This week’s Joe Henderson Festival kicks off with saxophonist Ranzel Merritt’s Hotplate performance (4/18) dedicated to Joe’s 1966 Blue Note session Inner Urge, his fourth as a leader. The album features a masterful quartet including pianist McCoy Tyner, bassist Bob Cranshaw, and drummer Elvin Jones, and introduced a pair of compositions that are now considered jazz standards, “Isotope” and the title piece. To get a better feel for this classic album, here are critic and journalist Nat Hentoff’s original liner notes:
ONE of the marks of Joe Henderson's rapidly rising stature is that he cannot be neatly categorized. On the one hand, he is among the young explorers of new ways of expanding the jazz language. On the other, he can be equally convincing as a blue groover (as in Freddie Roach's Brown Sugar, BLUE NOTE 4168) and as a masterful individualizer of ballads in the vintage, big-toned jazz tenor tradition. This album further illustrates Henderson's scope and depth.
The title song, “Inner Urge,” was written at a time when, as Henderson explains, "I was consumed by an inner urgency which could only be satisfied through this tune. During that period, I was coping with the anger and frustration that can come of trying to find your way in the maze of New York and of trying to adjust to the pace you have to set in hacking your way in that city in order to just exist. Now I'm calmer, but this tune represents a particular stage in my life." Structured in a 16-8-16 pattern, the song is basically sequential in form. The outer 16-bar segments move step-wise and the channel moves in minor thirds.
In this number, as in the rest of the album, Henderson receives exemplary support from Bob Cranshaw and the long-term team of Elvin Jones and McCoy Tyner from the John Coltrane unit. "McCoy," Henderson notes, "plays behind you as if he were your shadow. He seems to have a seventh sense of what you're going to do. With him there I can relax. I don't have to worry about playing something that might not fit in with what he's doing. Elvin, of course, provides the same kind of support. Along with his musical intuitiveness, Elvin always lays it in the right spot at the right time. And that makes me play better." Of Bob Cranshaw, Henderson says "He's got that big, fat, juicy sound. He generates such a good feeling that I can't help but be affected by it."
“Isotope,” another Henderson original, is described by the composer "as a compliment to Thelonious Monk, a tribute particularly to the humor in his music." Basically a 12-bar blues, the song enters rather new territory in this context in the 11th and 12th measures. There it descends in a series of minor thirds-each getting two beats. The sequence goes from (7 to A7 to g flat 7 to e flat 7. The melody has a Monkish angularity and wryness; but although a tribute, the piece and the playing are at the same time very much Henderson's own. Among the qualities that make his work consistently arresting are the freshness of his ideas; the penetrating strength of his tone; the sweep of his beat; and the sense of total emotional commitment in his playing. There is also his firm command of structure, as "Isotope" underlines. He really builds rather than strings together a series of fragmentary phrases. And to use a word that comes to my mind because of Henderson's current association with Horace Silver, Joe "cooks." And he cooks all the time-in every musical situation.
“EI Barrio” represents Henderson's attachment to the Spanish musical ethos-an attachment which began when he was a boy in Lima, Ohio. "I lived," he recalls, "in a kind of international neighborhood, and it was the Spanish influence that particularly hit me. My affection for it just grew, stimulated by a couple of years of studying the language in school and by getting to have a number of Spanish friends." “EI Barrio” is meant to evoke not only the New York Puerto Rican neighborhood of that title, but any Spanish-speaking neighborhood.
The performance is impromptu. "I just gave the other musicians two chords," Henderson says. "B major and C major 7. I asked them to play something on top of that with a Spanish feeling. And I improvised the melody. It worked so well that we did this in just one take. Incidentally, if you listen hard, you may find some Greek overtones as well."
What especially moves me in “EI Barrio” is both Henderson's melodic freedom and the "cry" at the heart of his playing. It is a "cry" rooted in the blues but also understanding of the root passion at the core of Spanish musical feeling. There are touches of flamenco story-telling as well as of blues preaching, and the fusion is accomplished without the least self-consciousness. For me this album as a whole is Henderson's best so far, and “EI Barrio” in particular is a track that should endure for a long, long time because it is essentially timeless. No matter what changes occur in jazz, this quality of basic, song-like ardor has to remain one of the bedrock criteria of expressive eloquence.
Duke Pearson's “You Know I Care” is a graceful, tender ballad on which Henderson reveals, as noted, that his range of skills extends to an ability to be directly lyrical. Listen too to the intricate subtlety and taste of Elvin Jones' brushwork, the resonant suppleness of Bob Cranshaw's line and the characteristic bell-like lucidity of McCoy Tyner's background chording and solo.
Joe Henderson altered both the melody and the chord changes of “Night and Day,” and that act provided him with the challenge which enabled him to revivify this standard. In his playing here and on the other tracks, Henderson has a further insignia of unmistakable musical substance. He plays with authority. There is no groping for effects or coasting on technical agility. This is clearly a man who knows how to discipline passion and who does not substitute rhetorical flourishes for solid musical thought. He has the foundation-the knowledge of the whole of the jazz tradition and the technical equipment to execute everything he hears. With that base, he forges a distinctly personal and irrepressibly honest conception.
Eventually, Joe Henderson would like to lead his own unit. And it's certain that when he does, his sets will have the same diversity of' mood and material as his albums have had. "You see," Joe points out, "I would never want to play in only one bag. When you do, eventually you get bored. And if you get bored, the listener will. And basically, it doesn't make sense to play all funk or all hip. Music covers a much wider range than just one approach. I like to think of myself as having a feeling for all of music's possibilities."
It is because of Joe Henderson's openness to change, challenge and his own inner breadth of emotions that he has already acquired so impressive a reputation. This album will add more to that reputation, and there is no question that his will be a major jazz career. — Nat Hentoff
Ranzel Merritt and his band play music from Joe Henderson’s Inner Urge as part of this year’s Joe Henderson Festival in the Joe Henderson Lab, 4/18. Tickets and more information are available here.