TT 397: "Inner Urge" by Joe Henderson

with piano by McCoy Tyner and Chick Corea

(By happenstance, today is the birthday of Joe Henderson, born on April 24, 1937.)

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Zoltán Kodály’s Háry János Suite from 1927 has a pentatonic scale over a “wrong” bass note. The melody is the D-flat pentatonic scale, the bass line is in C-flat. (This is in movement six, "Entrance of the Emperor and His Court.")

Woody Shaw took that hip sound and made it in to a jazz classic. “Zoltan’”was recorded on Larry Young’s Unity in 1965 with Joe Henderson and Elvin Jones.

JoeHen had also been paying attention to such matters. The previous year the saxophonist had produced “Inner Urge” for his classic album of the same name. “Inner Urge” is a charismatic piece that has gone into the history books as something that all aspiring jazzers work on, almost a “Giant Steps” for the 1960s.

Dave Liebman was a few years younger and watched it all unfold. In his excellent article “The Compositional Style of Joe Henderson,” Liebman makes special note of the harmony of “Inner Urge”:

LYDIAN MAJOR 7th FLAT 5 CHORDS

Joe was a big fan of the lydian scale (fourth degree of the major mode) and used its accompanying chord, the major 7th flat 5 quite often. (This chord may be more accurately called major 7th sharp 4.) The flat 5 interval was one of the signposts of the be- bop language, but its use for melodic material rather than solely as passing tones had to wait till the 1960s (and George Russell’s tome on the subject) to become part of the common vocabulary. The manner is which Joe used this chord compositionally and in his playing was a music lesson that became required homework for the next generation. (Wayne Shorter was more responsible for the lydian augmented or flat 5/sharp 5 chord.) “Inner Urge” is the classic tune for this chord using it for most of the first part of the tune, while the pure major prevails for the second half. “Shade of Jade” also has a large percentage of major 7 flat 5 chords, in this case once again with a lot of whole and half step root motion. “Afro Centric” is another composition with great use of this lydian harmonic color.

“Lydian Major 7th flat 5 chord” is correct as far it goes, but there’s something else at work. I believe that many of the best who use lydian actually think of the associated pentatonic scale first.

This is exactly what Kodály showed Woody Shaw with Háry János. If the chord is C lydian, the cats play D pentatonic. Over a C bass note, melodic shapes can be made with D, E, F#, A, B.

The root itself doesn’t appear in that pentatonic. Indeed, a strongly stated “C” on top of a C Lydian Major 7th flat 5 might be “wrong” (at least in a modern jazz context).

“A whole step above” (like D major pentatonic over C) is definitely part of the Joe Henderson style. John Coltrane, McCoy Tyner, Wayne Shorter, Woody Shaw, McCoy Tyner, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, and others: All the best players of harmonically complex ‘60s jazz had their own private tips and tricks to “undo” the stated harmony, often with a pentatonic scale replacing the given chord or progression.

This perhaps was always the way. Louis Armstrong and Lester Young can give the impression that they are playing their own private changes, with certain intervals always emphasized or certain notes always left out. Occasionally both Pops and Pres even have a nearly pentatonic attitude in their improvised melodies.

The pentatonic scale can sound very “African.” For the jazz originators, perhaps the pentatonic scale was another way to assault the structure of European harmony, another way to turn Beethoven into the blues.

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Wayne Shorter’s “E.S.P.” (recorded in 1965 with Miles Davis) has a few Lydian moments; in some ways I see “Inner Urge” and “E.S.P.” as belonging to the same family. (They were also tracked less than two months apart.)

I tried to nail Shorter down on this topic a bit, although at that moment I was thinking less about lydian and more about how melodic and harmonic structures were intervallic, especially quartal.

Ethan Iverson: Okay, McCoy Tyner’s a pivotal figure with fourth chords and you have your song “E.S.P.,” which is fourths in a very different way. Just wondering if you have anything to share with us students of the music about how fourth chords and fourth intervals got into the music.

Wayne Shorter: I don’t know. It’s just, without even thinking, it’s something like a shape. What do you do with this? Like some people try to play a solo over a harmonic configuration and they play within the chord and they embellish over, you know, eighth notes and sixteenth notes, anything like that.

But there’s a melody, an implied melody.

It’s a Miles thing: He wants to improvise over the melody of something, which seems removed from the chords. He’d say, “But it’s not removed—it’s stretched.”

And Charlie Parker said something like that before he passed, “I want to play on top of the on top of the top of the on top of.”

Shorter says that Bird said, “I want to play on top of the on top of the top of the on top of.” Is this one of the keys to the jazz greats? Charles McPherson told me, “The changes are there, but you don’t play the changes.”

At any rate, playing D pentatonic on a C chord is certainly “on top of on top of on top of.”

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The opening of “E.S.P.” almost seems like flamenco, with a sequence of E dominant, F lydian, and E dominant. While “Inner Urge” is not like flamenco, on the same JoHen album Inner Urge there’s “El Barrio,” with B phrygian, C lydian, and A dorian in close discussion.

Chick Corea used a lot flamenco references, including for both waltzes on his signature album from that era, 1968’s Now He Sings, Now He Sobs. The opening vamp of “What Was” is exactly like flamenco music, while “Now He Sings, Now He Sobs” has B minor and C lydian next to each other, a very “Spanish” sound just like “El Barrio.” The soloist can roll around D pentatonic comfortably as the bass note changes from B to C.

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“Inner Urge” is not easy; in fact it is one the hardest pieces in the whole common practice repertoire. Yet Joe Henderson, McCoy Tyner, Bob Cranshaw, and Elvin Jones casually tracked an utterly fiery and creative take in the close confines of Rudy Van Gelder’s studio on November 30, 1964. They were all in the same room, with no headphones. Elvin is playing out and the band sounds huge. (Elvin Jones at Van Gelder’s is its own category of artistic excellence, a topic that borders on alchemy and mysticism.) While the song is essentially swing, Cranshaw is not walking all the time, he is playing more of a broken but still propulsive bass line. McCoy’s whole thing is quite Cuban, the piano makes the quartet sway in a dance. The overall feeling is quite magical. If the solo order didn’t begin with a long bass statement, I’m sure this track would have made it more into the general consciousness of non-musicians.

Both JoeHen and McCoy have an epic declamatory theatrical affect in their extended improvisations. Of course, JoeHen wrote the darn thing. But McCoy also sounds like he knows the piece inside and out, despite never playing these kinds of harmonies for his normal employer, John Coltrane.

Indeed, with “Inner Urge” we are seeing a young master distance himself from his teacher. Joe Henderson was a John Coltrane disciple of the first order. “Night and Day” from the same album is even revamped with something like “Coltrane changes” — not to mention the fact that JoeHen has half the Coltrane quartet joining him in the studio!

But “Inner Urge” is not like Coltrane. It’s modal, like most of Coltrane’s music of the era, but Coltrane rarely (if ever?) used lydian except in passing. Coltrane also never wrote a piece where the bass doubled a syncopated sax melody on the head.

“Inner Urge” was incredibly new but the performance was definitive. Like “Giant Steps,” nobody started playing “Inner Urge” right away. Even JoeHen rarely included it on live gigs. But eventually the wheel turned enough times for “Inner Urge” to appear on a pair of important 90’s JoeHen releases. The trio with Rufus Reid and Al Foster on The Standard Joe (1991) is great, but the real surprise is Henderson’s own arrangement on Big Band (1996), especially because Chick Corea is guesting in the piano chair. (The rhythm section is completed with Christian McBride and Lewis Nash.)

Corea had his ups and downs: suffice to say that not all his records were as good as Now He Sings, Now He Sobs. Yet in the end, Corea was absolutely one of the anointed, one of the very few who truly commanded the language of intellectual and virtuosic ‘60s jazz. His main influence was McCoy Tyner, but Corea found his own approach within the Tyner pentatonic matrix. On “Inner Urge” Corea and Tyner are talking to each other through the decades, agreeing on certain finesses, noting the appropriate light and shade, and surprising each other with bold choices.

Abe Gold has transcribed this Corea solo and provides a scrolling-score video.

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There are no conventional cadences in “Inner Urge.” The harmony just goes. The last chord is G major, but nobody would say that “Inner Urge” is in the key of G. I suspect it is this very unresolved quality that has made “Inner Urge” a favorite of jazz students. One never has to risk a resolution that feels square; instead, one is suspended in perpetual hipness.

Again, this is not like John Coltrane. As free as Coltrane got, the opening and closing tonic of a Coltrane track is rarely in doubt.

This kind of “non-tonic” logic found in “Inner Urge” and other pieces from the era is quite different from bebop. In bebop, tension and release was tied to rhythm in specific ways. This new “non-tonic” logic is tied to chord scales and the pentatonic scale. Inevitably, some of the basic information of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk, and Tadd Dameron would get lost, and the music would suffer in the hands of many practitioners — some quite famous — who could play “Inner Urge” but could not play rhythm changes.

This critique does not apply to Joe Henderson himself, nor to any other of the true greats of the ‘60s. But something in the bigger picture was diminished, and by some lights, “Inner Urge” was part of the problem.

Late in life, JoeHen would play Charlie Parker’s “Confirmation” and “Passport” in a trio with Charlie Haden and Al Foster; an epic version of “Passport” is on an official record, The Montreal Tapes tracked in 1989. For me, this one of the greatest performances of rhythm changes…ever!

Over the previous thirty years the maestro would have heard chord scales almost abolish bebop, especially at the student level where all the money was. It’s possible that with “Passport,” JoeHen was stating for the record and for all time, “To be clear, this is how it goes.”