Forces of Nature

Joe Henderson and McCoy Tyner on fire, Appalachia under water

The only time I interviewed tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson, it was over the phone, in the mid-1990s. The tape and the transcript are lost to time, unless there’s a microcassette buried in a box in the basement. Anyway, Joe was out on tour, and I began by asking whether his travels had been disrupted by heavy rainfall and historic flooding in the midwest. He said he’d thankfully had no problems, and expressed his heartfelt sympathy for the tens of thousands of people who had been displaced. “I feel terribly for them,” I remember him saying. “It’s an awful situation.”

There’s a high likelihood that we were talking in mid-July of ‘96, during the aftermath of a record-setting rainfall in the Great Lakes Region. More than 35,000 homes were flooded, many in the western suburbs of Chicago. The heaviest deluge was clocked in Aurora, Illinois, where almost 17 inches fell in a 24-hour period, still a record for the state; it’s one reason this disaster is known as the Aurora Flood.

It should be obvious why my thoughts have turned in this direction. The catastrophic impacts of Hurricane Helene across western North Carolina — in particular, the city of Asheville — almost defy comprehension. I was barely beginning to realize the scale of the issue on Saturday, when I texted a friend in Asheville just to check in. She texted back a day later to say her car was gone, but she was safe, hiking in and out for provisions. (My friend is a writer, also here on Substack, but I don’t know how public she wants to be about the ordeal, so until she’s able to resurface, I’ll leave it there.)

In the face of such devastation, I’m painfully aware of how trivial it can feel to be crashing your inbox, enthusing about a jazz recording made nearly 60 years ago. So before I do just that, I wanted to share this list of charities from Blue Ridge Public Radio, which includes aid initiatives like Operation Airdrop and community service groups like Manna FoodBank and BeLoved Asheville.

I’ve found the analysis by climate expert

Bill McKibben

, here on Substack, to be illuminating and always on point. He turns his focus to Asheville and other Helene-affected areas in his latest post, simply titled “Water.”

Water

We’ve been talking about forces of nature, in the most destructive sense of that term. The phrase is deployed with more positive connotations in a forthcoming release on Blue Note Records, announced today. So with apologies for an awkward segue…

McCoy & Joe & Henry & Jack

McCoy Tyner and Joe Henderson’s Forces of Nature: Live at Slugs’, the album I just alluded to, is the latest in a series of miraculous-seeming archival jazz recordings to emerge in recent seasons. I daresay it’s one of the most thrilling we’ve seen yet, but you should be aware of my vested interests: I had the honor of writing liner notes for this album, which was produced by Zev Feldman with Jack and Lydia DeJohnette, and will be released on Blue Note on Nov. 22.

The recording, never intended for any sort of release, was made in the spring of 1966 at Slugs’ Saloon, the mythic East Village haunt. There’s an awful lot to say about it, but I don’t want to parrot my own writing from the package. For right now, I’ll simply note that Tyner and Henderson, both recently liberated from highly visible sideman gigs, had teamed up here with two young terrors, Henry Grimes on bass and the aforementioned Jack DeJohnette on drums. Among the tunes they played on the gig was “Isotope,” a Henderson tune formally introduced on the album Inner Urge, with a quartet much like this one, right down to Tyner’s presence on piano. (Inner Urge was recorded late in 1964, but released right around the time of this gig.)

“Isotope” is a classic JoeHen blues. As the great David Liebman once appraised it, the tune features “wide intervals for the melody with a series of moving dominant seventh chords that are non-cyclical in nature.” Listen to this live version, and I think you’ll get why Forces of Nature is so exciting a discovery. But I also want to say that this is only a small taste of the full glories on this album, which opens with an almost 27-minute version of “In ‘n Out,” another tune from the Henderson-with-Tyner files.

The advance notice I’ve seen about Forces of Nature gives due credit to Zev Feldman, an archival producer whose track record is already the stuff of legend. I know Zev himself would want to share that recognition with at least two other people: first, the maverick engineer Orville O’Brien, who dragged his Crown reel-to-reel tape recorder to Slugs’ that evening, and also DeJohnette, who had the foresight to ask for a personal reference copy. It was Jack’s set of 7-inch tape reels that provided the source for this album. Having heard the tracks in an earlier round, I can attest that mastering engineer Matthew Lutthans did an incredible job with the materials at hand.

This isn’t the last you’ll hear from me about Forces of Nature. I sincerely hope, for one thing, that you buy a physical copy and read the liner notes — not just my essay, but also comment from DeJohnette, Feldman, Lutthans and Blue Note president Don Was, as well as testimonials from an all-star panel of contemporary jazz artists, like Terri Lyne Carrington and Christian McBride. Again, preorder here.

I’ll also let you in on something: The Late Set has a forthcoming episode devoted to Forces of Nature. Greg Bryant is every bit as excited about the album as I am, and we recently had the privilege of speaking with DeJohnette about it. (If you don’t already get this podcast in your feed, what are you waiting for?)

Extra Choruses

Gabriel Kahane on set. (Playwrights Horizons)

• When last we spoke, I was rushing to Playwrights Horizons to see Book of Travelers, a brilliant “solo musical play” by Gabriel Kahane. I told you I’d have something to say about it: here is my essay, for PH’s in-house magazine Almanac.

• The Jazz Omnibus is a newly announced anthology on Cymbal Press, edited by my pal David R. Adler. The subtitle: “21st-Century Photos and Writings by Members of the Jazz Journalists Association.” I’m one of the contributors, alongside Adler, Jordannah Elizabeth, Substackers

  Ted Gioia
  and
  Howard Mandel
  , and others. The book is out on Oct. 15, and I’ll have more to say about it soon.

• More good news from the jazz journalism beat: the British digital media company BGFG has announced the acquisition of six publications — including JazzTimes. Thus ends the nightmare reign of Greg Royal’s BeBop Channel, to no one’s surprise. I look forward to seeing what’s next for JT. If you missed my commentary around Royal’s takeover the first time around, here it is below.

Thanks as always for reading The Gig. Tomorrow morning I’m off to Austin, for a family trip that will also involve the Austin City Limits Music Festival. So you can look forward to a dispatch from Zilker Park in the nearish future. ‘Til then…