Billboard : 02/14/1970
Four Stars

—–

Cashbox : 02/14/1970
Jazz Pick

Joe Henderson has gained for himself a reputation as one of today’s foremost tenor sax players. Power to the People can only add to that reputation, as it spotlights his excellent musicianship on some swinging material. Fine sidemen like Herbie Hancock and Ron Carter help to keep things hummin’. This is an album which discerning jazz fans will want to have in their collections. An exciting set.

—–

London Guardian
Sam Peters : 09/07/1970

No one laughed when I first sat down to play jazz. But the clarinetist, a Scot who had toured England with Fats Waller, later took me aside to say: “It’s not what you put into a solo, but what you leave out that counts.” Twenty-two years on I mentioned the incident to Junior Mance. “Funny,” he said, “Dizzy Gillespie told me the same thing when I joined his band.”

In 1947, when tenor saxist Dexter Gordon presided over The Dial Sessions in Hollywood, the advice was sound. The Chase and The Duel, Gordon’s cutting contests with fellow tenor men Wardell Gray and Teddy Edwards, were limited to two sides of a 78 rpm single. With a maximum of three choruses, a soloist had to know exactly where he was going.

Long-playing records help the lazy or less-talented soloist to get by without editing his improvisation. He can cast around for ideas, knowing he has time to strike gold. Too many recent albums are dedicated to such floundering. But the LP also gave Thelonious Monk time to pursue his logical prodding to apt conclusions, Sonny Rollins time to work on extended solo form, John Coltrane time to struggle against harmonic skills he had learnt too well, Joe Henderson time to show his mastery of the tenor saxophone.

On Power to the People, expertly and electrically accompanied by pianist Herbie Hancock and bassist Ron Carter, Henderson displays his credentials: control of tone, full range, fluency on chord sequences and ease without them, and competent writing.

—–

Minneapolis Star
Walter Lide : 12/20/1970

Everything about Joe Henderson‘s latest release, Power to the People, smacks of cliches. Starting with the title of the album right through to the last note from Henderson’s sax, it all seems to have been done before or been heard before. Even the piano of Herbie Hancock fails to make anyone sit up and take notice.

—–

Nottingham Evening Post
Frank Jones : 08/14/1970

As horn players go, Joe Henderson is one whose “image” has never lived up to his ability.

While lesser talents grab the limelight, he’s busy blowing some of the meanest tenor around.

Listen to Power to the People and you’ll see what I mean. Henderson creates on a consistently high level.

He’s got the right catalytic support, too – Herbie Hancock (piano), Ron Carter (bass) and Jack DeJohnette (drums). Whether working electrically or conventionally, thy make a fine team.

Henderson, chameleon-like, can change his tonal colours to suit the mood. The warmth of Black Narcissus and Opus One-Point-Five stands out sharply from his gritty up-tempo work on Isotope and Afro-Centric.

An interesting new talent on two tracks is Mike Lawrence. Owing more to Dizzy than Miles, he uses his solo space with intelligence and ingenuity.

—–

Victoria College Martlet
Jack Patrick : 10/22/1970

Can’t help thinking Henderson‘s sounding more like Stan Getz these days (while Getz is sounding more like a whole lot of other people.) This is one of the more recent Henderson sets, and it’s a nice, easy performance all the way through, assured Henderson, with good support from the sidemen. There’s a previous Milestone album also by Henderson which is worth looking out for too.

—–

Liner Notes by Alan Heineman

The thing about Joe Henderson is, you can never get anybody to say anything bad about him. Maybe that’s a problem: if he annoyed or angered or upset people, they’d write more about him, and then others would listen.

But despite a general aura of praise about his work, Joe isn’t a poll-winner, either, although he always finishes comfortably in the balloting – fifth here, ninth there, sixth the other place. And I think the reason he is thus undervalued is the same one, paradoxically, that makes his music “acceptable”: there’s no bombast, no pretension, no novelty for its own sake. The sad fact is that even among people who should know better (and are paid to), “new” music is more easily identified than original and unique contributions within a relatively traditional framework.

If you listen, what you will hear Joe play on this album you have never heard before. His tenor is a personal voice, owing debts to many (as does every jazz player, however important), but servant to no muse but Joe’s own. I happen to believe that this is the most impressive and together tenor player currently alive, Sonny Rollins excepted.

There are a lot of musicians around who purvey uncontrolled emotion by the truckload. It all tumbles out at you, and you’re knocked over. Then you play the record again, just slightly removed from the impact of that first hearing, and somehow it’s a little flat, not quite what you thought it was. The reason, generally, is that art is not meant to reproduce experience directly. When it can do so at all, it can do it only once. (Art can do something more valuable: it can reflect experience and add to it intelligence, patterns, sets of relations.) At the other extreme, there are those ultra-cool cats who can lay down a coherent, perfectly structured solo every time. Each phrase symmetrical, every chorus exquisitely balanced. And your response is: yeah, well, what else is new?

Joe Henderson avoids the pitfalls of both these extremes. For he is one of those very rare artists possessed of both fire and ice – emotional depth and a strong shaping intellect. He can tear your guts out, as the agonized screams of the title cut of this album fully indicate, and he does so with total honesty. He can reach way into you because he has first reached into himself. But later, when you hear him shriek again in the same places, the power is undiminished, because it all fits, it’s right, it’s led into and away from, and no less spontaneous for that. In this latter paradox you have the central miracle of successful jazz. Whitney Balliett called it “the sound of surprise.” Right on. I’d add that jazz at its best is the sound of surprising inevitability.

If Joe sometimes seems hurt or angry (and which black – saints, fools and children aside – shouldn’t be?), he can also be tender. Dig on Black Narcissus, for instance, where Joe floats like a butterfly with a tone so airy he might in spots be blowing alto. That a man could participate in the moods both of Power to the People and Black Narcissus is not astonishing; that he can be wholly convincing in both worlds, and others beside, is. Another example of his breadth: the alternations between frenzy and relaxation or delicacy in Foresight and Afterthought. (in the middle of some free playing on that cut, incidentally, there’s a delightfully placed blues lick, lest anyone forget Joe’s pervasive consciousness of roots).

Perhaps his work on Opus One-Point-Five is even more impressive. His second solo is spiritually audacious: a tightrope walk between lyricism and tightly-coiled, barely suppressed aggressiveness. One slip in either direction, and the other mode will ring false as well. Joe doesn’t slip.

Finally, a word, please, about the rhythm section – ridiculous. “Rhythm section” is too limiting a term, of course, because these are three strong and original minds interlocking with Joe’s to surge and sing together. Ron does things nobody ever thought of on electric bass, as Herbie does on electric piano, and it is already a truism that each has few peers on his acoustic instrument. And Jack does everything right on this session. (Where does Miles get these pianists and bassists and drummers, one after the other?) The interplay throughout Isotope, to mention no other instances, couldn’t be more emphatic.

All of which is not to say that this is the most dynamite album of the century, or even of the year or month, because who gives a damn about such idiotic category-mongering? It is to say, though, that once upon a time, about eight albums ago, a young tenor man emerged as a leader-composer-player with something very urgent to say. It wasn’t clearly defined then, and it still isn’t, because an artist is always in the act of becoming. But at some indeterminate point along the line an interesting new talent grew into a major voice.

You can’t ask much more of a recording than that it presents a major voice in great form, with a wonderfully sympathetic context.