Mode for Joe

Was the tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson thinking of the film Black Narcissus (1947) when he wrote a song of that title? It’s an unlikely connection. The movie, directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger and based on a novel by Rumer Godden, follows a group of English nuns who struggle with isolation and sexual jealousy at a Himalayan convent. Henderson’s composition—a highlight of his 1969 album Power to the People, which was reissued this year by Jazz Dispensary—is a delicate waltz in a minor key, evoking enigmatic beauty and repose. Like much of Powell and Pressburger’s work, Black Narcissus is an expressionist fantasy full of bright colors and operatic emotions, while Henderson’s “Black Narcissus” is about as understated as a jazz composition can get.

I haven’t found evidence that Henderson, one of the leading musicians of the post-bebop generation, ever saw the film. He told an interviewer that he came up with the name of the song first and wrote the melody afterward, but it’s unclear what he hoped the title would convey. The most straightforward explanation is that he liked the metaphorical implications of a dark-colored flower. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Henderson’s album titles reflected growing interest in the Black Power movement: after Power to the People, he released If You’re Not Part of the Solution, You’re Part of the Problem (1970), In Pursuit of Blackness (1971), and Black Is the Color (1972). Perhaps he wanted to write a paean to Black beauty, a kind of response to Duke Ellington’s lovely “Petite Fleur Africaine” from earlier in the decade.

Whether or not Henderson saw the film, he would have found much to like in it. He was fascinated with Eastern cultures and studied texts like the Bhagavad Gita. He sometimes drew on Asian motifs in his compositions—using, for example, staccato pentatonic melodies to call to mind Japanese or Chinese music—and developed a harmonic language based on shifting, dense major chords to avoid standard European progressions. As a skeptic of Western culture he may have been amused at the nuns’ struggles to Christianize a population that has little interest in changing its ways.

Henderson would likely have identified with the nuns too, especially the sister superior, Clodagh, whose worldly attachments haunt her and cause her to doubt her vocation. He was something of an ascetic himself. He said that Hermann Hesse’s novel The Glass Bead Game, an allegory of intellectual life centered around a secular monastic order, was “like a bible to me.” The fictional game, whose rules Hesse never explains clearly, involves creatively manipulating and exchanging abstracted knowledge from different disciplines; Henderson, who referred to the game in song titles, thought it was similar to jazz improvisation and must have seen himself in the monks who play it.¹ Born in 1937 in Lima, Ohio, to a family of fifteen children, he valued privacy and was known to go days or even weeks without company. The jazz scholar Joel Geoffrey Harris explains in his biography of the saxophonist that friends referred to him as “the Phantom” for his tendency to withdraw into himself, move around stealthily, and be unreachable for long stretches. But his penchant for isolation may have also stemmed from less lofty interests; some bandmates said he used heroin, which probably accounted for his longer disappearances.

In contrast to Henderson’s personal self-effacement, he played in Technicolor. Still in his early twenties when Ornette Coleman exploded the formal constraints of jazz improvisation, Henderson was one of a number of virtuosic musicians to emerge in the 1960s who were equally comfortable with traditional and avant-garde approaches, though he mostly stuck to the former. On the dozens of albums he recorded for the Blue Note label (mostly as a sideman) between 1963 and 1967, he harnessed the emotional urgency of free jazz in straight-ahead settings. He honked, squawked, and frequently played harsh long trills and bursts of repeated notes in the upper registers, which could make him resemble the shredding rock guitarists of a later era. He sometimes seemed to be playing in front of the beat and about to leave it behind entirely, as if his ideas had such force that they refused to be bound by tempo. With his burred and buzzing tone, he sounded impatient and agitated even when he stuck close to a song’s underlying form or used standard bebop licks.

Henderson conveyed defiance not by throwing away established technique but by mastering it. He knew that expressive freedom requires discipline and clarity of thought. His musical vocabulary was enormous—encompassing the idioms of Lester Young, Charlie Parker, Lee Konitz, Stan Getz, and John Coltrane, as well as his own melodic innovations—and he consistently deployed it in unexpected ways, drawing comparisons to Sonny Rollins. Like Rollins, he had a formidable memory and occasionally included quotes in his improvisations. (Although quoting was once a common technique, it was out of fashion among Henderson’s iconoclastic generation.) His intellectual powers, musical and otherwise, impressed fellow musicians. The pianist Joanne Brackeen, who toured with him in the 1970s, told Harris that she had heard him speak competently in seventeen languages. (By other accounts, he was fluent in French and Spanish and competent in German, Portuguese, and Japanese.) The bassist Marlene Rosenberg, who was part of his all-female rhythm section in the late 1980s, reported to Harris that he played entire games of chess in his head.

In the 1960s Henderson was one of the most in-demand tenor players among cutting-edge jazz artists. When Miles Davis’s and John Coltrane’s sidemen recorded their own albums, they often called on him; the pathbreaking trumpet virtuoso Woody Shaw chose Henderson to play on his earliest studio sessions. Priding himself on his ability to interpret other people’s compositions, Henderson had fruitful partnerships with a wide range of musicians, from the trumpeter and bebop veteran Kenny Dorham (who shared his early interest in bossa nova) and the funky hard bop pianist Horace Silver (Henderson played on “Song for My Father,” perhaps Silver’s best-known recording) to the idiosyncratic pianist Andrew Hill and the spiritually minded harpist and pianist Alice Coltrane (John’s widow).

And yet Henderson, who died in 2001, only broke through to the broader public in the 1990s, when he released a string of hugely successful albums on Verve celebrating the music of Davis, Billy Strayhorn, Antonio Carlos Jobim, and George Gershwin. It’s fitting that these tributes to better-known artists gained him the widest recognition of his career: the Phantom often blended in so perfectly with his musical surroundings that his own individuality and genius went overlooked.

The paradox of Joe Henderson is that he was at once a vessel of tradition and a Romantic individualist, a consummate professional in an art form that lionized rebels. Jazz musicians have to balance their desire to strike out on their own with their community’s stringent expectations. Henderson resolved this problem with enviable ease and naturalness: mentally agile, in command of his instrument, and with fire in his belly, he made stale standards sound fresh as few others have. “Heaven is on the bandstand,” he used to say. It was a place where the anxieties and rigors of the practice room gave way to unfettered invention.

Power to the People was a transitional work for Henderson, perhaps the last statement of the first phase of his career. It was the third of twelve albums he released between 1968 and 1977 on Milestone, a label he joined following the retirement of Blue Note’s cofounder and president Alfred Lion. Shortly after recording Power to the People, he appeared as a sideman on albums in the new fusion style, including the pianist Herbie Hancock’s Fat Albert Rotunda (1969) and the trumpeter Freddie Hubbard’s Red Clay (1970), and he was briefly a member of the popular jazz-rock group Blood, Sweat & Tears. Henderson attempted to capitalize on the commercial success of fusion with his subsequent studio records for Milestone, though they sold poorly. They’ve also long been underrated. Black Is the Color, Multiple (1973), The Elements (1974), and Canyon Lady (1975) showcase his versatility and contain some curious experiments with synthesizers and overdubbing. Never known to have a bad performance, he sounded as good against a funk backbeat as he did when swinging.

But in May 1969, Henderson wasn’t thinking much about rock or funk. The biggest influence on Power to the People was rather Miles Davis’s mid-1960s quintet, which treated jazz tradition the way a dog treats a favorite toy, with a mix of love and viciousness. Henderson hired two members of that group—Hancock and the bassist Ron Carter, both of whom had recently left Davis—as well as the drummer Jack DeJohnette, who had just joined Davis and would play on Bitches Brew a few months later. Henderson himself was briefly a Davis sideman in 1967, when Davis expanded his group to a sextet. (No recordings of that period are known to exist.) He told an interviewer that Davis had previously hired him in 1960, on Coltrane’s recommendation, but the army drafted him before he could join the band.

Power to the People begins with “Black Narcissus,” one of Henderson’s best-known compositions. Its soft chant-like melody, gradually building to an emphatic two-note conclusion, recalls the haunting lyricism of the Davis quintet’s saxophonist, Wayne Shorter, who shared Henderson’s interest in the East. But Henderson, like Shorter, was an accomplished and imaginative composer (many of his works have long been standards), and “Black Narcissus” doesn’t carry a hint of pastiche. The song is emotionally and tonally coherent, a masterwork of enchanting simplicity, and its turnaround features a harmonic sequence—ascending major chords—that was something of a Henderson signature.

Two other stand-out pieces on the album, “Afro-Centric” and the title song, are more clearly in the style of the Davis quintet’s mid-1960s albums. The tracks, which also feature the trumpeter Mike Lawrence, contain soaring melodies over a fast beat that’s somewhere between swung and straight, with occasional punctuations from the horns reinforcing the groove. It’s worth noting that the relation between these songs’ titles and their tunes is unclear as well: “Power to the People” is a particularly odd name for a sneering melody that suggests something haughty and even villainous.

Hancock plays a Fender Rhodes on “Black Narcissus,” “Afro-Centric,” and “Power to the People,” and Carter plays electric bass on the latter two—the first use of electric instruments on a Henderson-led date. Hancock and Carter had performed on electric instruments with Davis in 1968, and clearly Henderson heard something he liked on Miles in the Sky and Filles de Kilimanjaro, even if he didn’t follow Davis’s incorporation of rock grooves. You can sense that Henderson and Hancock are still discovering the new timbres offered by amplification. They interact wonderfully on these three songs; the saxophonist’s trills and short repeated phrases dance around the Rhodes’s bubbling, frothy sound.

The album also has four acoustic tracks. On the slow “Opus One-Point-Five,” Henderson barely raises his volume above a whisper, a reminder that he could play ballads as sensitively as anyone despite his reputation for being loud and aggressive. (Hancock, meanwhile, at one point brushes his nails directly against the piano strings, an unusual gesture at the time.) “Isotope” is a jagged blues previously recorded on Henderson’s Blue Note album Inner Urge (1966); the considerably faster version here displays his technical advances and growing interest in speedy tempos. (An even quicker “Isotope” appears on If You’re Not Part of the Solution, You’re Part of the Problem.) On “Lazy Afternoon,” an easygoing medium-tempo song, he sticks close to the melody’s three-note motif during his solo, taking a break from more taxing work. For once, the song’s title is perfectly comprehensible.

“Foresight and Afterthought,” the final track, is a freely improvised “suite” accompanied by only Carter and DeJohnette.² This was Henderson’s first recording with just drums and bass, a format that was crucial to his late-career resurgence: in 1985, with Carter and the drummer Al Foster, he recorded the two-volume live album The State of the Tenor at the Village Vanguard, which established him as a jazz elder statesman and may be the definitive statement of his philosophy of circumscribed freedom.³

What’s remarkable about “Foresight and Afterthought” is that Henderson sounds essentially the same playing without a structure and following chord changes. As on his fusion records, he squeals and plays overtones more than usual, but otherwise the melodic material is practically indistinguishable. Yet his playing suits the open-ended setting perfectly. Another paradox of Henderson is that he could adapt to any situation without sacrificing his individuality. He never quite made it sound easy—he was too intelligent and dexterous—but he made it sound a lot easier than it was.