Jazz, like the world it reflected, was in flux in 1969. That year, Miles Davis released In a Silent Way, an album whose low-key atmosphere belied its status as a herald of major upheaval, leading the music into a decade of electric instruments, studio-driven experiments, and rhythms that drew as much from funk and R&B as swing. Yet plenty of people were still playing changes in the old-fashioned way: A musician could devote their entire life to mastering the art, and just because Miles was suddenly doing tape manipulation and listening to Sly and the Family Stone didn’t mean everyone else was following suit. And free jazz, a decade or so old at that point, was still a radical force, its elaborations and deconstructions of melody providing alternate routes forward from tradition, ones that didn’t necessarily require plugging in at all.
Looking back, it’s tempting to see these various styles—fusion, straight-ahead, avant-garde—as utterly distinct and walled off, and it’s true that certain players could be dogmatic in their adherence to one idiom and rejection of the others. The case of tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson gives good reason to consider them more holistically. An old-school virtuoso who taught himself to play by transcribing and memorizing solos by bebop titans like Charlie Parker and Lester Young, he also brushed the edges of free jazz as a sideman with Andrew Hill, and encouraged his own supporting players to experiment with electronics even on records that steered clear of full-on fusion. His 1969 album Power to the People, available on vinyl for the first time in decades via a superb new reissue from Craft Recordings and Jazz Dispensary, is an essential document of this transitional moment, due in part to its creator’s disregard for rigid stylistic affiliation. If you want to hear, in a single album, how jazz—all of it—sounded just before the turn of the ’70s, you could do worse than this one.
Henderson surrounded himself with a few of the world’s best players for Power to the People. Two, keyboardist Herbie Hancock and bassist Ron Carter, were veterans of Davis’ band, and one, drummer Jack DeJohnette, was just joining up with Miles at around the same time; Henderson also recruited up-and-coming trumpeter Mike Lawrence on two of the seven tracks. Across the album, Hancock switches between acoustic piano and Fender Rhodes, and Carter between upright and electric bass, choices that mirror the album’s fluid stylistic approach. Carter’s choice of bass, in particular, is a rough indicator of where a given track will fall on the spectrum. On upright, his primary instrument, he tends toward traditional walking lines, outlining the chords with a steady pulse that the rest of the players are free to improvise around. On electric, he dances more freely around the outskirts of the pocket, jabbing in and out in search of new rhythmic possibilities, nudging the music away from the jazz’s well-worn solo-and-accompaniment format and toward more open-ended group improvisation.
Power to the People begins with “Black Narcissus,” one of Henderson’s best-known compositions. Hancock’s Rhodes cycles through two ambiguous chords, setting a misty nocturnal atmosphere through which Henderson meanders elegantly. As his melody slowly rises toward the end of each chorus, so does the intensity of the ensemble’s playing, easing toward a big climax that never quite comes: Just as they seem ready to rip, the form repeats, and they reorganize themselves quickly in the more subdued earlier mode to begin the ascent once more. Each time they execute this rise-and-fall maneuver, the highs are more powerful and the lows more delicate: By the fourth drop, in the middle of Henderson’s solo, the accompaniment dissipates almost entirely, leaving only ghostly traces of harmony and the searching gestures of his horn.
Two pieces mark the far edges of Power to the People’s range. On one side, there is “Isotope,” an original that Henderson first recorded several years earlier, which could almost pass for a lost composition by Thelonious Monk, the idiosyncratic genius of the bebop era who’d first hit the scene when Henderson was still in grade school. On the other, the album-closing “Foresight and Afterthought,” an avant-garde odyssey that Henderson, Carter, and DeJohnette apparently improvised freely on the spot, whose climaxes nearly abandon harmony altogether in favor of ecstatic pure sound. The former is tight and swinging; toward the end of the latter, DeJohnette downshifts from his usual flurry of cymbals into a pummeling half-time rhythm that sounds to modern ears like the breakdown to a hardcore punk song. Even as they demonstrate how far jazz had come in the previous two decades, these two pieces also emphasize its continuity. Monk was essentially an avant-gardist in his time, and “Isotope” highlights the spiky angularity of the great pianist’s music; though “Foresight and Afterthought” is resolutely modern, Henderson makes room in between his streams of abstraction for a few short declarative riffs that carry distinct echoes of the blues.
If “Black Narcissus” is the tune on Power to the People that fans are most likely to know, the title track is the best reason for those who haven’t heard the album in full to seek it out. Nearly nine minutes long and ferociously groovy, it is an astounding showcase for the communal intimacy of these five musicians, many of whom had long histories working together in other configurations. DeJohnette plays like a man possessed by the sound of Henderson’s sax, backing off whenever the horn needs more room to maneuver and reaching nearly superhuman force when it’s time to dig in. During Hancock’s Rhodes solo, Carter begins playing natural harmonics, a technique that can make a stringed instrument sound more like a bell, and suddenly it’s like their two instruments are one and the same.
The minor-key melody they circle, like that of the earlier “Afro-Centric,” seems informed on some level by the South African jazz that had begun hitting U.S. shores earlier in the ’60s, though it’s possible the lines of influence are not so direct. Aside from a brief passage of quick changes, the piece sticks mostly to one chord, which allows for a certain jammy looseness: When there isn’t an elaborate harmonic structure to uphold, you’re free to try just about anything. It’s an approach many later fusion bands would use to great effect, but “Power to the People” still has a foot in older idioms: It isn’t a fancy studio creation, just a faithful document of five world-class musicians playing together.
“Opus One-Point-Five,” the lone tune penned by Carter on an album otherwise filled with Henderson originals, wears its liminality right on its title: not quite one number or the other, but somewhere in between. As it proceeds slowly and pensively, it’s difficult to tell where the composition ends and the improvisation begins. It has the outlines of a tender ballad, but its inner workings are surreal and disorienting. DeJohnette’s cymbals provide slippery texture rather than strict tempo; Hancock seems determined not to allow the music to settle, always spiraling off into some new dissonance. Henderson plays long, breathy lines, as if this really is the soundtrack to a moonlit romance, and then interrupts himself with an outburst of staccato or a scribbled aside. It is deeply strange music, even more so than Power to the People’s more overtly out pieces, precisely because of its proximity to the familiar. Near the end, to punctuate things, Hancock reaches over the keyboard and strums a chromatic cluster of notes directly on the strings of the piano, an eerie and highly specific sound that seems somehow outside the boundaries of the tune as we’ve come to understand it so far. Both out of place and perfectly intuitive, it bears an important message: In this music, anything is possible.
