Henderson grew up in Yazoo City, Mississippi, but Detroit is where his musical life really started taking shape. He was playing professionally while still in his teens, which tells you something about how quickly his abilities outpaced his age. By the time Stevie Wonder brought him into the fold in the late 1960s, Henderson was already a confident, physically imposing bassist — the kind of player who doesn't crowd a song but simply makes it impossible to ignore the low end.

The Miles Davis years are what most people mean when they bring up Henderson's name, and for good reason. He joined the band around 1970 and stayed through some of the most chaotic and productive stretches of Davis's electric period. Albums like On the Corner (1972) and Get Up with It (1974) are dense, sometimes disorienting records, and Henderson's bass is one of the few anchoring forces in them. Miles was pulling music in about six directions at once during those years, and Henderson just planted himself and held the groove while everything else swirled around him. That's harder than it sounds.

What Henderson brought to the electric Miles band was a funk sensibility that the jazz world wasn't entirely ready for. He came from soul and R&B, and he played electric bass the way those traditions demanded — with feel, with pocket, with a clear understanding that the rhythm section is the whole point. Some jazz purists at the time didn't know what to do with that, but the music held up. Those records sound just as strange and alive now as they did then, and his bass is a big reason why.

After leaving Miles's orbit, Henderson launched a solo career in the late 1970s that leaned hard into R&B and quiet storm territory. Goin' Places (1977) and In the Night-Time (1978) are slick, well-produced records that have nothing to do with jazz experimentation — they're aimed squarely at the radio, and they did reasonably well on the R&B charts. Some listeners who found him through Miles were surprised by the turn, but Henderson was never pretending to be a jazz musician in some purist sense. He was a musician who played whatever he played with complete commitment, and that consistency runs through all of it.

He doesn't get mentioned as often as he should in conversations about electric bass. Players like Jaco Pastorius absorbed most of that critical attention in the late 1970s, and Henderson's more restrained, groove-focused approach wasn't the kind of thing that made critics reach for their notebooks. But go back and listen to what he's doing on those Miles records — the way he moves under Herbie Hancock or John McLaughlin without ever losing the thread — and you'll understand pretty quickly why Davis kept him in the band as long as he did.