Henderson, Michael A00010
Woodfox, Albert A00009
Thursday, August 11, 2022
A00010 - Michael Henderson
Michael Henderson, Funk Bassist Turned Crooner, Dies at 71
He was a sideman with Stevie Wonder and Miles Davis before embarking on a successful second career as a singer of soulful, romantic ballads.
Michael Henderson, a self-taught bassist who performed and recorded in the 1960s and ’70s with Stevie Wonder and Miles Davis, then remade himself as a popular soulful balladeer and songwriter, died on Tuesday at his home in Dallas, Ga., a suburb of Atlanta. He was 71.
His son, Michael Jr., said the cause was cancer.
Mr. Henderson began his career early. He was about 14 and on tour with the Detroit Emeralds, an R&B group, when he met Mr. Wonder at a theater in Chicago.
“There was a piano upstairs where the dressing rooms were,” Mr. Henderson said in the liner notes to “Take Me I’m Yours: The Buddah Years Anthology” (2018), a two-CD collection of his records from the 1970s and ’80s released by Soul Music Records. “Stevie was playing something I’d heard before, so I got my bass and sat down next to him. He started playing, and I started playing right along with him.”
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Mr. Wonder soon hired him. For the next five years, Mr. Henderson toured with Mr. Wonder while also working as a session musician for Motown Records. He said he had learned all he could from the influential Motown bassist James Jamerson, who would sometimes come to clubs or recording sessions where Mr. Henderson was playing.
“I stayed close to James’s sound but began adding in my little stuff every now and then,” he said in the “Anthology” liner notes. “I’d go up the neck and find higher notes.”
Mr. Henderson’s skills had advanced enough to pique Miles Davis’s interest when he heard him play with Mr. Wonder’s band in 1970 at the Copacabana in Manhattan. Davis had already begun using electric instruments and rock rhythms on “Bitches Brew” and other albums; now he wanted to take his music in more of a funk direction and decided to hire Mr. Henderson, who was not a jazz musician, to replace Dave Holland, who was best known as an upright bassist but who had begun playing the electric bass with Davis.
When the show was over, Mr. Henderson recalled in a 2017 interview for the website Lee Bailey’s Eurweb, which covers urban entertainment, sports and politics, Davis came backstage and told Mr. Wonder that he was “taking” his bass player.
Over the next few years, Mr. Henderson recorded a string of albums with Davis, including “A Tribute to Jack Johnson,” “Live-Evil” and “On the Corner.” In a 1997 review of CD reissues of five Davis albums from 1969 to 1973, the New York Times critic Ben Ratliff cited “Live-Evil” and “In Concert: Live at Philharmonic Hall” as evidence of Mr. Henderson’s noticeable impact on Mr. Davis’s band.
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“Mr. Henderson made Davis’s band sound less searching, more hypnotic,” Mr. Ratliff wrote. “Instead of improvising and interacting with the band, he took a simple bass vamp and percolated it endlessly.”
Michael Earl Henderson was born on July 7, 1951, in Yazoo City, Miss., and moved to Detroit with his mother, Rose Williams, who sang in church, and his stepfather, Earl Henderson, when he was young. During his childhood, he played cello and then switched to bass. Precociously talented, he was performing with local bands before his 12th birthday.
“Mom was always cool with the noise I was making in the basement and backyard, and later as I began playing in the local bar scene,” he said in the liner notes. When he was 10 or 11, he saved enough money to take a bus to see a bill of Motown artists at the Fox Theater.
“I told myself, ‘One day, I’m going to be onstage with all those artists,’” he said.
Mr. Henderson was a sideman until 1976 — the year his time with Davis ended — when the jazz drummer and bandleader Norman Connors invited him to write and record a song for his album “Saturday Night Special.” He sang that song, “Valentine Love,” with Jean Carne. Mr. Henderson wrote and sang on the title song of Mr. Connors’s next album, “You Are My Starship,” and sang a duet with Phyllis Hyman on his song “We Both Need Each Other.”
After making a deal with Buddah Records in 1976, Mr. Henderson’s transformation into a sexy crooner and songwriter continued. The cover of his 1981 album, “Slingshot,” showed him on a beach wearing a tiny aqua swimsuit.
When Mr. Henderson appeared at the Roxy Theater in West Hollywood in 1979, Connie Johnson, a pop critic for The Los Angeles Times, wrote that he “isn’t a platinum sex symbol in the manner of Teddy Pendergrass — yet,” adding, “Currently, he’s in the same league as Peabo Bryson and Lenny Williams.”
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Mr. Henderson found success on the Billboard R&B chart with singles like “Take Me I’m Yours,” which hit No. 3 in 1978; “Wide Receiver,” which peaked at No. 4 in 1980, and “Can’t We Fall in Love Again,” another duet with Ms. Hyman that rose to No. 9 in 1981.
After seven albums for Buddah, the last of them in 1983, he recorded “Bedtime Stories” for EMI America in 1986. That was his last solo album, although he continued to perform.
In addition to his mother and a son, Mr. Henderson is survived by his daughters, Chelsea and Michelle Henderson, and his companion, DaMia Satterfield. He was separated from his wife, Adelia Thompson.
In 2002, Mr. Henderson returned to Miles Davis’s music. He and several other Davis alumni, including the saxophonist Sonny Fortune and the drummer Ndugu Chancler, formed the group Children on the Corner; a year later, they released the album “Rebirth,” which reinterpreted and recreated Davis’s electric music from the 1970s.
“This ain’t no smooth jazz,” Mr. Henderson told All About Jazz in 2003. “Don’t come to hear us and get ready to eat your steak and sit there and have a conversation with your old lady. It ain’t happenin’. Because when we hit the stage, we mean business. We’re going for the throat.”
Richard
Wednesday, August 10, 2022
A00009 - Albert Woodfox, Survivor of 42 Years in Solitary Confinement
Albert Woodfox, Survivor of 42 Years in Solitary Confinement, Dies at 75
His term in solitary was perhaps the longest in American history. He described how he kept his sanity, and dignity, in an acclaimed memoir.
Albert Woodfox, who spent 42 years in solitary confinement — possibly more time than any other prisoner in all of American history — yet emerged to win acclaim with a memoir that declared his spirit unbroken, died on Thursday in New Orleans. He was 75.
His lead lawyer, George Kendall, said the cause was Covid-19. Mr. Kendall added that Mr. Woodfox also had a number of pre-existing organ conditions.
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Mr. Woodfox was placed in solitary confinement in 1972 after being accused of murdering Brent Miller, a 23-year-old corrections officer. A tangled legal ordeal ensued, including two convictions, both overturned, and three indictments stretching over four decades.
The case struck most commentators as problematic. No forensic evidence linked Mr. Woodfox to the crime, so the authorities’ argument depended on witnesses, who over time were discredited or proved unreliable.
“The facts of the case were on his side,” The New York Times editorial board wrote in a 2014 opinion piece about Mr. Woodfox.
But Louisiana’s attorney general, Buddy Caldwell, saw things differently. “This is the most dangerous person on the planet,” he told NPR in 2008.
Mr. Woodfox’s punishment defied imagination, not only for its monotony — he was alone 23 hours a day in a six-by-nine-foot cell — but also for its agonies and humiliations. He was gassed and beaten, he wrote in a memoir, “Solitary” (2019), in which he described how he had kept his sanity, and dignity, while locked up alone. He was strip-searched with needless, brutal frequency.
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His plight first received national attention when he became known as one of the “Angola Three,” men held continuously in solitary confinement for decades at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, which is commonly called Angola, after a slave plantation that once occupied the site.
In 2005, a federal judge wrote that the length of time the men had spent in solitary confinement went “so far beyond the pale” that there seemed not to be “anything even remotely comparable in the annals of American jurisprudence.”
Mr. Woodfox would spend more than another decade in solitary before becoming, in 2016, the last of the three men to be released from prison.
His first stint at Angola came in 1965, after he was convicted of a series of minor crimes committed as a teenager. The prison was notoriously harsh, even to the point of conjuring the days of slavery. Black prisoners, like Mr. Woodfox, did field work by hand, overseen by white prison guards on horseback, shotguns across their laps. New inmates were often inducted into a regime of sexual slavery that was encouraged by guards.
Released after eight months, he was soon charged with car theft, leading to another eight months at Angola. After that, he embarked on a darker criminal career, beating and robbing people.
In 1969, Mr. Woodfox was convicted again, this time for armed robbery, and sentenced to 50 years. By then a seasoned lawbreaker, he managed to sneak a gun into the courthouse where he was being sentenced and escape. He fled to New York City, landing in Harlem.
A few months later he was incarcerated again, this time in the Tombs, the Manhattan jail, where he spent about a year and a half.
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It proved to be a turning point, he wrote in his memoir. At the Tombs, he met members of the Black Panther Party, who governed his tier of cells not by force but by sharing food. They held discussions, treating people respectfully and intelligently, he wrote. They argued that racism was an institutional phenomenon, infecting police departments, banks, universities and juries.
“It was as if a light went on in a room inside me that I hadn’t known existed,” Mr. Woodfox wrote. “I had morals, principles and values I never had before.”
He added, “I would never be a criminal again.”
He was sent back to Angola in 1971 thinking himself a reformed man. But his most serious criminal conviction — for murdering the Angola corrections officer in 1972, which he denied — still lay ahead of him, and with it four decades in solitary, a term broken for only about a year and a half in the 1990s while he awaited retrial.
The other two members of the Angola Three, Robert King and Herman Wallace, were also Panthers and began their solitary confinement at Angola the same year as Mr. Woodfox. The three became friends by shouting to one another from their cells. They were “our own means of inspiration to one another,” Mr. Woodfox wrote. In his spare time, he added, “I turned my cell into a university, a hall of debate, a law school.”
He taught one inmate how to read, he said, by instructing him in how to sound out words in a dictionary. He told him to shout to him at any hour of the day or night if he could not understand something.
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Albert Woodfox was born on Feb. 19, 1947, in New Orleans to Ruby Edwards, who was 17. He never had a relationship with his biological father, Leroy Woodfox, he wrote, but for much of his childhood he considered a man who later married his mother, a Navy chef named James B. Mable, his “daddy.”
When Albert was 11, Mr. Mable retired from the Navy and the family moved to La Grange, N.C. Mr. Mable, Mr. Woodfox recalled, began drinking and beating Ms. Edwards. She fled the family home with Albert and two of his brothers, taking them back to New Orleans.
As a boy, Albert shoplifted bread and canned goods when there was no food in the house. He dropped out of school in the 10th grade. His mother tended bar and occasionally worked as a prostitute, and Albert grew to loathe her.
“I allowed myself to believe that the strongest, most beautiful and most powerful woman in my life didn’t matter,” he wrote in his memoir.
His mother died in 1994, while he was in prison. He was not allowed to attend her funeral.
The first of the Angola Three to be let out of prison was Mr. King, whose conviction was overturned in 2001. The second, Mr. Wallace, was freed in 2013 because he had liver cancer. He died three days later.
In a deal with prosecutors, Mr. Woodfox was released in 2016 in exchange for pleading no contest to a manslaughter charge in the 1972 killing. By then he had been transferred out of Angola.
His incarceration over, the first thing he wanted to do was visit his mother’s grave.
“I told her that I was free now and I loved her,” he wrote. “It was more painful than anything I experienced in prison.”
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Mr. Woodfox is survived by his brothers, James, Haywood, Michael and Donald Mable; a daughter, Brenda Poole, from a relationship he had in his teenage years; three grandchildren; four great-grandchildren; and his life partner, Leslie George.
Ms. George was a journalist who began reporting on Mr. Woodfox’s case in 1998 and met him in 1999. They became a couple when he was released from prison.
Ms. George co-wrote Mr. Woodfox’s book, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction. In a review in The Times, Dwight Garner called “Solitary” “uncommonly powerful”; in The Times Book Review, the writer Thomas Chatterton Williams described it as “above mere advocacy or even memoir,” belonging more “in the realm of stoic philosophy.”
After being released, Mr. Woodfox had to relearn how to walk down stairs, how to walk without leg irons, how to sit without being shackled. But in an interview with The Times right after his release, he spoke of having already freed himself years earlier.
“When I began to understand who I was, I considered myself free,” he said. “No matter how much concrete they use to hold me in a particular place, they couldn’t stop my mind.”
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