Joe Henderson was born April 24, 1937, in Lima, Ohio, into a family of fifteen children. He started on saxophone at eight, encouraged by an older brother who admired Lester Young, and the Lester Young influence — a light, vocalized tone married to a restless, exploratory ear — never fully left his playing even as his harmonic vocabulary grew far more adventurous. He attended the University of Kentucky before moving to Detroit in 1956 to study at what was then still called Wayne University (renamed Wayne State University that same decade), playing the city's clubs alongside fellow students Yusef Lateef and Donald Byrd — a scene thick enough with talent that a teenage tenor player could apprentice alongside future giants of the music without leaving the neighborhood. He put together his first working band in Detroit in 1959.

Drafted into the Army in 1960, Henderson remained in uniform until 1962, leading bands that toured Europe to entertain U.S. troops; while stationed at Fort Benning, Georgia, he led an award-winning quartet that was selected for a world tour. Discharged, he moved to New York, where trumpeter Kenny Dorham became both mentor and door-opener — Dorham brought him into his own quintet and onto Blue Note as a sideman on 1963's Una Mas, then vouched for the younger saxophonist to Blue Note's Alfred Lion. Henderson signed to the label that same year and made his leader debut with Page One (1963), a hard-bop date built around Dorham's trumpet and Henderson's own "Recorda Me," which became a jazz standard almost immediately. Blue Note kept him extraordinarily busy for the rest of the decade, both as a leader — Our Thing (1964), In 'N Out (1965), Inner Urge (1966, whose modal title track remains one of his most covered compositions), Mode For Joe (1966), Tetragon (1968) — and as one of the label's most in-demand sidemen, appearing on landmark dates by Horace Silver (Song for My Father, The Cape Verdean Blues), Herbie Hancock (The Prisoner), Lee Morgan (The Sidewinder), Andrew Hill (Black Fire, Point of Departure), Grant Green (Idle Moments), and Pete La Roca (Basra). He joined Horace Silver's touring quintet in 1964, staying two years, and in 1967 briefly rehearsed with Miles Davis's working quintet of Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams — an association that never made it onto record.

When his Blue Note contract lapsed at the end of the decade, Henderson moved to Orrin Keepnews's Milestone label, and the shift in label matched a shift in music. Power to the People (1969), with Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, and Jack DeJohnette, opened a run of politically charged, genre-crossing 1970s albums whose titles alone announced the era — In Pursuit of Blackness (1971), Black Is the Color (1972), Black Narcissus (recorded 1974–76, released 1977) — alongside records that pushed hard into fusion, Latin jazz, and studio experimentation: Multiple (1973, with James "Blood" Ulmer's guitar and an Echoplex-treated electric piano), The Elements (1974, a genuinely strange, beautiful quartet date with Alice Coltrane's harp and harmonium), and Canyon Lady (1975, arranged and conducted by Luis Gasca, heavy on Latin percussion and horns). Barcelona (1979, on the German label Enja) closed out the decade in a leaner trio setting, live and in the studio, with bassist Wayne Darling and drummer Ed Soph.

The 1980s were quieter on record — Henderson worked steadily as a first-call sideman and occasional leader without a comparable commercial profile — until Blue Note itself was relaunched in 1985 under EMI-Manhattan and Bruce Lundvall. Henderson's trio, with Ron Carter on bass and Al Foster on drums, played a ten-set engagement at the Village Vanguard in November 1985 that Blue Note recorded and released as The State of the Tenor, Vols. 1 & 2 (1986–87). The albums were both a critical rediscovery and, for many younger listeners, an introduction: a mid-career saxophonist who had spent the decade in relative commercial obscurity reasserting, in real time and without a safety net, that he belonged among the music's very best living improvisers.

That reassertion set up the final and most celebrated chapter of Henderson's career. In 1991 he signed with Verve, and his label debut, Lush Life: The Music of Billy Strayhorn (1992) — recorded with Wynton Marsalis, Stephen Scott, Christian McBride, and Gregory Hutchinson — became a genuine commercial breakthrough, the rare straight-ahead jazz record to chart, and won Henderson his first Grammy Award. Verve followed the formula with two more single-composer tribute albums: So Near, So Far (Musings for Miles) (1993), a Miles Davis songbook date with John Scofield, Dave Holland, and Al Foster, and Double Rainbow: The Music of Antonio Carlos Jobim (1995), pairing him with Herbie Hancock, Eliane Elias, and a roster of Brazilian musicians. Both won Grammys in turn, giving Henderson four Grammy Awards across the three tribute records — an unlikely late-career run for a saxophonist who had spent much of the 1970s and '80s under wider jazz radar. He closed out the Verve years with Big Band (1996), an ambitious large-ensemble session arranged around his own compositions with an all-star horn section including Freddie Hubbard and Nicholas Payton, and Porgy & Bess (1997), his final studio album as a leader — a Gershwin reimagining recorded with John Scofield, Dave Holland, Jack DeJohnette, Stefon Harris, and vocal features from Sting and Chaka Khan, with arranging contributions from a young pianist named Kevin Hays.

Colleagues nicknamed Henderson "the Phantom" for his tendency to withdraw from the public eye between engagements, and that pattern held to the end: he stopped performing publicly in 1998 after suffering a stroke, and died of heart failure on June 30, 2001, in San Francisco, following a long battle with emphysema. He was 64. He left behind one of the most quietly influential tenor sound-concepts in jazz — harmonically restless without ever losing a blues-and-Lester-Young foundation — and an enormous, still under-explored body of sideman work that shaped the sound of 1960s hard bop as much as any of his own albums did.

Henderson's tenor sound started with Lester Young's lightness and lyricism, filtered through the harder-edged, more angular language of hard bop and — once he reached Blue Note's modal experiments of the mid-1960s — a genuine comfort with post-bop abstraction that never tipped into free playing for its own sake. What set him apart from other tenor players of his generation was range: he could sound completely at home on a straightforward blowing date, on Andrew Hill's or McCoy Tyner's most harmonically knotty material, on Alice Coltrane's modal-Indian hybrids, or on 1970s jazz-funk with an Echoplex-treated rhythm section, without any of those settings sounding like a stretch. That adaptability made him one of the most called-upon sidemen of the Blue Note era, and it's the same quality that let him reinvent himself twice more — as a stripped-down trio virtuoso on The State of the Tenor and as Verve's songbook interpreter of Strayhorn, Davis, and Jobim — without ever sounding like he was chasing a trend rather than simply playing the music in front of him.