Back in the Archives: Joe Henderson and Cannonball Adderley

A look at a new and a not-so-new unearthing from the jazz archives

For this installment’s essay, I return to a frequent topic here: the archival recording. I discuss two jazz releases that are worth hearing (if you haven’t already) but also wrestle a bit with my enthusiasm for the ongoing urge to dip into the vaults and wonder if it perhaps is at the expense of contemporary artists and new music. What do you think? Let me know by dropping a comment below.

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Back in the Archives: Joe Henderson and Cannonball Adderley
By: Robert C. Gilbert

I sat out last Record Store Day. I hadn’t intended to but I was out late the night before and the thought of rising early to wait in line on the off chance that what I was interested in was in stock just didn’t seem to be worth the trouble or the bother. Reports that the sneak preview of Frank Tiberi’s tapes of John Coltrane performing live confirmed the fear that the sound was as challenging as thought helped to cool my ardour despite the undeniable historical importance of hearing him stretch out with McCoy Tyner on ‘Giant Steps.’

For the past few years, I have checked out at least a few of the newly unearthed recordings of live jazz from the sixties and seventies that have come out on Record Store Day. Last year, I even wrote about a few of them (read it here). This year, I passed on doing so, mostly because I was neck deep in a passion project (read that here) and didn’t want to divert my attention from it. But, there was one recording that fascinated me after the lines for Record Store Day disappeared into the void.

Joe Henderson may well be the tenor player who most explicitly carried on the banner of Sonny Rollins. It’s a thought that came to me after listening to Rollins in the days after his passing. It became stronger as I thought of some of Henderson’s recordings as a leader and as a sideman from 1963 and 1964 on Blue Note, his striking and stylistically broad introduction on the scene.

On the title track of Horace Silver's Song for My Father, Henderson’s preacher-like volleys sound a lot like Rollins’ onrush of ideas. His distorted growls and brogue-inflected phrases on his solo on Kenny Dorham’s ‘Trompeta Toccata’ recall Rollins’ testing of the limits on his bracing summit meeting with Coleman Hawkins on RCA from 1963.

Henderson’s sound could never be mistaken for Rollins’. It was thinner, perhaps reedy is a good word here, and it could float. But like Rollins, he had an inexhaustible stamina, spinning out chorus after chorus after chorus without flagging in intensity or in ideas.

Here, I think first of his long solo—well, at four minutes, long by Blue Note’s standards of the time—on Dorham’s ‘Una Mas (One More Time)’ and on Forces of Nature, the 2024 release of a tape from 1966 at Slugs’ Saloon on which he improvises on his ‘Inner Urge’ as well as on the impromptu ‘Taking Off’ for more than 10 minutes. And then I think of a recording from twelve years later that arrived on Record Store Day—the one that struck me as a must-listen and a must-buy even as I skipped the annual spring ritual.

Consonance: Live at the Jazz Showcase captures Henderson in February 1978 at the Jazz Showcase in Chicago. It was released on Resonance Records and co-produced by the prolific Zev Feldman—no one has done more to bring recordings like this to light in recent years—with John Koenig, who helmed Contemporary Records after the passing of his father Les. The tape came from the archives of club founder Joe Segal who, when allowed to by the musicians appearing at the club, taped the proceedings on the bandstand from the Jazz Showcase’s soundboard.

What makes the recording feel momentous even before hearing a note is noticing that it consists of nine performances, five of them over 20 minutes. Both CDs contain 80 minutes of music. Not one second of space is left standing.

The most recognizable musician supporting Henderson is pianist Joanne Brackeen with bassist Steve Rodby and drummer Danny Spencer both new to me.

By 1978, the tenor saxophonist had ended his run on Milestone Records, producing a series of recordings that I admittedly have only tentatively explored but from what I have listened, they document how Henderson held tight against the decade’s electric explosion while also exploring it. Consonance bears nothing of this flirtation. It is pure, straight-ahead, long-form jazz.

It was created in the moment and then to be remembered only in the way that such music is often recalled—in the mind, image and sound reconstructed to screen in the head with the scene heightening how it felt rather than how it actually looked and sounded.

Live jazz, more than any other type of music except classical, and when played in a club, has this intended ephemeralness. It exists at a certain moment sandwiched between a lifetime of moments before and a lifetime of moments after. Its’ importance should not be anything more than that. When one of these moments is preserved and packaged, it ascribes a posterity that was never intended.

I suspect I am overthinking things here but I do wonder sometimes if a certain novelty exaggerates the interest in these recordings. In other words, does the desire to hear something that was never meant to be heard more than once result in collecting recordings like these that get a cursory listen or two and then sit in a progressively growing pile attracting dust.

It is undoubtedly fun to travel back in time, to be a fly on a wall to bear witness to something that one hadn’t been around for. I’ve written about why this is. But again, once one has transcended time and space, I’m not always sure it warrants doing so again and again. I think that’s why I sometimes feel conflicted about archive recordings (even as they still fascinate me) like Consonance despite its super-strong lure and worry that they arrive at the expense of jazz that is being made today, the quantity of which is impossible to absorb in any meaningful way.

These ponderings don’t negate that Consonance lives up to its expectation. This is a recording to spend time with. To get lost with and into. It opens with John Coltrane’s ‘Mr. P.C.,’ his salute to Paul Chambers. By the fifth minute, Henderson is fully into a trance, wringing possibility after possibility out of the changes.

The speed with which these ideas out of his horn is breathtakingly fast. He continually adds distortion and takes his sound to the outer edges of its range. There’s a moment about 10 minutes in where Rodby and Spencer coast along—Brackeen long dropped out by then—before Henderson turns it back on for an additional two minutes. Brackeen takes over to rain down a flurry of notes and cascades of dark chords. The effect is often discordant and deeply interior, an inner dialogue that flirts with fury—check out the staccato chords at the 16-minute mark—and approaches the avant-garde without surrendering to it. Rodby and Spencer follow with solo statements that break the tension before Henderson returns for a last statement that includes a long, winnowing volley.

This kind of extreme extrapolation is tricky. Retaining interest is of paramount importance, both for the musicians involved as well as for the listener who is listening to the music without seeing it unfold. There has to be a point to these herculean exercises and on Consonance, it seems to be to bear witness to Henderson and Brackeen’s endurance, and Rodby and Spencer’s ability to keep up. There can’t be any coasting or goofing off or endless repetition. Just intense, hypnotic excavation.

On ‘Inner Urge,’ Henderson almost tempts fate but again, the feeling is absorption in his puzzling through the structure, finding new ways to deconstruct and move through it. Brackeen’s statement is a gradual building of momentum as is Henderson’s on ‘Invitation,’ that arresting standard by Bronisław Kaper.

‘Recorda Me,’ one of the high points from Henderson’s masterful debut as a leader, Page One, is taken as an urgent calypso and it’s here with his burbling solo that the comparison with Sonny Rollins becomes apt. Brackeen’s improvision invites its own comparison with McCoy Tyner and is maniacally propulsive as is Rodby’s statement. Out of it comes a marvellous coda which Henderson builds out of a jaunty riff.

The album’s two ballads: ‘’Round Midnight’ and ‘Good Morning Heartache,’ are enlivening examples of the discursive Henderson working around the edges. Each ends with a lengthy cadenza; sadly, the tape runs out during the one for ‘’Round Midnight.’

‘Softly As In a Morning Sunrise,’ which Henderson memorably recorded with Larry Young on Unity and retains the theme statement against brushes approach and its growing intensity during the solos, is a final extended adventure.

Both discs ends with a set closer; the first has Charlie Parker’s ‘Relaxin’ at Camarillo’ and the second has Henderson’s Monkian ‘Isotope.’ Henderson charges through them. Consonance stands as 160 minutes of potent jazz.

Equally vibrant is a set by Cannonball Adderley from 1972 that was released for Record Store Day in April 2024 on Resonance. Poppin’ in Paris: Live at L’Olympia 1972 comes from a tape made for France’s public broadcaster at the time, ORTF, of a concert from October 25, 1972.

Adderley had long codified his conception of a jazz-rock fusion by this time. It’s worth noting that the alto saxophonist was among the earliest and one of the most adventurous jazz musicians to incorporate straight-time rhythms into the music, culminating on such mind-benders written by long-time pianist Joe Zawinul like ‘74 Miles Away’ and ‘Rumpelstiltskin.’

Zawinul was with Adderley for almost a decade, leaving in 1970 and soon forming Weather Report. In his place came George Duke to join Nat Adderley, Walter Booker and Roy McCurdy.

What makes Poppin’ in Paris remarkable—far more so than the more pedestrian Boppin' in Bordeaux from 1969, also released by Resonance for 2024's Record Store Day—are long performances of Duke’s ‘The Black Messiah’ and Zawinul’s ‘Doctor Honoris Causa’ that each feature extended, spacy improvisations by Duke on both acoustic and electric piano. Whereas Henderson’s Consonance is about length for endurance, length here is used to bliss out on the resonant, ringing sound Duke gets out of his keyboard.

A fiery take on ‘Autumn Leaves,’ a standard that Adderley took as his own after 1958’s Somethin’ Else with Miles Davis, reminds of the edgier sound Adderley’s music took as the sixties turned into the seventies.

Compact revisits of Zawinul’s ‘Walk Tall’ and ‘Mercy, Mercy, Mercy’ fill in the portrait of Adderley as adept populist. I’m glad this recording is now available for all to enjoy and discover.