It was about a decade ago that promoter George Sams booked New York/‘Frisco trumpeter/fluglehornist Eddie Henderson into Hot Locust Cantina. Now Sams has scheduled Henderson’s return a few blocks west at The Nu-Art Series Metropolitan Gallery, 2936 Locust Street, on Friday, February 22 at 8 p.m., backed by an exciting foursome of local favorites: Willie Akins, tenor sax; Ptah Williams, piano; Darrell Mixon, bass; and Jerome “Scrooge” Harris, drums.
Born in 1940 to a singing father (one of the Charioteers) and dancing mother (one of the Brown Twins at the original Cotton Club), Eddie received his first trumpet lesson in 1949 from Louis Armstrong, when his mother took him down to the Apollo Theater. At age 14, his family moved to San Francisco, where he studied at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music from 1954 to 1956.
Just a few years later, he met Miles Davis, who was a guest of his parents during an engagement at the legendary Black Hawk Club. He played for Miles, who liked his performance but urged him to develop his own identity. Henderson related in a Jazztimes article how he acquired, by listening to Miles, a sense of “the etiquette of what you do and what you don’t do – and how to leave space. A lot of good players are very good technically, but you know – you can’t play all the time. You gotta take a breath or you’ll overload the audience.”
The introspective horn man with the captivating sound has some staggering credentials.
In high school he successfully combined scholarship, music, basketball and figure skating. After a stint in the U.S. Air Force from 1958 to 1961, Eddie became the first African American to compete for the National Figure Skating Championship, winning the Pacific and Midwestern titles.
He then began a challenging double life in medicine and music, receiving a BS degree in zoology from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1964 and his MD from Howard University in 1968. But he practiced medicine only four hours a day, due to the empathy of a music-loving head of the San Francisco clinic that retained him. Music, he said, “was my number one thing emotionally, even though I was practicing medicine at a very skilled level.”
Blending the two, he said, “was cool – just a matter of focus and discipline.”
“Music and medicine are both divine disciplines,” he said.
“But, for me, that old adage of ‘physician, heal thyself’ means that I can’t help anybody else until I’m cool. And music is what cools me out.”
And “cool” may be the perfect description for his soothing trumpet licks, which first earned global recognition with Herbie Hancock’s Mwandisi group during the early ‘70s. Henderson, who claims Miles Davis, Freddie Hubbard and Clifford Brown as his trumpet heroes, used to practice with the great Lee Morgan. He is not married to traditional jazz, however. His flights into ‘70s fusion – using an Echoplex, a phase shifter and a wah-wah pedal – show he doesn’t want to be stuck in one genre.
During his 1997 appearance at Hot Locust Cantina, he was stuck in a panoply of soaring phrases and exhilarating personal essays. Two of the sidemen billed this time, the demonstrative Darrell Mixon and the virtuosic Ptah Williams, brilliantly augmented his sterling performance on that gig; and the masterful, malleable Willie Akins and Jerome “Scrooge” Harris booked with them on Feb. 22 can concoct great chemistry with anyone.
The Eddie Henderson Quintet appears at Metropolitan Gallery presented by The Nu-Art Series, 2936 Locust Street, Friday, February 22 at 8 p.m. For info, contact 314-535-6500 or email nu-artseries@charter.net.