Joe Henderson born 24 April 1937

Joe Henderson (April 24, 1937 – June 30, 2001) was an American jazz tenor saxophonist. In a career spanning more than four decades, Henderson played with many of the leading American players of his day and recorded for several prominent labels, including Blue Note, Milestone, and Verve. 

Born in Lima, Ohio, United States, Henderson was one of five sisters and nine brothers. He was encouraged by his parents Dennis and Irene and older brother James T. to study music. He dedicated his first album to them "for being so understanding and tolerant" during his formative years. Early musical interests included drums, piano, saxophone and composition. According to Kenny Dorham, two local piano teachers who went to school with Henderson's brothers and sisters, Richard Patterson and Don Hurless, gave him knowledge of the piano. He was particularly enamoured of his brother's record collection. 

It seems that a hometown drummer, John Jarette, advised Henderson to listen to musicians like Lester Young, Stan Getz, Dexter Gordon and Charlie Parker. He also liked Flip Phillips, Lee Konitz and the Jazz at the Philharmonic recordings. However, Parker became his greatest inspiration. His first approach to the saxophone was under the tutelage of Herbert Murphy in high school. In this period of time, he wrote several scores for the school band. 

By age 18, Henderson was active on the Detroit jazz scene of the mid-1950s, playing in jam sessions with visiting New York City stars. Henderson studied music at Kentucky State College from 1956, and at Wayne State University, Detroit, where one of his fellow students was the multi-reed player Yusef Lateef.  Shortly prior to his army induction in 1960, Henderson was commissioned by UNAC to write some arrangements for the suite "Swings and Strings", which was later performed by a ten-member orchestra and the local dance band of Jimmy Wilkins. 

Henderson spent two years (1960–62) in the U.S. Army: first in Fort Benning, where he competed in an Army talent show and won first place, then in Fort Belvoir, where he was chosen for a world tour, with a show to entertain soldiers. While in Paris, he met Kenny Drew and Kenny Clarke. Then he was sent to Maryland to conclude his enlistment. In 1962, he was finally discharged and promptly moved to New York.  Then he joined the bands of trumpeter Kenny Dorham and pianist Horace Silver, eventually co-leading a hard bop group called the Jazz Communicators, with trumpeter Freddie Hubbard. After that, he worked with Herbie Hancock in the pianist's harmonically adventurous, if commercially obscure, sextet of 1969-70, and with the jazz-rock band Blood, Sweat And Tears. He toyed with jazz-rock fusion, but it was not especially memorably. 

Though Henderson would recall that some of his earliest sax-playing experiences had been for dances around Detroit, and that his first experience of hearing Charlie Parker live was also to witness dancers gyrating to fast bop improvisations on Indiana and Cherokee, the dance versions of jazz music that came from rhythm 'n' blues, rather than swing roots, struck him as more repetitive, and harder to improvise inventively with. Impatient with the narrowing opportunities for uncompromising jazz improvisers during the 1970s, he moved to San Francisco, and became active in music education. He also worked with Freddie Hubbard and others in a group variously known as Echoes Of An Era, and the Griffith Park Band. 

                   

Henderson appeared on 34 Blue Note albums between 1963 and 1990, alongside some of the most creative musicians in American jazz - including McCoy Tyner, Elvin Jones, Chick Corea, Ron Carter and Al Foster. But 1985 was re-emergence year for this often overlooked artist. He played with Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter and Tony Williams at the televised concert, One Night With Blue Note (the re-launch of the famous Blue Note label), and also recorded the adventurous double-set, The State Of The Tenor, alongside Carter and Foster. 

In 1991, Verve records signed Henderson to the label. In January of that year, Henderson had made a guest appearance on Stephen Scott's Verve album Something to Consider, and worked with Verve producer and vice president Richard Seidel during the session. Seidel served as producer on all five of Henderson's 1990s Verve studio albums. Verve adopted a 'songbook' approach to recording him, coupling it with a considerable marketing and publicity campaign, which more successfully positioned Henderson at the forefront of the contemporary jazz scene. His 1992 'comeback' album Lush Life: The Music of Billy Strayhorn was a commercial and critical success and was followed by tribute albums to Miles Davis, Antonio Carlos Jobim, a big band album, and a jazz adaptation of the George Gershwin opera Porgy and Bess. 

A chain smoker, on June 30, 2001, after a long battle with emphysema, Henderson died on June 29th 2001in San Francisco, California, as a result of heart failure. He was 64 years of age. 

(Edited from Wikipedia & The Guardian)