Our Thing

Our Thing was recorded in September 1963, the second album Joe Henderson led for Blue Note following his debut Page One earlier that year, and it reunited him with trumpeter Kenny Dorham, who had brought the young tenor saxophonist to the label. Henderson, barely into his mid-twenties, had already distinguished himself with a big, assertive tone and a harmonically inquisitive style that set him apart from the prevailing hard-bop tenor voices of the day. The session paired Henderson's and Dorham's original compositions with a simple two-horn, no-chordal-clutter format built around Andrew Hill's spare, exploratory piano, Eddie Khan's bass and Pete La Roca's drums, giving the music an open, searching quality that pointed toward the more abstract directions jazz was taking in the mid-1960s. Dorham, an important but often underrated composer and mentor figure, contributed several of the album's most memorable themes, while Henderson's own pieces showcased the rhythmic displacement and tonal ambiguity that would become hallmarks of his mature style. Album notes from the period, written by a leading jazz critic, framed the record as a demonstration of the mutually beneficial partnership between Henderson and Dorham, with Hill's increasingly abstract harmonic sensibility pushing the group toward new territory without abandoning swing. The record has endured as one of the stronger entries in Henderson's run of 1960s Blue Note albums, valued by critics and collectors for its blend of hard-bop drive and modernist exploration, and it remains an important document of the transitional period in jazz just before the mid-decade avant-garde breakthroughs.