Connections Near and Far: Joe Henderson's Musings for Miles

Kim Kleinman, Contributing Writer

Friday evening Jazz Spectrum will showcase Joe Henderson’s So Near, So Far (Musings for Miles). For this avid listener, it will be a chance to return to that record to ask questions once again of the music and its players. This time, I’m curious about the underappreciated (by me) side of Miles Davis that I discussed in this space on May 28 as I joined the world in celebrating the maestro’s centennial. As influential as Miles is, there are broad swaths of his music that I know too poorly. A striking feature of Henderson’s album is that he avoided the obvious choices to find gems hidden in plain sight in such an important catalog.

I’d bought the compact disc of this album at a time when one still consumed music in that way but when I was not primarily listening to jazz. I already had Henderson’s tribute to Billy Strayhorn and was eager to see what he did with the artist who had epitomized jazz for me. I admit that I was underwhelmed by the CD in large part by my unfamiliarity with the material. And yet it has repaid repeated listenings as a way to discover more about the music.

When I went on a tear to immerse myself in the music of Dave Holland’s magnificent quintet of the late 1990s/early 2000s, this album helped me collate that music with what I had heard before, both when he played with Miles in the early electric period when he replaced Ron Carter as well as his album Conference of the Birds.

When I was looking forward to seeing John Scofield’s quartet with Joe Lovano, here was a chance to hear the guitarist with another important tenor playing at least somewhat familiar material. Similarly, as I thought about what Melissa Aldana was accomplishing in her work with guitarists Charles Altura and Lage Lund, this album joined Pat Matheny’s 80/81, Sonny Rollins’s The Bridge, and Paul Desmond’s work with Jim Hall and Ed Bickert as points of comparison.

When Al Foster died last year, this album was the one I had at hand reflecting his work as I made sense of his celebrated career. I knew him as a beloved member of the community of players I found gigging on the streams from Smalls Live and Smoke Jazz Club that shaped my listening during Lockdown and beyond. Like Holland (and Scofield too), his work with Miles himself was as part of electric bands. Yet, as they demonstrate on this album, they were/are all masters of all eras of Miles’s music.

Of course, their leader Joe Henderson defines this album. It comes from his Verve years as a village elder in the 1990s when he revisited core repertoire, not just Strayhorn and Miles but Antonio Carlos Jobim and Porgy and Bess. He earned that status by reporting from the Village Vanguard in 1985 on The State of the Tenor in two volumes with Ron Carter and Foster. But I’ve listened to this album several times in relation to the Blue Note work (his own Inner Urge and Mode for Joe as well as playing on key albums with Kenny Dorham, Horace Silver, Herbie Hancock, and Andrew Hill) and, most recently, the release of the 1966 quartet with McCoy Tyner from Slug’s, truly Forces of Nature as the album is titled.  Last week, Jazz Spectrum introduced us to another live recording from the vault, Henderson at the Jazz Showcase in 1978.

So, it is high time for me now to return to this album to consider the evolution of Henderson’s style as well his prescient curation of corners of Miles Davis’s music I want to explore.