BLP 4189

Joe Henderson - Inner Urge

Released - March 1966

Recording and Session Information

Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, November 30, 1964
Joe Henderson, tenor sax; McCoy Tyner, piano; Bob Cranshaw, bass; Elvin Jones, drums.

1481 tk.2 Inner Urge
1482 tk.10 You Know I Care
1483 tk.15 Isotope
1484 tk.21 Night And Day
1485 tk.23 El Barrio

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
Inner Urge	Joe Henderson	November 30 1964
Isotope	Joe Henderson	November 30 1964
Side Two
El Barrio	Joe Henderson	November 30 1964
You Know I Care	Duke Pearson	November 30 1964
Night and Day	Cole Porter	November 30 1964

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 blues groover (as in Freddie Roach’s Brown Sugar, BLUE NOTE 4168 BLP4168) 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 lust 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 hove 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 o series of minor thirds — each getting two beats. The sequence goes from C7 to A7 to g flat 7 to e flot 7. The melody has a Monkish angularity and wryness; but although a tribute, the piece and the playing are at the some 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.

El 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.” El 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 El 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 El 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 far 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

RVG CD Reissue Liner Notes

A NEW LOOK AT INNER URGE

Joe Henderson had recorded an astounding amount of important music on Blue Note in the 20 months that separated Inner Urge from his label debut on Kenny Dorham’s Una Mas. There had been a total of five quintet albums with trumpeter Dorham, who had served as Henderson’s mentor when the saxophonist arrived in New York after completing his military service, as well as an array of sideman appearances that demonstrated the new tenor star’s uncommon consistency and versatility. Henderson never failed to bring inspiration and sensitivity to the music at hand, whether the mood was the after-hours mellowness of Grant Green’s Idle Moments or the dark, exploratory edge of Andrew Hill’s Black Fire and Point of Departure. As far as reaching beyond the hard-core jazz audience and connecting with the general public went, Henderson’s exclamatory solos were central to two of the most commercially successful performances in the label’s history, Lee Morgan’s “The Sidewinder” and Horace Silver’s “Song for My Father.”

For all that, Inner Urge was arguably the defining moment in Henderson’s early career, not to mention the recording that ended any remaining debate regarding his prominence as a tenor stylist. While the album was the fourth to appear under Henderson’s name, it was his first as a leader without Dorham, and only the second of all his Blue Note appearances to feature a tenor/piano/bass/drums quartet. The absence of a second horn in favor of the format then employed by two of the music’s leading visionaries, John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk, was an implicit acknowledgement that Henderson was ready to stand alone in the context favored by two of the very giants who had provided him with inspiration.

Having McCoy Tyner and Elvin Jones from the Coltrane Quartet as part of the Inner Urge rhythm section only reinforced the comparison, yet the music avoids sounding like recycled Coltrane. As was their habit in joint appearances on Blue Note with Wayne Shorter and others (including Henderson’s previous session In ‘n’ Out and the Grant Green Solid album where Henderson is also featured), Tyner and Jones took the opportunity to show their own range by playing music with different harmonic and rhythmic contours than they encountered in Coltrane’s band. Tyner remained fleet and powerful while finding different colors in the music, and Jones tailored his polyrhythmic swirls to new moods as well. Comparisons can obviously be drawn, as will be clear by hearing “El Barrio” next to Coltrane’s “Ole,” or “Night and Day” against the Coltrane version of “The Night Has a Thousand Eyes.” At the same time, Henderson’s music expresses significant individuality. For their part, Tyner and Jones sound as inspired as they did when they returned to Van Gelder’s nine days later and recorded A Love Supreme.

Henderson programmed the session exceptionally well, and Nat Hentoff’s original notes do a fine job of capturing the mood of each track. Issue must be taken, however, with Hentoff’s structural description of the title track. “Inner Urge” is a 24-bar, A-A-B form, an extended blues variation if you will, with fascinating chord substitutions that descend in four bar units until the cycle of minor thirds in the B section accelerates the harmonic motion. Giving Bob Cranshaw the first solo was a brilliant way to extend the brooding mood of the piece. The other Henderson originals provide different kinds of drama, while Duke Pearson’s “You Know I Care” is one of the pianist’s loveliest ballads. Pearson never recorded the piece for Blue Note, but did cut a nonet version in 1965 for his Atlantic album Honeybuns that features the flute of Les Spann.

It is rather surprising given the success of Inner Urge that Henderson did not return to this specific instrumentation more frequently during the remainder of his career. In the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, when he struggled to maintain a permanent group of his own, he carried one or two additional horns, while he often opted for a pianoless tenor/bass/drum trio during his final decades. Henderson did lead quartets in his live performances of the ‘80s, and gave important early exposure to pianists Fred Hersch and Renee Rosnes in the process, yet even then he rarely chose the instrumentation for recording purposes. There were other memorable Joe Henderson quartet moments on disc, of which the 1971 Joe Henderson in Japan on Milestone remains a personal favorite even with electric piano; but the quartet successor that approaches most closely the present classic, with Tyner and Jones again present and Ron Carter on bass, is Tyner’s 1967 debut as a Blue Note leader, The Real McCoy.

— Bob Blumenthal, 2003