 |
| Joe Henderson (photo credit unknown) |
Today’s song-of-the-day features the hard bop master of the tenor
saxophone, Joe Henderson, on his fourth recording as a leader, the influential Inner
Urge on Blue Note from 1966. The album is a vibrant, almost urgent
album that finds Henderson teamed with members of the then John Coltrane’s
quartet, McCoy Tyner on piano and Elvin Jones on drums. The recording band was
completed with a member of Sonny Rollins’ band, bassist Bob Cranshaw. It’s hard
to imagine a more talented, albeit combustible and perhaps even risky group
that producer Alfred Lion could have matched to play with Henderson for this
record, but he hit gold with this combination. The album included three
Henderson originals the title cut “Inner Urge,” “Isotope” purportedly a nod to
pianist Thelonious Monk’s, and “El Barrio,” which shows Henderson’s proclivity toward
Latin music and its influences. The two remaining cuts include Duke Pearson’s “You
Know I Care” and Cole Porter’s “Night and Day.”
This album was my portal into the music of Joe Henderson,
and it made a lasting impression. A fieriest album, Henderson’s unleashing a
muscular, urbanized sound to his saxophone, a sound that spoke to how this mid-westerner
was relating to the frenetic life he found in NYC. The quartet left us with adventure
and sensitivity on a sterling performance on the closing piece “Night and Day”
The band was telepathic throughout, Tyner and Jones creating a turbulent backdrop
upon which Henderson could improvise. Jones drum work was particularly on top of his game, and Cranshaw deftly maintaining stability
and grounding the music like the roots of an oak.
While the entire album was a treat, the title cut, “Inner
Urge” was Henderson’s salvo into the era of hard bop that was to dominate the jazz
scene.