Like just about every major tenor saxophonist of his generation, Henderson was influenced by Coltrane, but Henderson absorbed that influence and transformed it into a mark of his own originality. He took on essential elements of Coltrane’s sound—the long low-note honks and growls and high-pitched screeches and wails—and he was inspired by Coltrane’s vehemence, how his energies from deep within seemed to burst out with reckless, self-revealing fervor. Yet where Coltrane is a natural complexifier, piling chords on chords and notes on notes and creating colossal intricacies even within jaunty phrases, Henderson is a simplifier, planing the harmonic field in order to dash ahead all the more ebulliently. Coltrane builds vertically, layering and intertwining the music into elaborately interlocking spirals; Henderson hurls out details and dashes through them, creating sonic landscapes for his relentless improvisational travels.
Notably, the first track on the new album, “Mr. P.C.,” is a Coltrane composition, an assertive romp that, a minute and a half in, already conjures a sense of having gone far fast. With buzzing and droning, wild high rasps and moans, fragmented and juddering phrases, roars and screams and split notes, beelike buzzing and hectic squalling, Henderson offers the sound-world of the avant-garde underpinned by songful riffs and a foot-stomping beat. At times, as in his solo on his own composition “Inner Urge,” these sound-shredding elements reach strident extremes untempered by thee rhythmic accompaniments of his bandmates—the pianist Joanne Brackeen, the bassist Steve Rodby, and the drummer Danny Spencer—who are keenly responsive partners in the high-spirited clamor.
Henderson also offers one of the most beautiful and unusual renditions of the classic modernist ballad “ ’Round Midnight” that I’ve ever heard. It starts with his unaccompanied solo saxophone; then, joined by the rest of the quartet, he bumps the tempo up to a bouncy stride and offers solos with thrilling velocity and intensity to match. He ends another ballad, “Good Morning Heartache,” with another free and unaccompanied cadenza that dives into the wild zone, buzzing and yodeling. I’ve listened to many of Henderson’s albums from early in his career through the seventies, and long beyond. The new one is what I’d play for a Martian who wanted to know the power and the freedom of Henderson’s art.
Cecil Taylor Unit, “Fragments: The Complete 1969 Salle Pleyel Concerts”
Elemental Music
Taylor, of course, is one of the prime creators of so-called free jazz, a genre largely defined by atonality, collective improvisation, ferocious intensity, and the absence of a foot-tapping beat. But the idiom’s paradoxes—and its deep roots in classic jazz—are reflected in the title of his composition “Fragments of a Dedication to Duke Ellington,” which fills the entirety of this two-disk album. The recording, from Paris on November 3, 1969, is by a quartet featuring two of Taylor’s longtime collaborators, the drummer Andrew Cyrille (who’s still active and recording) and the alto saxophonist Jimmy Lyons, along with Sam Rivers—one of the prime free-jazz recording artists in his own right—on tenor and soprano saxes and flute. The group offers two separate performances of the same composition—one, from the afternoon set, and the other, from the evening. This is the first official release of the recordings, and hearing them is an ecstatic experience.
I’ve long thought of the great jazz musicians synesthetically, in terms of their implicit connections to other art forms. Taylor’s music has always struck me as bound with dance, for reasons that also help explain his deep connection to Ellington, beyond the similarities of their percussive piano styles and their efforts to create original group sounds. For much of Ellington’s career, his band was a dance band, playing in night clubs and at social gatherings which weren’t principally concerts, and his compositions and arrangements were designed to set people in motion. Taylor didn’t make his career playing for dancers (though he did, in 1990, accompany a choreographed dance performance), yet his music does much the same thing, in radically different ways that take a bit of teasing out. Taylor’s way of playing the piano evokes dance in its gestures, and he provokes the same effect from the entire group. At the keyboard, he doesn’t swing; he lurches and glides, leaps and thrusts and spins and jitters, unleashing torrents of notes at astounding speed, fragmenting his rhythms to their vanishing point. His free music manages to be intensely rhythmic nonethelesss, in a way that’s radically different from the familiar beats of foot-tapping jazz. His performances channel metabolic undulations, akin to breathing with the whole body, and they are liable to get even listeners in their seats, at home, moving along. By the end, a listener should feel not only exhilarated but also exhausted.
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