Herbie Hancock sextet alumni and trumpet great Eddie Henderson spent the 1970s building off the fusion influences of both his former bandleader and the tectonic shifts created by electric Miles Davis. And while that made Henderson’s increasingly soul-crossover albums contentious in their time — trad-jazzers, per usual, declared it was all too smooth, too disco, too commercial — latter-gen jazz-funk heads, especially their devotees in the hip-hop beatmaker world, helped recontextualize this music as something more important for its feeling than its market segment. Heritage is Henderson’s last and best of two for Blue Note before closing out the ’70s going deeper into the boogie for Capitol, and it stands as a high point of his entire career. The reason? As expertly tuned towards hi-fi funk as his band is, Henderson’s notes are hit with such a piercing and uninhibited intensity that whatever smoothness there is feels instilled with an equal amount of eerily vivid emotion — and not always the carefree kind. James Mtume-penned opener “Inside You” might be familiar to heads who swear by Reasonable Doubt, but even before Jay-Z and Memphis Bleek’s “Coming of Age” banter, Henderson’s instrument captured a similarly empathetic vibe of discovering yourself in someone else — but one that still hints at undertones of vulnerability and unease. Patrice Rushen’s “Kudu” and Julian Priester’s “Acuphuncture” take the airy-yet-dizzying tone that Henderson laced some of Mwandishi‘s starkest moments with, and gives it a jittery uptempo footchase groove — driven wonderfully by Rushen’s keyboards and Paul Jackson’s balletic rumble of a bassline — that evoke equal parts excitement and anxiety. And when it’s pared down into a more reflective quietude, particularly the minimalist spacewalk boogie of “Nostalgia,” the breathing room also leaves a lot of space for the melancholia.