Henderson, Fletcher (Hamilton jr) [Smack]

(b Cuthbert, GA, 18 Dec 1897; d New York, 29 Dec 1952). American jazz and dance-band leader, arranger and pianist.

1. Early years.

Henderson was born into a middle-class black family, and studied European art music with his mother, a piano teacher. He later took a degree in chemistry and mathematics at Atlanta University. In 1920 he moved to New York, where he picked up work as a song demonstrator with the Pace-Handy Music Company, an early black publishing firm. When Harry Pace founded Black Swan, the first black recording company, Henderson joined it as musical factotum. He began to put together groups to back the company’s singers, and in this way drifted into a career as a bandleader. Probably in January 1924 he began to perform in Club Alabam on Broadway. The same year he was offered a position at the Roseland Ballroom, later to become the best-known dance hall in New York. (These clubs were restricted to white customers.) Henderson’s band remained there for a decade, using the Roseland Ballroom as a springboard to national fame.

At the outset Henderson’s group was an ordinary dance band, not a jazz band, though its music was inflected with the ‘raggy’ rhythms that had been popular for some time. As such, it was no different from the thousands of dance bands that were springing up across the USA in response to the vogue for social dancing. But musicians everywhere were drawn to the new jazz music, and in 1924 Henderson brought in Louis Armstrong, whom he had heard briefly in New Orleans three years earlier, as a jazz specialist. Armstrong’s style was rapidly maturing, and his playing, with its propulsive swing and melodic invention, entranced not only Henderson’s men but other New York musicians. Although Armstrong was not the only jazz influence on New York players, he was the most important one, and Henderson’s band members began to emulate his solo style.

At about the same time the band’s music director, Don Redman, was working out what was to become the basic pattern of big-band arrangements for decades: the interplay of brass and reed sections, sometimes in call-and-response fashion, at other times with one section playing supporting riffs behind the other. Many solos were interspersed between the arranged passages. Redman and Henderson were not alone in developing this formula: the Paul Whiteman Orchestra was employing the technique in rudimentary form in 1920, but Redman and Henderson developed it fully. However, in 1924 and 1925 the band was still learning to play with a jazz feeling, and the recordings made then are notable mainly for solos by Armstrong; among these are Copenhagen (1924, Voc.), Go ’long mule (1924, Col.), Shanghai Shuffle (1924, Pathé) and Sugar Foot Stomp (1925, Col.), a reworking of King Oliver’s Dippermouth Blues. The last piece became the band’s first hit.

2. 1925–52.

Armstrong left Henderson’s band in the autumn of 1925; but the seed sown by him and others took root, and by 1926 the band was playing excellent jazz, with first-rate soloists and an ability to make the arranged passages swing. From this time until the mid-1930s the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra was one of the principal models for big jazz bands.

Until 1927 Redman wrote virtually all of the band’s arrangements, and it is difficult to estimate Henderson’s particular contribution to the development of the big-band format. However, in 1927 Redman left Henderson to become music director of McKinney’s Cotton Pickers. For the next few years Henderson depended mainly on freelance arrangers. Then, in 1931, he began providing his own arrangments, possibly as a result of the economic constraints imposed by the Depression. He proved to have a remarkable talent for it: his arrangements were spare, clean and delicate, with an easy and natural manner that made them comfortable for his musicians to play and generate an infectious swing. Among his best works from this period are Down South Camp Meeting and Wrappin’ it up (both 1934, Decca) and King Porter Stomp (recorded by Benny Goodman, 1935, Vic.).

Henderson also had a remarkable gift for discovering new talent; in steady succession he engaged virtually all of the major black jazz players of the time, many of whom, like Armstrong and Lester Young, he raised from obscurity. As a consequence few bands ever matched his in the quality of their soloists. Unfortunately Henderson lacked the traits that make a successful leader: he had little understanding of salesmanship and promotion and could not control his frequently unruly players, who were often lured away by other bandleaders; several times his bands broke up owing to his poor management. In 1934 financial problems forced him to sell some of his best arrangements to Goodman, who was then in the process of starting his own band. Although the widely-held belief that Goodman’s success was entirely due to the Henderson arrangements is untrue, they were undoubtedly an important element in Goodman’s rapid rise to popularity, which in turn triggered the enormous success of swing bands from 1935 to 1945. Henderson led bands until 1939, when he joined Goodman as a full-time staff arranger. From 1941 he returned to bandleading and writing arrangements for a living, left behind by the swing-band boom which he had played so large a part in bringing about. He suffered a severe stroke in December 1950 and was partially paralysed until his death.

Despite his lack of personal force, Henderson’s musical intelligence and taste were important factors in creating the character of big-band jazz. Although he was not alone in shaping the big-band style, his group was the principal model for this music, and its influence at second hand, through the bands of Goodman and others, was profound. His personal papers are in the holdings of the Amistad Research Center at Tulane University in New Orleans.

WORKS

(selective list)

arrangments almost certainly by Henderson; dates those earliest known performance, orchestra in parenthesis

BIBLIOGRAPHY

SchullerEJ

R. Hadlock: ‘Fletcher Henderson and Don Redman’ Jazz Masters of the Twenties (New York, 1965/R), 194–218

W.C. Allen: Hendersonia: the Music of Fletcher Henderson and his Musicians: a Bio-discography (Highland Park, NJ, 1973)

J.L. Collier: The Making of Jazz: a Comprehensive History (New York, 1978)

M. Audibert: Fletcher Henderson et son orchestre, 1924–1951: sa place dans l’histoire du jazz (Bayonne, 1983)

JAMES LINCOLN COLLIER