Was the tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson pondering of the movie Black Narcissus (1947) when he wrote a music of that title? It’s an unlikely connection. The film, directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger and based mostly on a novel by Rumer Godden, follows a bunch of English nuns who wrestle with isolation and sexual jealousy at a Himalayan convent. Henderson’s composition—a spotlight of his 1969 album Energy to the Folks, which was reissued this 12 months by Jazz Dispensary—is a fragile waltz in a minor key, evoking enigmatic magnificence and repose. Like a lot of Powell and Pressburger’s work, Black Narcissus is an expressionist fantasy filled with vivid colours and operatic feelings, whereas Henderson’s “Black Narcissus” is about as understated as a jazz composition can get.
I haven’t discovered proof that Henderson, one of many main musicians of the post-bebop era, ever noticed the movie. He informed an interviewer that he got here up with the title of the music first and wrote the melody afterward, however it’s unclear what he hoped the title would convey. Probably the most easy rationalization is that he favored the metaphorical implications of a dark-colored flower. Within the late Nineteen Sixties and early Seventies, Henderson’s album titles mirrored rising curiosity within the Black Energy motion: after Energy to the Folks, he launched If You’re Not A part of the Answer, You’re A part of the Downside (1970), In Pursuit of Blackness (1971), and Black Is the Shade (1972). Maybe he wished to write down a paean to Black magnificence, a sort of response to Duke Ellington’s pretty “Petite Fleur Africaine” from earlier within the decade.
Whether or not or not Henderson noticed the movie, he would have discovered a lot to love in it. He was fascinated with Japanese cultures and studied texts just like the Bhagavad Gita. He generally drew on Asian motifs in his compositions—utilizing, for instance, staccato pentatonic melodies to think of Japanese or Chinese language music—and developed a harmonic language based mostly on shifting, dense main chords to keep away from commonplace European progressions. As a skeptic of Western tradition he could have been amused on the nuns’ struggles to Christianize a inhabitants that has little curiosity in altering its methods.
Henderson would seemingly have recognized with the nuns too, particularly the sister superior, Clodagh, whose worldly attachments hang-out her and trigger her to doubt her vocation. He was one thing of an ascetic himself. He mentioned that Hermann Hesse’s novel The Glass Bead Recreation, an allegory of mental life centered round a secular monastic order, was “like a bible to me.” The fictional sport, whose guidelines Hesse by no means explains clearly, includes creatively manipulating and exchanging abstracted data from totally different disciplines; Henderson, who referred to the sport in music titles, thought it was much like jazz improvisation and will need to have seen himself within the monks who play it.1 Born in 1937 in Lima, Ohio, to a household of fifteen youngsters, he valued privateness and was recognized to go days and even weeks with out firm. The jazz scholar Joel Geoffrey Harris explains in his biography of the saxophonist that associates referred to him as “the Phantom” for his tendency to withdraw into himself, transfer round stealthily, and be unreachable for lengthy stretches. However his penchant for isolation could have additionally stemmed from much less lofty pursuits; some bandmates mentioned he used heroin, which in all probability accounted for his longer disappearances.
In distinction to Henderson’s private self-effacement, he performed in Technicolor. Nonetheless in his early twenties when Ornette Coleman exploded the formal constraints of jazz improvisation, Henderson was considered one of a variety of virtuosic musicians to emerge within the Nineteen Sixties who have been equally comfy with conventional and avant-garde approaches, although he largely caught to the previous. On the handfuls of albums he recorded for the Blue Notice label (largely as a sideman) between 1963 and 1967, he harnessed the emotional urgency of free jazz in straight-ahead settings. He honked, squawked, and often performed harsh lengthy trills and bursts of repeated notes within the higher registers, which may make him resemble the shredding rock guitarists of a later period. He generally appeared to be enjoying in entrance of the beat and about to go away it behind solely, as if his concepts had such drive that they refused to be sure by tempo. Together with his burred and buzzing tone, he sounded impatient and agitated even when he caught near a music’s underlying type or used commonplace bebop licks.
Henderson conveyed defiance not by throwing away established approach however by mastering it. He knew that expressive freedom requires self-discipline and readability of thought. His musical vocabulary was huge—encompassing the idioms of Lester Younger, Charlie Parker, Lee Konitz, Stan Getz, and John Coltrane, in addition to his personal melodic improvements—and he persistently deployed it in sudden methods, drawing comparisons to Sonny Rollins. Like Rollins, he had a formidable reminiscence and infrequently included quotes in his improvisations. (Though quoting was as soon as a typical approach, it was out of trend amongst Henderson’s iconoclastic era.) His mental powers, musical and in any other case, impressed fellow musicians. The pianist Joanne Brackeen, who toured with him within the Seventies, informed Harris that she had heard him converse competently in seventeen languages. (By different accounts, he was fluent in French and Spanish and competent in German, Portuguese, and Japanese.) The bassist Marlene Rosenberg, who was a part of his all-female rhythm part within the late Nineteen Eighties, reported to Harris that he performed total video games of chess in his head.
Within the Nineteen Sixties Henderson was some of the in-demand tenor gamers amongst cutting-edge jazz artists. When Miles Davis’s and John Coltrane’s sidemen recorded their very own albums, they typically known as on him; the pathbreaking trumpet virtuoso Woody Shaw selected Henderson to play on his earliest studio classes. Priding himself on his capability to interpret different individuals’s compositions, Henderson had fruitful partnerships with a variety of musicians, from the trumpeter and bebop veteran Kenny Dorham (who shared his early curiosity in bossa nova) and the funky onerous bop pianist Horace Silver (Henderson performed on “Song for My Father,” maybe Silver’s best-known recording) to the idiosyncratic pianist Andrew Hill and the spiritually minded harpist and pianist Alice Coltrane (John’s widow).
And but Henderson, who died in 2001, solely broke by way of to the broader public within the Nineteen Nineties, when he launched a string of vastly profitable albums on Verve celebrating the music of Davis, Billy Strayhorn, Antonio Carlos Jobim, and George Gershwin. It’s becoming that these tributes to better-known artists gained him the widest recognition of his profession: the Phantom typically blended in so completely together with his musical environment that his personal individuality and genius went missed.
The paradox of Joe Henderson is that he was without delay a vessel of custom and a Romantic individualist, a consummate skilled in an artwork type that lionized rebels. Jazz musicians should steadiness their want to strike out on their very own with their group’s stringent expectations. Henderson resolved this drawback with enviable ease and naturalness: mentally agile, in charge of his instrument, and with hearth in his stomach, he made stale requirements sound contemporary as few others have. “Heaven is on the bandstand,” he used to say. It was a spot the place the anxieties and rigors of the follow room gave option to unfettered invention.
Energy to the Folks was a transitional work for Henderson, maybe the final assertion of the primary section of his profession. It was the third of twelve albums he launched between 1968 and 1977 on Milestone, a label he joined following the retirement of Blue Notice’s cofounder and president Alfred Lion. Shortly after recording Energy to the Folks, he appeared as a sideman on albums within the new fusion model, together with the pianist Herbie Hancock’s Fats Albert Rotunda (1969) and the trumpeter Freddie Hubbard’s Purple Clay (1970), and he was briefly a member of the favored jazz-rock group Blood, Sweat & Tears. Henderson tried to capitalize on the business success of fusion together with his subsequent studio information for Milestone, although they offered poorly. They’ve additionally lengthy been underrated. Black Is the Shade, A number of (1973), The Parts (1974), and Canyon Girl (1975) showcase his versatility and comprise some curious experiments with synthesizers and overdubbing. By no means recognized to have a foul efficiency, he sounded nearly as good towards a funk backbeat as he did when swinging.
However in Might 1969, Henderson wasn’t pondering a lot about rock or funk. The largest affect on Energy to the Folks was reasonably Miles Davis’s mid-Nineteen Sixties quintet, which handled jazz custom the way in which a canine treats a favourite toy, with a mixture of love and viciousness. Henderson employed two members of that group—Hancock and the bassist Ron Carter, each of whom had not too long ago left Davis—in addition to the drummer Jack DeJohnette, who had simply joined Davis and would play on Bitches Brew a number of months later. Henderson himself was briefly a Davis sideman in 1967, when Davis expanded his group to a sextet. (No recordings of that interval are recognized to exist.) He informed an interviewer that Davis had beforehand employed him in 1960, on Coltrane’s suggestion, however the military drafted him earlier than he may be a part of the band.
Energy to the Folks begins with “Black Narcissus,” considered one of Henderson’s best-known compositions. Its tender chant-like melody, regularly constructing to an emphatic two-note conclusion, recollects the haunting lyricism of the Davis quintet’s saxophonist, Wayne Shorter, who shared Henderson’s curiosity within the East. However Henderson, like Shorter, was an achieved and imaginative composer (a lot of his works have lengthy been requirements), and “Black Narcissus” doesn’t carry a touch of pastiche. The music is emotionally and tonally coherent, a masterwork of enchanting simplicity, and its turnaround includes a harmonic sequence—ascending main chords—that was one thing of a Henderson signature.
Two different stand-out items on the album, “Afro-Centric” and the title music, are extra clearly within the model of the Davis quintet’s mid-Nineteen Sixties albums. The tracks, which additionally characteristic the trumpeter Mike Lawrence, comprise hovering melodies over a quick beat that’s someplace between swung and straight, with occasional punctuations from the horns reinforcing the groove. It’s price noting that the relation between these songs’ titles and their tunes is unclear as nicely: “Power to the People” is a very odd title for a sneering melody that means one thing haughty and even villainous.
Hancock performs a Fender Rhodes on “Black Narcissus,” “Afro-Centric,” and “Power to the People,” and Carter performs electrical bass on the latter two—the primary use of electrical devices on a Henderson-led date. Hancock and Carter had carried out on electrical devices with Davis in 1968, and clearly Henderson heard one thing he favored on Miles within the Sky and Filles de Kilimanjaro, even when he didn’t comply with Davis’s incorporation of rock grooves. You possibly can sense that Henderson and Hancock are nonetheless discovering the brand new timbres supplied by amplification. They work together splendidly on these three songs; the saxophonist’s trills and brief repeated phrases dance across the Rhodes’s effervescent, frothy sound.
The album additionally has 4 acoustic tracks. On the sluggish “Opus One-Point-Five,” Henderson barely raises his quantity above a whisper, a reminder that he may play ballads as sensitively as anybody regardless of his popularity for being loud and aggressive. (Hancock, in the meantime, at one level brushes his nails instantly towards the piano strings, an uncommon gesture on the time.) “Isotope” is a jagged blues beforehand recorded on Henderson’s Blue Notice album Interior Urge (1966); the significantly quicker model right here shows his technical advances and rising curiosity in speedy tempos. (An excellent faster “Isotope” seems on If You’re Not A part of the Answer, You’re A part of the Downside.) On “Lazy Afternoon,” an easygoing medium-tempo music, he sticks near the melody’s three-note motif throughout his solo, taking a break from extra taxing work. For as soon as, the music’s title is completely understandable.
“Foresight and Afterthought,” the ultimate observe, is a freely improvised “suite” accompanied by solely Carter and DeJohnette.2 This was Henderson’s first recording with simply drums and bass, a format that was essential to his late-career resurgence: in 1985, with Carter and the drummer Al Foster, he recorded the two-volume reside album The State of the Tenor on the Village Vanguard, which established him as a jazz elder statesman and will be the definitive assertion of his philosophy of circumscribed freedom.3
What’s exceptional about “Foresight and Afterthought” is that Henderson sounds primarily the identical enjoying with no construction and following chord adjustments. As on his fusion information, he squeals and performs overtones greater than common, however in any other case the melodic materials is virtually indistinguishable. But his enjoying fits the open-ended setting completely. One other paradox of Henderson is that he may adapt to any scenario with out sacrificing his individuality. He by no means fairly made it sound straightforward—he was too clever and dexterous—however he made it sound rather a lot simpler than it was.
