Music Monday: Joe Henderson, Pharoah Sanders, and Amir ElSaffar

It was a long, windy, snowy weekend which I spent mostly writing a grant and reading in a relatively desultory way. Ordinarily that would be an opportunity to listen to a ton of music, but for some reason nothing really grabbed me. It’s a good reminder that listening to music isn’t always about the music doing the work. Sometimes you have to meet the music more than half way.

So after listening to Keith Jarrett’s At the Deer Head Inn and being completely overmatched trying to listen to Dream Archiveby Craig Taborn, Tomeka Reid and Ches Smith, I had to pivot.

On his Facebook page, Ron Carter mentioned (he used the word “masterpiece,” but I’m not going to go there) Joe Henderson’s quirky, but very entertaining album Black Is the Color (1972) which features multiple overdubs and additions. It lacks the kind of energy that a live jazz album (especially of the early 1970s can have), but it is fun (and features a great group of musicians on various tracks: Dave Holland and Ron Carter on bass, Jack DeJohnette on drums and keyboards(!) as well as Airto Moreira, George Cable on keys and Georg Wadenius on guitar). Check it out here

This led me to Pharoah Sanders’s Jewels of Thought (1970). This album is probably best known for Leon Thomas’s throat singing on “Hum-Allah-Hum-Allah-Hum-Allah.” There’s lots of percussion on this album — with Lonnie Liston Smith, Roy Haynes, and Richard Davis, Idris Muhammad, and even Cecil McBee credited with percussion — and it is amazing:  

Finally, to show that I didn’t just bury my head in the 1970s, I did listen a few times to Amir ElSaffar’s New Quartet Live at Pierre Boulez Saal (2025) in Berlin. I don’t know much about ElSaffar and but I definitely enjoyed the interplay between his trumpet and the microtonal piano. The album held my attention and drew me in.