Terrific + Jazz = JAZZARIFIC

A true jazz icon and bandleader – Fletcher Henderson

Fletcher was never accepted by blacks as much as Duke. I don’t think the blacks of Harlem bought many of his records: they were too sophisticated, not racy enough, and sounded like a white band.

Garvin Bushell, from Jazz from the Beginning

A scholarly looking, middle-class chemistry graduate, with a penchant for baseball, Fletcher Henderson was the living antithesis of those primitive qualities held in such high regard by early jazz critics. Although he grew up in the South, Henderson had little to do with the stereotypical image of the African-American laborer picking cotton, which was still the state’s dominant rural industry during his childhood.

As a pianist, he became an adept sight-reader as a child, with a good sense of relative pitch and a broad classical repertoire – all qualities instilled in him by a demanding father – but as a young adult, Henderson had to learn how to play jazz and blues, neither of which came naturally to him.

Fletcher Henderson & his Orchestra – Shake your feet

In the longer term, Henderson’s importance lay in his role as a bandleader, and the way that, in the mid 1920′s, he and his colleagues Don Redman and, later, Benny Carter took forward the innovations of Hickman, Grofé and Whiteman to establish a paradigm for big-band arranging that lasted for the next twenty years.

By 1925, Henderson’s orchestra was the leading African-American big-band in New York, and through its extensive touring, it also established itself on a national basis.

It maintained this position until the end of the 1920′s, and Henderson’s bands of the early 1930′s were also highly regarded, although by that period there was stiff competition from Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway, among others.

Although he arranged some of his band’s very earliest discs himself, Henderson’s own significance as an arranger came much later on, in the 1930′s, when he was writing for other leaders such as Benny Goodman.

Nevertheless, the work of his 1920′s band was a very significant step on the way toward this later writing, which, by paring back his craft to its essentials, became the foundation of the universal sound of the swing era, in a way that the more subtle and varied writing of Duke Ellington, for example, did not.

Tags: big bands, fletcher henderson