Fletcher Henderson

For more information on Fletcher Hamilton Henderson, Jr., visit Britannica.com.

(b Cuthbert, ga, 18 Dec 1898; d New York, 29 Dec 1952). American jazz bandleader, arranger and pianist. He began leading bands while he was house pianist for the Black Swan record company (1922) and in 1923 formed a group which, the following year, moved to the Roseland Ballroom, New York; it became the most important pioneering big band, setting the pattern for most later ones. He employed such musicians as Louis Armstrong, Coleman Hawkins and Benny Carter as soloists and his arranger, Don Redman, established what was to become the accepted use of brass and reed sections in jazz arranging. Henderson made most of his own arrangements from 1927, and in 1934 arranged for Benny Goodman, joining him in 1939 as staff arranger. He continued to work with his own bands until 1950.

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Fletcher Henderson (1897 - 1952) was a key figure in the development of the ensemble jazz style known as swing. As a bandleader and composer himself, and as an arranger for the Benny Goodman Band in that group's golden years just before World War II, he nurtured both the sound of swing and the players who made the music.

Henderson did not grow up playing jazz or improvised music of any kind, and as a musician himself, he was no more than adequate. Historians have differed as to his significance in jazz history. Some argue that the swing genre sprang practically full-blown from his arranger's pen, while other better-known musicians reaped the benefits of his discoveries. Other writers contend that Hen-derson happened to be at the center of a vital musical scene in New York City just as the new music was taking shape, and that other musicians deserve equal credit for swing's artistic accomplishments and growth in popularity. Henderson's biographer Jeffrey Magee takes a middle ground, writing in The Uncrowned King of Swing: Fletcher Henderson and Big Band Jazz that "to get at what Henderson did, it might be best to describe him as a musical catalyst, facilitator, collaborator, organizer, transmitter, medium, channel, funnel, and 'synergizer,' if such a word existed."

Studied Classical Music

Henderson was born in Cuthbert, Georgia, on December 18, 1897. His father was an educator, and both his parents played the piano. Henderson enjoyed an unusually good education for an African American in the South at the height of segregation. His father mortgaged the family home to the hilt to finance his son's education. Henderson attended Howard Normal School, a black prep school in Atlanta, and then majored in chemistry at Atlanta University, graduating in 1920. He began taking classical piano lessons at age six. His parents steered him clear of ragtime piano and the other African-American musical traditions of the rural South, but he developed sharp musical instincts and a good ear that allowed him to learn new musical traditions quickly. In the Atlanta University chapel he served as the school organist.

With ideas of studying chemistry at Columbia University, Henderson moved to New York in 1920. Higher education, in the sciences as elsewhere, was still highly segregated, and he ended up working as an assistant in a chemistry lab. Music actually offered him greater opportunities. Rooming with a pianist, he filled in for his roommate on a riverboat job and was noticed and hired for further work by Fred "Deacon" Johnson, an influential booker who had worked with the Clef Club orchestra, the leading black ensemble of the pre-jazz years. Soon Henderson had a full-time job as a song plugger - a salesman who promoted songs to artists - with the Pace & Handy music publishing firm, recently formed by legendary blues arranger W.C. Handy and Atlanta University alumnus Harry Pace.

In 1921 Henderson moved on with Pace to the new black-oriented Black Swan record label. The classically trained Henderson turned out written musical arrangements quickly for use in the Black Swan studios, and Henderson was picked to lead the backing group for Black Swan artist Ethel Waters on her national tour. It was on that tour that Henderson began to grasp the energy of blues, jazz, and popular African-American rhythms. "On that tour Fletcher wouldn't give me what I call the 'damn-it-to-hell bass,' that chump-chump stuff that real jazz needs," Waters recalled (as quoted by Magee). She gave Henderson some piano rolls by the Harlem "stride" pianist James P. Johnson. "To prove to me he could do it, Fletch began to practice," Waters said. "He got to be so perfect, listening to James P. Johnson play on the player piano, that he could press down the keys as the roll played, never missing a note. Naturally he began to be identified with that kind of music, which isn't his kind at all."

Back in New York, Henderson began to show up on records as accompanist to an increasingly wide variety of singers. The piano or small-band accompaniments heard on the mid-1920s recordings of jazz-influenced "classic blues" singers such as Bessie Smith and Gertrude "Ma" Rainey are often Henderson's. His name became better known among musicians, and by 1923 he had joined with an eight-piece band of his own, performing at New York's Club Alabam. The college-educated Henderson was picked as leader because it was thought that he projected the personable image the group would need in order to crack the New York high society market. Henderson proved to be an astute judge of emerging talent. His 1923 band included future saxophone superstar Coleman Hawkins, then 19 years old, and another saxophonist with arranging talents, Don Redman. By the following year, when Henderson settled in for a long residence at New York's Roseland Ballroom, his band had expanded to ten and then to sixteen musicians, and had taken on a trumpeter recently arrived from New Orleans - Louis Armstrong.

Added Jazz Elements to Dance Styles

Henderson experienced success partly because he identified an unfilled niche: a top-notch African-American dance band that could read music and compete on equal terms with white ballroom orchestras like that of Paul Whiteman was bound to make a splash among both black and white audiences. For downtown appearances, trumpeter Howard Scott recalled (as quoted by Magee), that Henderson "was a very strict leader. Every night you had to … stand inspection. He'd look at your hair, your face, see if you shaved, your shoes, see if they're shined. You had to be perfect to suit him." In Harlem, musicians sought to emulate Henderson by learning to read music. The big bands of the swing era, which depended partly on musical notation, would soon be stocked with players who had either worked directly with Henderson or been inspired by him indirectly.

But Henderson did not simply imitate the sound of white bands. Armstrong, who remained with Henderson for 14 months, and the other young jazz players Henderson hired, pushed the sound of the band toward the freer, more energetic type of jazz that was flowering as Americans became more and more aware of the non-notated ensemble improvisations coming out of New Orleans and traveling northward toward the Midwest. Armstrong and Henderson both characterized their relationship as a mutually beneficial exchange. Don Redman began writing arrangements that balanced the talents of individual improvisers with varied large-band textures, and Henderson's band began to gain popularity beyond New York. He took over some of the arranging chores in 1927 after Redman departed to form his own group, and the music he made during this period features the textures that became characteristic of swing in general: interaction between brass and reed sections, a smooth surface with plenty of dance-floor energy coming from drummers, and solo interludes that provided a space for the artistry of talented individual players.

Saxophonist Benny Carter, another important entertainer who emerged from the Henderson band, also wrote arrangements for the band, creating effective showcases for his own playing. The innovative arrangements of the Henderson band were closely followed by other musicians. One who credited Henderson as a direct influence was bandleader Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington, who raised the Hendersonian art of showcasing distinctive individual players to a level of perfection. White clarinetist and bandleader Benny Goodman was another Henderson admirer who began purchasing Henderson's arrangements and compositions. That helped Henderson and his big band stay afloat financially when Henderson suffered injuries in an auto accident in 1928. But Goodman's appropriation of Henderson's material also disguised Henderson's contribution to jazz at a key point in its history - the emergence of swing onto a national stage. One of the Benny Goodman band's most-played pieces, "King Porter Stomp," was based heavily on a Henderson arrangement. But the Great Depression severely curtailed the activities of recording companies, and the musical activities of Henderson himself during the Depression years are poorly documented. Even so, Henderson pieces like "The Stampede" and "Rocky Mountain Blues" became well-known jazz standards.

Henderson led a band at the Harlem club Connie's Inn in the early 1930s and continued to record sporadically. His popularity dropped somewhat with the emergence of newer swing bands led by Ellington, Count Basie, the Dorsey Brothers, and other musicians. His business skills were inferior to his musical ones, and jazz historian John Lincoln Collier (as quoted in American Heritage) noted that Henderson had "an almost pathological lack of self-assertiveness." Henderson's group disbanded when he ran out of money to pay them after a Detroit engagement in 1934. He had not lost his eye for talent, however; a new group he formed for a 1936 residency at Chicago's Grand Terrace ballroom included future trumpet star Roy Eldridge. Henderson's role with the Goodman band expanded as the band rose to the top of the charts, thanks to appearances on the Camel Caravan radio program sponsored by the R.J. Reynolds tobacco firm. Henderson took a full-time job as staff arranger with the bandleader in 1939, dissolving his own group and sometimes playing piano in the newly integrated Goodman band.

Toured in Battle of Sexes Act

Goodman's recordings made between 1935 and 1940 came to be seen as emblematic of swing at its height, and Henderson was a key unseen presence behind their creation. Henderson's work for Goodman brought financial rewards, but he soon gravitated back to the bandstand himself. During World War II he formed a band that took on the International Sweethearts of Rhythm, an all female Jazzband, in a touring "Swing Battle of the Sexes." After the war he continued to work with a diminished Goodman band and came full circle by touring as accompanist once again for Ethel Waters. Always quick to catch on to new trends, Henderson adapted to the decline of swing by forming a sextet that appeared at New York's Café Society club. In the late 1940s he was slowed by a variety of health problems.

Henderson suffered a series of strokes beginning in 1950, and became partly paralyzed. He died in New York City on December 28, 1952. The specific talents of the swing giants who came after him eclipsed his pioneering contributions, and Henderson's name was forgotten for a time. Reissued LPs helped revive his musical reputation, as did the historical studies of jazz that were undertaken in the late twentieth century; enthusiasts and jazz scholars traced the careers of jazz musicians in the 1920s and 1930s, and they noticed how many jazz career paths intersected with Henderson's.

Whatever his specific role, it is indisputable that the bands Henderson led in the 1920s and 1930s were on the forefront of new developments in jazz. Henderson drew on his unusual musical background to facilitate the incorporation of improvisational jazz styles from New Orleans and other areas of the country into the musical life of New York, and into a dance band tradition that relied on arrangements written out in musical notation. The new music that developed under Henderson's leadership struck a balance between improvisation and compositional planning - a balance that continues to shape jazz today.

Books

Bushell, Garvin, as told to Mark Tucker, Jazz from the Beginning, University of Michigan Press, 1990.

Contemporary Black Biography, vol. 34, Gale, 2002.

Magee, Jeffrey, The Uncrowned King of Swing: Fletcher Henderson and Big Band Jazz, Oxford, 2005.

Porter, Lewis, and Michael Ullman, Jazz from Its Origins to the Present, Prentice Hall, 1993.

Schuller, Gunther, The Swing Era, Oxford, 1989.

Periodicals

American Heritage, November 1994.

Online

"Fletcher Henderson," All Music Guide, http://www.allmusic.com (February 8, 2006).

"Fletcher Henderson," Jazz: A Film by Ken Burns, http://www.pbs.org/jazz/biography/artist_id_henderson_fletcher.html (February 13, 2006).

"Fletcher Henderson (1897 - 1952)," Harlem 1900 - 1940: the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, http://www.si.umich.edu/CHICO/Harlem/text/fhenderson.html (February 13, 2006).

"James Fletcher Henderson," Red Hot Jazz, http://www.redhotjazz.com (February 13, 2006).

jazz musician; bandleader; music arranger and orchestrator; pianist

Personal Information

Born James Fletcher Henderson on December 18, 1897, in Cuthbert, GA; son of a school teacher and principal; married Leora Meaux, 1925; died December 28, 1952, in New York, NY.
Education: Atlanta University, B.S., chemistry, 1920.

Career

Jazz bandleader, arranger, and pianist. Pace & Handy publishing firm, song demonstrator, 1920; Black Swan record label, musical director, 1921-23; formed band, early 1920s; resident band at Roseland Ballroom, New York, 1924-36; began writing own arrangements, late 1920s; sold arrangements to Benny Goodman and others, 1930s; led band at Grand Terrace club, Chicago, 1936; joined Benny Goodman band as staff arranger, 1939; toured with own band during World Ward II; toured as pianist with Ethel Waters, 1949; formed sextet in New York City, 1950.

Life's Work

From different perspectives, Fletcher Henderson has been viewed as the creator of the jazz style known as swing, and as merely a working musician who happened to be present as the style took shape. What is beyond doubt is that the bands Henderson led in the 1920s and 1930s were vitally significant incubators of new developments in jazz. Henderson played a key role in bringing improvisatory jazz styles from New Orleans and other areas of the country to New York, where they merged with a dance-band tradition that relied heavily on arrangements written out in musical notation. The new music that developed at Henderson's hands and under his mentorship allowed the composer's art to flourish, yet left room for the improvisatory talents of individual jazz soloists--striking a balance that has influenced jazz ever since.

Born in Cuthbert, Georgia, on December 18, 1897, James Fletcher Henderson enjoyed the best education available to an African American in the pre-Civil Rights South. His father was teacher and later a school principal, and both his parents played the piano. Henderson started piano studies at age six, but it was the classical compositions of Europe that he was taught; his parents frowned upon vernacular or down-home black traditions. He attended prep school in Atlanta and then moved on to Atlanta University, graduating in 1920 with a degree in chemistry.

Music More Lucrative Than Chemistry

Henderson moved north in 1920 hoping for a career as a research chemist, but the best he could do in the still-segregated sciences was a job as a lab assistant. His musical talents turned out to be more useful when he was hired the following year by the Pace & Handy music publishing firm and then by the new black-oriented Black Swan record label. His classical background and music-notation skills attracted notice at Black Swan, and when the company prepared for a national tour by its prime property, blues vocalist Ethel Waters, Henderson became the leader of her backing group.

The experience gave Henderson an education in African-American rhythms. "On that tour Fletcher wouldn't give me what I call the 'damn-it-to-hell bass,' that chump-chump stuff that real jazz needs," Waters recalled in her autobiography (as quoted in The Music of Black Americans). She dispatched Henderson to study piano-roll recordings of the Harlem "stride" pianist James P. Johnson. Then, as he led bands in various New York venues in the early 1920s, he proved to have a keen ear for emerging solo talents. His ten-piece band in 1923 included saxophonists Don Redman and Coleman Hawkins, and by the following year, when he began a 12-year residence at New York's Roseland Ballroom, the band had grown to 16 players. One of them was a recent arrival from New Orleans, a cornetist named Louis Armstrong who remained with Henderson for 14 months.

Band's Arrangements Shaped Swing Style

With Redman writing the band's arrangements and all the instrumentalists in the band responding in inspired ways to Armstrong's pathbreaking innovations as a jazz soloist, Henderson's band evolved into one of the top ensembles in the country. Redman's arrangements and Henderson's own, which he began to write after Redman left to form his own band in 1927, contained the features familiar to anyone who has ever heard a classic swing recording: sectional interplay between brasses and reeds, a smooth sheen that did not foreclose a propulsive dance-floor energy, and well-conceived interludes that called upon the improvisatory skills and styles of individual players. Another important contributor to the Henderson sound was saxophonist Benny Carter, in whose arrangements the Henderson band became a natural extension of his own saxophone playing.

One bandleader influenced heavily by Henderson's innovations was Duke Ellington, who credited Henderson with inspiring the sound toward which he aimed in his initial forays into bandleadership. Another was the white clarinetist Benny Goodman, who began purchasing Henderson's arrangements. That helped keep Henderson afloat during a difficult period that resulted from the Great Depression slowdown and from the aftereffects of an auto crash that temporarily sidelined Henderson in 1928. With few records being made at the height of the Depression in the early 1930s, Henderson's style at the point when swing was developing and becoming a distinct genre is sparsely documented. But Goodman and other musicians have repeatedly attested to Henderson's importance. Goodman's trademark number, "King Porter Stomp," derives largely from a Henderson arrangement.

Became Staff Arranger for Goodman

Henderson's own popularity suffered somewhat in the 1930s as his band began to face competition from those led by Ellington, Count Basie, the Dorsey Brothers, and other musicians. His band temporarily broke up when he ran out of money to pay them after a Detroit trip in 1934. He continued to spot and hire important emerging players, however, featuring trumpeter Roy Eldridge during an extended 1936 engagement at Chicago's Grand Terrace club. In 1939, Henderson disbanded his group and went to work for Benny Goodman as a staff arranger, an occupation that had consumed much of his creative energy for the previous several years in any event.

Thus the ensemble sound heard on Goodman's classic recordings just before the outbreak of World War II was largely Henderson's creation. Henderson gained a measure of financial security from his time with Goodman, but soon gravitated back to the bandstand himself. During World War II, he led a new band of his own, and after the war, continuing his work for Goodman, he served as an accompanist once again for Ethel Waters, who launched a revival tour. As the large swing bands proved less and less financially viable in the years after the war, Henderson adapted by forming a sextet that appeared at New York's Café Society club.

Partly paralyzed by a stroke in 1950, Henderson died in New York on December 28, 1952. Eclipsed by the giants of swing who came after him, Henderson for a time was insufficiently appreciated for his contributions. Reissue LPS featuring his work helped resuscitate his reputation, but what really did the job was the rise of serious historical studies of jazz in the late twentieth century; musicologists traced the careers of jazz musicians between the wars and found that the paths of many of them intersected with Henderson's career. "Henderson did his work well," noted jazz historians Lewis Porter and Michael Ullman in Jazz from Its Origins to the Present. "By 1934, there was a host of fine big bands, many stocked with ex-Henderson writers and players."

Works

Selected discography

• A Study in Frustration: The Fletcher Henderson Story, Thesaurus of Classic Jazz, Columbia/Legacy, 1994.
• Introduction to Fletcher Henderson: 1921-1941, Best of Jazz, 1996.
• Under a Harlem Moon, ASV.
• Rarest Fletcher, Vol. 1: 1923-24, MCA.
• First Impressions: 1924-1931, MCA.
• Swingin' the Thing: 1931-34, MCA.
• Fletcher Henderson and the Dixie Stompers: 1925-1928, DRG.

Further Reading

Books

• Contemporary Musicians, volume 16, Gale Research, 1996.
• Dictionary of American Biography, Supplement 5: 1951-1955, American Council of Learned Societies, 1977.
• Notable Black American Men, Gale, 1998.
• Porter, Lewis, and Michael Ullman, Jazz from Its Origins to the Present, Prentice Hall, 1993.
• Schuller, Gunther, The Swing Era, Oxford, 1989.
• Southern, Eileen, The Music of Black Americans, 3rd ed., Norton, 1998.

Online

• All Music Guide, http://allmusic.com.

— James M. Manheim

• Born: December 18, 1897, Cuthbert, GA
• Died: December 29, 1952, New York, NY
• Active: '20s, '30s, '40s, '50s
• Genres: Jazz
• Instrument: Piano, Arranger, Leader
• Representative Albums: "Swing's the Thing (1931-1934)," "A Study in Frustration/Thesaurus of Classic Jazz," "Rarest Fletcher, Vol. 1 (1923-1924)"
• Representative Songs: "Sugar Foot Stomp," "King Porter Stomp," "Shanghai Shuffle"

Biography

Fletcher Henderson was very important to early jazz as leader of the first great jazz big band, as an arranger and composer in the 1930s, and as a masterful talent scout. Between 1923-1939, quite an all-star cast of top young black jazz musicians passed through his orchestra, including trumpeters Louis Armstrong, Joe Smith, Tommy Ladnier, Rex Stewart, Bobby Stark, Cootie Williams, Red Allen, and Roy Eldridge; trombonists Charlie Green, Benny Morton, Jimmy Harrison, Sandy Williams, J.C. Higginbottham, and Dickie Wells; clarinetist Buster Bailey; tenors Coleman Hawkins (1924-1934), Ben Webster, Lester Young (whose brief stint was not recorded), and Chu Berry; altoists Benny Carter, Russell Procope, and Hilton Jefferson; bassists John Kirby and Israel Crosby; drummers Kaiser Marshall, Walter Johnson, and Sid Catlett; guest pianist Fats Waller; and such arrangers as Don Redman, Benny Carter, Edgar Sampson, and Fletcher's younger brother Horace Henderson. And yet, at the height of the swing era, Henderson's band was little-known.

Fletcher Henderson had a degree in chemistry and mathematics, but when he came to New York in 1920 with hopes of becoming a chemist, the only job he could find (due to the racism of the times) was as a song demonstrator with the Pace-Handy music company. Harry Pace soon founded the Black Swan label, and Henderson, a versatile but fairly basic pianist, became an important contributor behind the scenes, organizing bands and backing blues vocalists. Although he started recording as a leader in 1921, it was not until January 1924 that he put together his first permanent big band. Using Don Redman's innovative arrangements, he was soon at the top of his field. His early recordings (Henderson made many records during 1923-1924) tend to be both futuristic and awkward, with strong musicianship but staccato phrasing. However, after Louis Armstrong joined up in late 1924 and Don Redman started contributing more swinging arrangements, the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra had no close competitors artistically until the rise of Duke Ellington in 1927. By then, Henderson's band (after a period at the Club Alabam) was playing regularly at the Roseland Ballroom but, due to the bandleader being a very indifferent businessman, the all-star outfit recorded relatively little during its peak (1927-1930).

With the departure of Redman in 1927, and the end of interim periods when Benny Carter and Horace Henderson wrote the bulk of the arrangements, Fletcher himself developed into a top arranger by the early '30s. However, the Depression took its toll on the band, and the increased competition from other orchestras (along with some bad business decisions and the loss of Coleman Hawkins) resulted in Henderson breaking up the big band in early 1935. Starting in 1934, he began contributing versions of his better arrangements to Benny Goodman's new orchestra (including "King Porter Stomp," "Sometimes I'm Happy," and "Down South Camp Meeting"), and ironically Goodman's recordings were huge hits at a time when Fletcher Henderson's name was not known to the general public. In 1936, he put together a new orchestra and immediately had a hit in "Christopher Columbus," but after three years he had to disband again in 1939. Henderson worked as a staff arranger for Goodman and even played in B.G.'s Sextet for a few months (although his skills on the piano never did develop much). He struggled through the 1940s, leading occasional bands (including one in the mid-'40s that utilized some arrangements by the young Sun Ra). In 1950, Henderson had a fine sextet with Lucky Thompson, but a stroke ended his career and led to his death in 1952. Virtually all of Fletcher Henderson's recordings as a leader (and many are quite exciting) are currently available on the Classics label and in more piecemeal fashion domestically. ~ Scott Yanow, All Music Guide

1924-1938 Buy this CD	Alternative Takes, Vol. 2: 1926-1936 Buy this CD	1924, Vol. 1 Buy this CD	1923-1924 Buy this CD	Introduction to Fletcher Henderson: His Best Recordings 1921-1941 Buy this CD
Harmony & Vocalion Sessions, Vol. 1: 1925-1926 Buy this CD	Radio Rhythm Buy this CD	Ken Burns Jazz Buy this CD	Harmony & Vocalion Sessions, Vol. 2: 1927-1928 Buy this CD	Jazz After Hours Buy this CD

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