Joe Henderson featuring Alice Coltrane: The Elements [JAZZ DISPENSARY/MILESTONE]

Why you'll love it

This Jazz Dispensary Top Shelf pressing is remastered from the original analog tapes and pressed on 180g vinyl at Quality Record Pressings. It brings Henderson's tenor together with Alice Coltrane's harp and piano and Charlie Haden's bass for a trance-like four-part suite.

This edition

• 180g vinyl
• Remastered from the original analog tapes
• Jazz Dispensary Top Shelf series
• Pressed at Quality Record Pressings
• Replica jacket

About the album

By the early 1970s Joe Henderson had nothing left to prove as a hard bop tenor man, so he went looking for somewhere new. He found it at Village Recorders in Los Angeles in October 1973, with Alice Coltrane on harp, piano, harmonium and tamboura, and a band built for long, open-ended journeys rather than tight heads and solos.

The album is a single improvised suite in four parts named for the classical elements. "Fire" burns slow and then blazes, "Air" drifts on Coltrane's harp, "Water" ripples with percussion, and "Earth" grounds it all with Kenneth Nash's spoken narration. Charlie Haden anchors things on bass, Michael White adds keening violin, and Henderson moves between tenor, flute and alto flute, and the whole group leaves plenty of room for the music to breathe. Orrin Keepnews produced, and the music was remixed at Fantasy Studios in Berkeley, with a few overdubs to thicken the colours.

It sits at the meeting point of spiritual jazz and fusion, and the way the players listen to each other is the real magic. Philosophers spent centuries sorting out the four elements; Henderson and Coltrane did it in three days.

Also at Kops: more Joe Henderson on vinyl · browse Modern Jazz

Tracklist

Listen

On Milestone / Jazz Dispensary (cat# MIL00001), a reissue of the 1974 album.