Jazz breaking news: Scorpio Rising As Eddie Henderson Impresses At Pizza Express Jazz Club
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
The influential New York-based trumpeter Eddie Henderson celebrates his seventy-first birthday today having just completed a well attended two-night run at the Pizza Express Jazz Club in London, where he was appearing with bassist Arnie Somogyi, Ambulance bandmate pianist Tim Lapthorn, and drummer Stephen Keogh.
Speaking to Jazzwise moments before joining his colleagues on the bandstand last night, a relaxed Henderson talked about playing with Herbie Hancock at the Cellar Door in Washington DC in the 1970s, a city he performed in more recently with The Cookers at the Bohemian Caverns, now happily putting on some happening jazz again. He also reminisced about his great friend Freddie Hubbard.
Henderson, revered for his Capricorn label 1970s LPs Realization and Inside Out, and his tenure in Hancock’s influential 1970s Mwandishi recording and touring band when he was known as Mganga – doctor in Swahili, referring to the fact that Henderson is a trained medic – hit the mark from the off.
With his characteristically limpid tone and an improvisational inventive candour, highlights of the first set yesterday included playful show tune standard ‘The Surrey With The Fringe On Top’; Henderson’s own sophisticated composition ‘Sandstorm’; and the stirring AfroCuban treatment of Wayne Shorter’s ‘El Gaucho’, which lifted the momentum achieved at that point still further. After a short break the second set began where the first left off, with an insightful ‘On Green Dolphin Street’ and also included the gem ‘Phantoms’ by Kenny Barron.
– Stephen Graham