Henderson brings jazz to his roots

West Palm Beach native was in middle of fusion movement.

By Bill Meredith
Special to The Palm Beach Post

For most touring musical artists, driving to play in South Florida isn't cost-efficient, since the geographics involve heading south only to do a U-turn afterward to hit other destinations. But guitarist Scott Henderson has a special reason to play here, which he'll do on Sunday at the Carefree Theatre-- he was born in West Palm Beach.

The year was 1954 and by the 1970s Henderson was playing area clubs with R&B band Pure Hell and jazz/rock group Paradise, torching everything from James Brown and Led Zeppelin to John Coltrane and Van Halen. After attending Palm Beach community College in Lake Worth and Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, Henderson had a frightening combination of natural firepower and music theory studies.

Which means he gravitated toward jazz, or jazz toward him, or both. Henderson moved to Los Angeles in 1980 to study at the Guitar Institute of Technology ("Plus," he says, "I wasn't exactly working a lot in South Florida"), putting him in one of America's jazz/fusion epicenters. Studying at G.I.T allowed Henderson to channel his blues-based rock influences (primarily Jimi Hendrix, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page and Ritchie Blackmore) through the intricacies of jazz studies.

"I never heard a note of jazz until college," Henderson says,"and I didn't even like it then!" But a prodigious talent like Henderson was almost certain to play in a demanding discipline like jazz or classical, and a growing interest in jazz made the genre find him.

While practicing at G.I.T., Henderson's signature sound found the ears of Allan Holdsworth-- the British guitarist whose fluid playing made him a jazz/fusion legend with 1970s bands led by drummers Tony Willimas and Bill Bruford. Holdsworth was so overwhelmed by Henderson that h called friend and violinist Jean Luc Ponty, who was looking for a guitarist, and talked Ponty into hiring Henderson sight unseen.

Career accelerates

The call started a domino effect in Henderson's career, an odyssey that finds him back home 20 years later, touring in support of his third solo CD, Well To The Bone. The guitarist toured with Ponty and appeared on the violinist's 1982 album Fables, then formed his still existing fusion band Tribal Tech with fretless bass wizard Gary Willis in 1984. Henderson recorded on keyboard legend Chick Corea's first Elektric Band album in 1986, then got a call from keyboardist Joe Zawinul to join his post- Weather Report group.

Tribal Tech's first three albums (Spears, Dr. Hee and Nomad), appeared during the same period as Henderson recorded and toured in support of the Zawinul syndicate's Black Water and The Immigrants. The exposure and the ability to work with one of the music industry's most demanding bandleaders, furthered Henderson's reputation and allowed him to forge ahead on his own. By Tribal Tech's sixth album, 1992's Face First, the lineup was solidified with keyboardist Scott Kinsey and drummer Kirk Covington.

But Henderson still looked ahead, coaxing a vocal out of Covington on the Face First blues tune, Boat Gig. The parody of tuxedo-clad cruise ship musicians brought Henderson's bebop-inspired humor more into focus, yet sounded out-of-place amid an otherwise dizzying blend of Weather Report tempo shifts and inspired solos. Which is exactly what Henderson wanted-- the track brought more attention to Face First, helping the CD and guitarist to win awards and polls in Guitar Player, Guitar World and Pulse! magazines.

Labeled by blues award

Henderson's first two solo discs, 1994's Dog Party and '97's Tore Down House, showed the underlying blues influence of Albert King, Albert Collins and Stevie Ray Vaughan. The vocals of Covington and guest singers, plus simpler blues/rock song structures, distanced the releases from Tribal Tech's largely improvised instrumental catalog. But when Dog Party won "Best Blues Album" of 1994 in Guitar Player, it typecast a guitarist whose talent can't be contained by musical genres.

"It's funny that I got labeled 'blues' after Dog Party," Henderson says. "I just consider it modern blues or blues with a twist. Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck, and so many other great players have done it before me, but my thing is to start from there and then get a little more harmonically adventurous. People tell me, 'It sounds like a jazz player who used to play the blues,' but it's really a combination of blues, rock, jazz and funk.

A variety of artists

Well To The Bone, features the versatile Covington on drums again, plus guest vocalists Thelma Houston and Wade Durham, but is the first Henderson solo CD to feature his touring bassist from the past few years, John Humphrey. A fretted player who uses simple lines as an anchor for the explosions of Henderson and Covingtong, Humphrey brings synchronicity to Henderson's 20-year climb-- the two met while touring in Ponty's band. Covington doubles on vocals in the live trio, enabling it to cover bluesy Well To The Bone vocal tunes like Devil Boy and the title track, as well as Instrumentals like the Middle Eastern-tinged Sultan's Boogie and somber Ashes.

While Tribal Tech (which can't even afford to tour in the U.S. anymore) and Henderson are still more popular overseas (It's unreal, the amount of press I get in Europe;" he says, "I feel like Michael Jackson"), the guitarist's "blues" CDs have furthered both his solo career and Tribal Tech. This Carefree date comes seven years to the day after Hendersons's first homecoming show there with his fusion act, and a year after his solo Carefree debut (sabotaged by the flight restrictions caused by last year's terrorist attacks) was to take place.

But for a guitarist who waited 15 years for a homecoming to showcase his signature blend of Beck's unorthodoxy, Holdsworth's liquid runs, and Vaughan's blues/rock channeling of Hendrix, what's a year? Expect a heaping helping of fried frets. Well-done of course.