Joe Henderson: Energy to the Individuals Album Assessment

Jazz, just like the world it mirrored, was in flux in 1969. That yr, Miles Davis launched In a Silent Approach, an album whose low-key ambiance belied its standing as a herald of main upheaval, main the music right into a decade of electrical devices, studio-driven experiments, and rhythms that drew as a lot from funk and R&B as swing. But loads of folks have been nonetheless taking part in adjustments within the old school means: A musician may dedicate their total life to mastering the artwork, and simply because Miles was all of the sudden doing tape manipulation and listening to Sly and the Household Stone didn’t imply everybody else was following go well with. And free jazz, a decade or so previous at that time, was nonetheless a radical power, its embellishments and deconstructions of melody offering alternate routes ahead from custom, ones that didn’t essentially require plugging in in any respect.

Wanting again, it’s tempting to see these varied types—fusion, straight-ahead, avant-garde—as totally distinct and walled off, and it’s true that sure gamers might be dogmatic of their adherence to 1 idiom and rejection of the others. The case of tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson provides good motive to think about them extra holistically. An old-school virtuoso who taught himself to play by transcribing and memorizing solos by bebop titans like Charlie Parker and Lester Younger, he additionally brushed the sides of free jazz as a sideman with Andrew Hill, and inspired his personal supporting gamers to experiment with electronics even on data that steered away from full-on fusion. His 1969 album Energy to the Individuals, out there on vinyl for the primary time in many years through an outstanding new reissue from Craft Recordings and Jazz Dispensary, is a necessary doc of this transitional second, due partly to its creator’s disregard for inflexible stylistic affiliation. If you wish to hear, in a single album, how jazz—all of it—sounded simply earlier than the flip of the ’70s, you would do worse than this one.

Henderson surrounded himself with a couple of of the world’s finest gamers for Energy to the Individuals. Two, keyboardist Herbie Hancock and bassist Ron Carter, have been veterans of Davis’ band, and one, drummer Jack DeJohnette, was simply becoming a member of up with Miles at across the identical time; Henderson additionally recruited up-and-coming trumpeter Mike Lawrence on two of the seven tracks. Throughout the album, Hancock switches between acoustic piano and Fender Rhodes, and Carter between upright and electrical bass, selections that mirror the album’s fluid stylistic method. Carter’s alternative of bass, specifically, is a tough indicator of the place a given observe will fall on the spectrum. On upright, his major instrument, he tends towards conventional strolling traces, outlining the chords with a gentle pulse that the remainder of the gamers are free to improvise round. On electrical, he dances extra freely across the outskirts of the pocket, jabbing out and in searching for new rhythmic potentialities, nudging the music away from the jazz’s well-worn solo-and-accompaniment format and towards extra open-ended group improvisation.