Henderson’s fourth album for Blue Note was his most intense and hard-bitten. The band included pianist McCoy Tyner, bassist Bob Cranshaw, and drummer Elvin Jones, and the compositions were sometimes little more than sketches. On the album’s best track, “El Barrio,” he asked them to “play something with a Spanish feeling” using just two chords while he improvised a melody (and a raucous, crying solo introduction). The result is astonishing for 1964; in some ways, it points to what David S. Ware would be doing in the 1990s and early 2000s.

– Phil Freeman