When you can feel the emotion in the lines, you are experiencing what happens when an artist is able to connect, seemingly without effort, expression germinating from mind, soul, and heart, and technical presentation, with their instrument. You experience the artist’s voice. In visual art, the voice is presented in colour or shape or a physical texture. In dance, the voice is in the play of movement and stillness. The writer’s voice speaks in your mind’s universe and stimulates imagination and inner eye imagery.
The musician, whether vocalist or instrumentalist, speaks to you in lines of music, taking musical notes, arranging them, coloring them, and creating message and storyline. Henderson’s horn playing, whether trumpet or flugelhorn, is all about color. The emotional presentation borrowing, in a way, some of the tools of the visual artist, using texture, but sound texture, to convey expression of mood and sentiment and applying it with a sensitive sonic brush. The spectrum is broad, brimming with equal opportunity from a palette of sound and sound colors.
You can almost see what you hear.