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Henry The Navigator
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Joe Henry's new album, Blood From Stars, continues his exploration in musical atmospheres. By Brian Wise.
Prince Henry the Navigator, the son of King João of Portugal, was born in 1394 and is most famous for the voyages of discovery that he organised and financed that eventually led to the rounding of Africa and the establishment of sea routes to the Indies. Henry (Dom Henrique) was said to be learned and scientific man but for much of the early part of his career, his explorations failed to make him either famous or recoup his investments. However, in his later years he was to find wider recognition as he became fascinated in other cultures and opened up new trade routes and territories.
Nearly 700 years later, musician Joe Henry has been on a similar, if more ethereal, journey of exploration – a musical one that has taken him through many styles and genres. For the past 20 years he has released a series of increasingly complex and acclaimed albums, culminating in his latest, Blood From Stars. He has also enabled other musicians and singers to reach their potential through his production.
A scan of Henry’s credits over just the past five years will attest to his musical explorations: Solomon Burke, Ani DiFranco, Aimee Mann, Susan Tedeschi, Bettye Lavette, Elvis Costello and Allen Toussaint, Loudon Wainwright III, Rodney Crowell, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Salif Keita, Mose Allison and Harry Belafonte.
Like other great producers, Henry’s name on an album is an imprimatur that will ensure you have to check out what is within. Unlike some other producers, however, Henry never seems to impose himself on a recording session; rather he empowers those with whom he works to find their true musical identity.
This aspect of Henry’s personality is immediately evident when we meet by phone to talk about his own latest recording. Just over halfway through our all too brief 20-minute conversation I realise that we have talked about everyone but Joe Henry!
Speaking from his new home in the historic Garfield House in South Pasadena, Henry opens the conversation with the news that he is producing a new album for the great Harry Belafonte, then lobs in the fact that he is about to work with jazz legend Mose Allison.
The word that immediately springs to mind when Henry tells me the news is ‘incredible.’
“It is incredible,” he agrees. “You know, Harry is 82 and he is an electric individual, and electrified individual.
“That is one out of left field, Joe,” I say.
“Tell me about it,” he laughs. “I had been talking to him and meeting with him since February about a couple of projects: one a big musical component to a documentary that he has been making for years about his life and about people he has encountered in his life, and then an album. We are jumping into both of those things as one overlapping project. We ended up doing a one-off in New York because he wanted to collaborate with the great African singer Baaba Maal. So I was in a session with Harry and Baaba Maal and, believe me, wondering how I got there.”
“It was just incredible,” he continues. “I mean I have a hard time explaining to you how significant I think Harry Belafonte has been musically and socially: his deep commitment to the civil rights movement very early on; his dedication to Dr King; how much he personally bank rolled that movement; and, how much he helped conceptualise the movement and how he contributed to the musical landscape. But I could still be sitting with him as I was last evening in his apartment in New York - it’s dream like.”
Then Henry mentions that he is about to start work with jazz great, 81-year-old Mose Allison, to whom Van Morrison and Ben Sidran paid tribute on the album Tell Me Something, and who is hugely influential on a whole range of artists from the ‘60s on.
”That will be great,” agrees Henry. “So, I’m reeling from the company I’m keeping right now.”
“He is a great character,” observes Henry of Allison, who adds that he put Mose on the bill for a festival he was curating in Germany last year.
“I’d been a fan of his since I was a teenager and I remember sitting by the side of the stage, His songs aren’t long and he blew through 17 or 18 - just this fantastic thing after another. I just had my head spun around and the whole five days we were there together I was just scheming, ‘Oh God, what could I possibly do to stick my hand into his frame.’ I was mad to do something and he said, ‘Oh, no I’m through making records, I play shows and I’m through with that.’ But his wife, who I got on tremendously well with and who is a retired high school teacher, encouraged me to keep knocking on the door. So I spent months chipping away until I could see some interest on his horizon and then I just kept fully chasing it.”
Henry laughs when I mention that my favourite quote from Mose was when he said the biggest impediment to his career was that most people thought he was dead.
“He sounds like Mark Twain,” he says. “A couple of things that he says could just be Mark Twain.
Not only was Allison a keen observer of personal foibles but he made some profound observations about society, though his songs were wrapped in a cloak of humour. Many of Allison’s songs remain as relevant now as when they were originally recorded, sometimes decades ago.
“Well, that was the beginning of my sort of luring him into my basement studio,” admits Henry. “There was a particular handful of songs that he was playing that he wrote in the ‘60s that spoke. Before the elections, late August last year, I sat with a pile of songs that he wrote in the ‘60s that were so timely and I said, ‘If nothing else you could re-record those songs because they need to be heard again - and heard in a new way because they are speaking with such clarity now.’
“We got beyond the concept of just re-recording a bunch of his old songs but that gave me an excuse to start talking to him about thinking about if we were going to do something together, what would we do? He is still writing some songs but not as many as we did when he was younger. But I purely believe as I watched him – and I care so much about an artist who grows up, who has life experiences to share, and I really do. I really believe in the people who do it for a life time, not just people who are good but people like Mose and Harry who have dedicated an enormous life time to the craft - that I might be some part of their story in some tiny way. I’m a facilitator.”
Another veteran musician who has also recently benefited from Henry’s touch is folk troubadour Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, with whom he recorded the brilliant album of blues covers in A Stranger Here, featuring guest appearances from David Hidalgo from Los Lobos, Greg Leisz and Van Dyke Parks.
“All of us of us who were on that session, the four days, felt like something unique had happened,” recalls Henry. “I think every musician involved at some point in the weeks that followed the sessions made a point of calling or sending an email saying ‘that one was really a completely unique, special.’ I don’t over use that word. It was a really beautiful thing and Jack is an incredibly big-hearted person. I admire that he showed up to do something he hadn’t done before and he completely trusted the process and trusted himself He threw himself in like a great actor. It was an amazing week of my life.”
“It’s great to be able to hear someone of Rambling Jack’s history still,” he adds. “I guess Dylan’s still doing the same thing, still making an incredible record at his age. It’s life affirming for those of us who don’t want to have to stop doing what we want to do.”
In Henry’s case, his own solo recording career has taken him across 23 years and arrived at a place where he is exploring new sounds that make his albums distinctive and compelling. Added to his previous albums this decade - Scar, Tiny Voices, Civilians – it completes an incredibly impressive body of work.
‘Nobody knows the man that I keep hid,’ sings Henry on ‘The Man I Keep Hid.’ It is an apt image, as Henry’s music requires some exploration itself before it reveals itself fully. The song features a striding Dixieland band (perhaps an influence of his recent recording with Allen Toussaint) and sounds at first as if it could have been recorded in the 1920s. When Henry’s voice arrives it is as if he is imagining the song being performed in Preservation Hall. Similarly, other songs show just as fertile an imagination, lyrically and musically. Like other albums from Henry it is really worth the effort to revisit Blood From Stars. You’ll pick up a lot of other things: like the guitar embellishment in ‘Suit On A Frame’ or the trumpet solo on ‘Bellwether.’ Occasionally, it is easy to believe that you are listening to a jazz record.
Henry’s studio accomplices on the album include guitarist Marc Ribot (who also plays cornet), drummer Jay Bellerose, pianist Jason Moran and bassist David Piltch (with whom Henry toured Australia earlier this year). Henry's teenage son Levon makes an impressive debut on saxophone.
“Well, he has just graduated from high school,” says Henry of his son, who has already played three times at the Montreal Jazz Festival. “He was still in high school when we were making this record and the rest of us would be working downstairs having to wait for him to get home from school. We started picking up a song and I was like, ‘We’ll just leave that one until he gets home from school at 4.’ It was a funny dynamic to have to juggle but he is an incredibly gifted and dedicated musician and he is actually going off to The New School in New York in August to do his studies. [The school contains Manne’s College for music students]. He has had an enormous amount of life experience as a musician and he doesn’t have a drivers licence.”
“I didn’t sit down and brow beat him with it,” responds Henry when I ask him if he was responsible for inculcating his son with a love of jazz music. “I listened to everything and when he was really young he heard everything.”
Henry says that he asked his son to load some of his CDs onto his iPod before he went on tour and discovered that Levon was immersing himself in it.
“One evening around Christmas time,” he recalls, “we were sitting around and completely out of the blue he made the comment, ‘Hey, Sketches of Spain is a great record’ and ‘actually all the stuff of Miles and Gil Evans is really great’. I was so stunned. I didn’t know that not only did he recognise the stuff of Miles but that he recognised that something significantly different was going on with Miles when he collaborated with Gil Evans. Then I’d say what happened was that he heard Horace Silver’s album Songs For My Father and Joe Henderson blew his mind. That was the beginning and then he went deep into Lester Young and Hank Mobley and that was the beginning of his path.”
Henry employs some of the same sorts of techniques that the jazz greats used to create works of atmosphere. I suggest to Henry that his work might be considered to be ‘jazz’ in the broadest sense of the word.
“I have always had hesitated to say such,” he replies. “I worked with a lot of great jazz musicians and what I like is the point of view and the freedom that they bring to their particular expression. I do think I work like a jazz musician, I would never call myself one. But I do think the idea of making records is always improvisational space on a form. I work really hard so that when I come into the studio the piece of writing is pretty well set and then hats are off. I’m just always thrilled to see where it might go. And everybody works the way the jazz musicians, I think, have traditionally worked.”
Henry thinks that his previous album Civilians, formidable in itself, was a lot more ‘mannered,’ ‘folky and contained’ and that for his latest album he wanted the production to be ‘invisible.’
“I don’t want it to seem produced,” he explains, “In the case of Blood From Stars I really wanted the production to be – and it was true for Tiny Voices as well - I wanted it to be a visible player on the stage. I wanted it to be the posture, the sonic identity of the record to read as a very deliberate and constructed thing.”
“I crossfade a lot of it and stitch a lot of the songs together and I try to create the sensation of a film happening,” says Henry, “so that once you’ve jumped onto the beginning of it you are at least encouraged to follow the whole story. It’s not a linear narrative but there is an arc that I believe the record follows. When you asked me about intention, I did have a very conscious thought that it was going to be a much more electric record, a lot more emotionally raw, a lot more frayed ends. It needed to feel more electrified literally and figuratively.
Having mentioned film, Henry mentions that he did the soundtrack to the new Uma Thurman film Motherhood, which premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival to rave reviews. As well as working with Harry Belafonte and Mose Allison he has also produced the new album for blues trio the Carolina Chocolate Drops. It looks like another busy year for one of the best producers in the business, who also happens to also be one of the most interesting and challenging singer songwriters of the past two decades.
Blood From Stars is available now through Shock Records.
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