Joe Henderson & Woody Shaw - Jazz Patterns (2025 Real Gone Music Remastered Vinyl LP)

Joe Henderson & Woody Shaw - Jazz Patterns | Vinyl LP - 2025 Real Gone Music Reissue (RGM-1946, remastered, lacquer cut at Well Made Music)

• Live recordings from the Lighthouse Café in Hermosa Beach, September 1970, captured by the same Henderson quintet that recorded If You’re Not Part of the Solution, You’re Part of the Problem for Milestone during the same residency.
• A band that barely needs introduction: Woody Shaw on trumpet and flugelhorn, George Cables on electric piano, Ron McClure on bass, Lenny White on drums, Tony Waters on percussion, with the original two-track mixes engineered by Bernie Grundman.
• First proper reissue since the botched 1982 Everest pressing, now remastered and restored by Skip Heller and Kevin Chubirka at Haven Recording, with corrected track titles and new liner notes.

The story behind this record is almost as good as the music. Orrin Keepnews recorded Henderson’s quintet over three nights at the Lighthouse in September 1970. The best material went to Milestone for If You’re Not Part of the Solution. The outtakes sat on the shelf until Keepnews sold the two-track reference mixes to Bernie Solomon at Everest Records. Solomon released them in 1982 on his budget Archive of Folk & Jazz Music imprint under the title Jazz Patterns, with Shaw’s name added for commercial pull. The cover was ugly. Two of the three track titles were wrong and the third was misspelled. There was no recording date, no location, no engineering credit. The sound quality was poor. Almost nobody bought it, and the few who did and actually listened found themselves holding one of the great undiscovered live jazz recordings of the early 1970s. Henderson on tenor, Shaw on trumpet and flugelhorn, Cables on electric piano, McClure on bass, White on drums, Waters on percussion. Every one of them playing at a level that makes the packaging irrelevant.

Real Gone Music’s 2025 reissue fixes nearly everything the Everest pressing got wrong. Skip Heller and Kevin Chubirka remixed, remastered and restored the original tapes at Haven Recording. The track titles are corrected: “Invitation” (the Kaper standard), Henderson’s own “Punjab” (from his 1963 Blue Note debut Page One), and “What’s Mine Is Yours”, a twenty-minute Henderson original that takes up the whole of Side B. The lacquer was cut at Well Made Music. Heller’s liner notes fill in the backstory that Everest never bothered to provide. The music is loose, searching, post-bop played by a working band at the end of a residency. Shaw matches Henderson line for line. White, two years before Return to Forever, drives the rhythm with a ferocity that the better-known Milestone album only hints at. This is the version of Jazz Patterns the music always deserved.