Joe Henderson: So Near, So Far (Musing for Miles)

by Fritz Byers

One way to think about jazz is as a dialogue between tradition and innovation. (Other dialogues you can hear in the music are between the individual and the collective and between composition and improvisation.) The influence of forebears has pervaded the music from the start, finding expression overtly in imitation, emulation, and quotation and more subtly in matters of harmonic grammar, instrumental tone, and the architecture of solos.

Then there’s the matter of explicit tributes, whether in the form of dedicated composition (for instance, Charles Mingus’s “Goodbye Pork-Pie Hat” or Michael Formanek’s recent tribute to Susan Alcorn, the innovator who, against all odds, made pedal-steel guitar a jazz instrument and who passed early last year – the tune, which is on Michael’s new release, New Digs, closes this Friday’s show) or an entire album designed as a tribute. I mentioned in last week’s post about Andrew Hill the steady flow of Thelonious Monk tributes that has seasoned the decade. (I’m still absorbing the pair of comprehensive tributes to Monk’s compositions released in 2018, Frank Kimbrough’s Monk’s Dreams and Miles Okazaki’s Work; each musician assayed the entirety of Thelonious’s seventy-song book. But then, that’s not surprising, since I suspect Monk’s tunes will never give up all their secrets.)

This week on Jazz Spectrum Friday, the spotlight will be on one of the most intriguing tribute albums in all of jazz — Joe Henderson’s So Near, So Far (Musing for Miles), recorded in 1992 and released the following year. It’s a Miles Davis tribute to be sure, but one that I hear as having been offered almost entirely by indirection, by inference. The tunes are all associated with Miles — either his compositions or standards he made his own. But beyond that, there’s nothing about the recording that calls Miles immediately to mind. Nothing, that is, other than the sustained virtuosity and relentless creativity. Which is the point, and what makes the recording so enduringly engaging.  

The premise of the record seems straightforward enough: a saxophonist paying homage to Miles Davis through Miles’s own repertoire, in the company of a rhythm section stocked with Davis alumni — John Scofield on guitar, Dave Holland on bass, and Al Foster on drums, each carrying firsthand knowledge of what Miles wanted from a band and how to balance support with quiet rebellion. Bass and drums, of course, but the chordal instrument isn’t a piano (or even an organ, such as Miles began migrating toward with In a Silent Way (1969); rather, it’s John’s occasionally spare, occasionally bracing, always luminous guitar. This matters more than it might seem to. Without a piano’s full harmonic scaffolding, and with the shimmery waves of John’s guitar, the music seems to drift more freely from the chordal roots, reshaping Miles’s materials in engaging and novel ways. This strikes me as precisely the right way to pay tribute to Miles.

Not surprisingly, given this inventive turn in instrumentation, Joe doesn’t play it straight. And that’s the record’s real revelation. The tunes are unmistakably Miles’s, yet Joe’s approach to them is elliptical, arriving at phrases from unexpected angles, favoring melody over the harmonic density that marked Joe’s revered Blue Note recordings from the '60s. This is tribute as refraction rather than reflection. As the subtitle of the album promises, these are musings rather than proclamations.

Which makes for an interesting comparison with last week’s featured album, a live recording that captured Joe at Chicago's Jazz Showcase in 1978. On that date, Joe’s attack was muscular and searching, still very much in dialogue with the language he’d helped define in the 1960s — the harmonic reach of Inner Urge, the dark-toned assurance of Page One. On So Near, So Far, recorded fourteen years after the Jazz Showcase date, Joe’s saxophone has lightened. Not diminished; lightened, the way a hand relaxes once it fully trusts what it’s doing. The innovation hasn’t disappeared; if anything, it’s deepened. But it seems to no longer need to announce itself, having achieved a kind of serene self-assurance. This is, throughout, a beautiful thing to witness.

Joe never said much publicly about what this record meant to him personally, and I'm wary of assigning emotional or biographical weight to music that the artist hasn’t claimed for himself. But what I am comfortable saying with confidence is craft-based: this is a saxophonist at the height of his interpretive powers, working through material he clearly loves, with collaborators who understood the source better than almost anyone alive. Dave Holland’s bass lines have that same searching quality he brought to Miles’s bands two decades earlier. Al Foster’s time-keeping is elastic without ever losing the pulse. And John Scofield, freed from the obligations of any conventional sense of rhythmic comping, threads through Joe’s lines, more like a second voice in conversation rather than an accompanist waiting his turn to speak.

The result holds a privileged place in Joe’s discography — a body of work, by the way, that places him in the pantheon of the greatest improvisers in the music’s history.  It’s a record about Miles that sounds like nothing Miles ever made, which might be the highest compliment available. The album flatters Miles by demonstrating how fertile his music and his legacy were, what his music could become in the hands of a contemporary who became a successor, a musician who knows that the most respectful thing a musician can do is to absorb tradition and honor it by making it entirely new.