. I came across psychiatry, which had an on-call schedule of one day every 45 days. So I picked psychiatry.
I did two years of that. In my last year – it was a three-year residency – Herbie Hancock, who I knew, came through San Francisco. He needed a trumpet player for a week. Somebody recommended me. He said, “Oh no, he’s a doctor.” They said, “Well, just give him a try.” That one week opened the door for me. All the musicians that I revered figured, well, Eddie plays with Herbie. His credentials must be in order. People like Dexter Gordon, Art Blakey, Elvin Jones, McCoy Tyner, Joe Henderson. They all started hiring me by virtue of the fact that I was affiliated with Herbie Hancock. So that changed my whole life. I went with Herbie – it was supposed to be one week. It turned into three and a half years.
I moved back to San Francisco and got a job at this doctor’s office. He gave me the option that I could work five days a week, four hours a day. If I got tours, I could go. He still paid me even though I wasn’t there. I had my cake and ate it. I was playing every night and practicing medicine four or five hours a day. I did that for 11 or 12 years.
On emulating your heroes and finding your own voice…
[Finding my voice] was a slow process. When I first met Miles Davis, I asked, “How do you play?” I had been imitating his solos. I asked him to listen to me. I put on his record and played with it. He said, “You sound good, but that’s me.” So, it’s fine to have influences. That’s the way he learned. But then you reach a point in life where you realize, who am I?
The next time Miles came to town, he said, “Hey Eddie, you still trying to sound like me?” But in the interim, I found out that his hero, who he imitated when he was just beginning, was a gentleman named Freddie Webster. Miles’s sound, style, conception, everything, was a sad carbon copy. So when [Davis] asked me [that], I said, “You mean Freddie Webster?”
The look on Miles Davis’s face was shock. He said, “Oh man, I didn’t know you was hip to that.” Then he smiled and said, “Everybody’s a thief. I just made a short-term loan.”
Everybody is a derivative of their predecessors. It’s so important to study the past before you can think about forging ahead. It’s a cumulative process. It’s a lineage.
On being a bandleader…
In the five years I played with Herbie [Hancock], he never told anybody how to play. If you have to tell them how to play, why hire them? If you hire race horses, let them run. That’s what I took away from my greatest experience, and the lesson given to me about going on in my future career. If you hire people, let them be themselves. Evolve together. It’s a collective effort when people play together. One person dictating – that limits it.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
https://londonjazznews.com/2018/12/13/interview-eddie-henderson/
INTERVIEW: Eddie Henderson
ON 13 DECEMBER 2018
“Music is a healing force.” – Eddie Henderson
Legendary American jazz trumpeter Eddie Henderson has performed in The UK several times this year, including his two unforgettable London performances: at Pizza Express Soho at the end of April with his Quintet, and Live at Church of Sound at St James the Great, end of May, with the fantastic ’60s jazz veterans The Cookers! During his long career the unquestionable master of trumpet worked with Herbie Hancock, Pharoah Sanders, Norman Connors, Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers, Dexter Gordon, Joe Henderson, Max Roach and McCoy Tyner – just to name a few. Tomasz Furmanek interviewed Eddie Henderson for London Jazz News.
LondonJazz News: From 1968 to the late ’80s you mixed music and medicine. As a professional psychiatrist, what connects music and psychiatry?
Eddie Henderson: In the study of medicine you have to heal the illnesses and the human body, and with music it can be a similar thing, it can be very complementary… Music is a healing force. The sound of music, a clear sound, it’s a healing force for me and, I think, for everybody else… So it can be a healing art form (not all music though), and it can go head to head with the medicine, they can overlap each other. You don’t have to be a musician to be happy, but music itself can make everybody happy!
LJN: It looks like it was music that gave you more happiness than medicine?
EH: Oh, absolutely! I can’t help anybody else unless I am happy, and music is what makes me happy. It is my source of happiness. If I feel good then I can help other people.
LJN: I have just experienced an incredible performance from you and The Cookers (incl. Billy Harper, Cecil McBee, David Weiss, Victor Lewis, Donald Harrison and Danny Grisset) – what does playing with these guys mean to you, what is the particular chemistry?
EH: The chemistry of people you play with is very important. For example, when you study chemistry at school, you learn that you can’t put just any elements together, as you might cause an explosion. You have to be careful of what elements you mix together, to make a homogenous mixture. With music it’s the same.
LJN: So this particular mixture of musicians is very complementary?
EH: It’s complementary on a personal level, on a friendship level and on the musical level. You can’t have just names, it’s not about that… It’s about the chemistry. I just don’t play with anybody, it’s not about a bad or good musicians either. I have to be, and to feel, comfortable playing.
LJN: You seem to have this genius quality of being able to get exactly what you want from music and musicians.
EH: I’ve learnt this quality from observing geniuses (laughs) – I hope that some of that quality rubs off on you whenever you associate with them! So be careful who you have around you (laughs)…because it may rub off on you! You absorb what you have around you.
LJN: The secret behind the relevant and always fresh sound of your trumpet?
EH: I had learned that from listening to Miles Davis when I was very young. In 1957 he stayed at my parents’ house, he was a family friend, and in certain ways he taught me many things. It wasn’t happening on a verbal level, but by observing him and listening to his sound that stood out from the crowd and from all of the trumpet players… So I kind of emulated him, because, you know, he was an amazing trumpet player, and I didn’t want to sound anonymous. I realized the importance of having this quality… you know, all the greats, they play two bars and you know it’s Coltrane, or Nat King Cole singing, or that’s Billie Holiday!…
LJN: …the importance of having an instantly recognizable sound?
EH: Right! Now people often talk about Miles Davis as if he just dropped out of a vacuum in the sky… No! He had his influences too, like Freddie Webster, who was a huge influence on him, but that’s how the evolution of the tradition goes, by observing it, being a part of it and perpetuating it by evolving it.
“[Louis Armstrong] told me how to make a sound on his horn.” – Eddie Henderson. Photo credit: © Mochles Simawi
LJN: Miles was very important to you at the beginning of your career and you often said that you admired him…
EH: Of course!
LJN: What have you learned from him and how?
EH: By observation – observation and listening! That’s the most important thing – listening! Not just talking to him – mostly because he didn’t talk to you (laughs)… he wouldn’t talk like a “normal” person would… no! Listening to his approach to music and listening to his sound. He wouldn’t just sit down with you and say “do this or do that”… No. It didn’t happen that way.
LJN: Magical. Your family was in the centre of the coolest musical crowd – and for you, all this seemed very normal?
EH: Oh, absolutely. All these people – Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Sarah Vaughan, Billie Holliday, Lena Horne… and many more… yeah, they were just friends of my parents. I remember sitting with them on the sofa in our living room… (laughs).
LJN: And you had your first trumpet lesson when you were nine with… Louis Armstrong!
EH: Because my mother new him and she took me to see him!
LJN: How do you remember that?
EH: How could I ever forget?! That’s the first time I ever blew a trumpet; he told me how to make a sound on his horn. I didn’t know who he was. You know, just a friend of my mother… I had no idea! I was just a child!
LJN: One more memory about someone else, please… Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers, you played with them for a while…
EH: Art Blakey and his influence was invaluable in my development, because his band was like an institution, he would always bring younger musicians up and hone them to the craft of the art form of jazz, and ideally if you stayed there at least two years, hopefully five years at most… And Billy Harper was with Art Blakey, George Cables… all the people… Freddie Hubbard, Lee Morgan, Wayne Shorter… McCoy Tyner, he played with Art Blakey too. All these notables of jazz came through that invaluable institution…
LJN: Like an academy…
EH: Oh exactly! Postgraduates! It was an invaluable experience. Unfortunately there are no more institutions like that nowadays.
LJN: As a teenager you studied trumpet at The San Francisco Conservatory of Music. What did you take from studying classical music?
EH: I wanted to go to the conservatory more or less to learn to play the trumpet technically. I had an excellent teacher, he was the number one trumpet player in the San Francisco Symphony, and I started performing with San Francisco Conservatory Symphony Orchestra – my teacher would play the first chair and I played the second chair. That was my only experience playing with the symphony orchestra, but it was wonderful! It allowed me to play an instrument and then I met Miles Davis and started learning from him!
Tomasz Furmanek, Mochles Simawi and LJN would like to thank Natsuko Henderson for her assistance in facilitating this interview.
Eddie Henderson - Mahal [FULL ALBUM] LP 1978
Eddie Henderson - Realization (1973) [Full Album]
Eddie Henderson "BE COOL" video
eddie henderson prance on
EDDIE HENDERSON - famed jazz trumpeter, draft
Eddie Henderson – Movin' On 1977
Eddie Henderson "Shuffle and Deal"
Eddie Henderson - Morning Song (1977)
Time And Place Eddie Henderson
Eddie Henderson – Cyclops 1978
Doctors That Play - Dr. Eddie Henderson Quintet
Eddie Henderson Quintet - This Is For Albert (1998)
Eddie Henderson / Herbie Hancock / Benni
Herbie Hancock and Mwandishi in Molde -1971
Herbie Hancock Mwandishi - France 1972
Herbie Hancock / Mwandishi - Live in Nice 1971
Herbie Hancock - Sleeping Giant - Live at Baker's Keyboard Lounge 1972
Herbie Hancock - February 20, 1973 - Strata Concert Gallery - Detroit, Michigan
