Eddie Henderson Quartet — 24 November 2026, Jamboree (Barcelona)

Jazz

The trumpeter Miles Davis invited to the Lighthouse as a teenager pays tribute to him in his centenary year at the Barcelona Jazz Festival

Eddie Henderson plays a tribute to Miles Davis at the Jamboree on two consecutive nights, Tuesday 24 and Wednesday 25 November, with two sets each night, at 7pm and 8.30pm. It’s one of the shows in the club’s series for the centenaries of Davis and John Coltrane, both born in 1926, and it’s part of the Barcelona Jazz Festival.

Davis was a patient of Henderson’s stepfather, a doctor, and often stayed with the family. Henderson met him as a teenager studying classical trumpet, and Davis invited him to one of his shows at the Lighthouse, in California, with Cannonball Adderley, Coltrane, Bill Evans, Paul Chambers and Jimmy Cobb in the band. According to the festival’s listing, his first trumpet lesson, at the age of nine, came from Louis Armstrong.

He went on to work as a musician and a doctor at the same time: Herbie Hancock chose him for some of his most forward-looking records, and he ended up as Thelonious Monk’s doctor. His latest album as a leader is “Witness to History”, released by Smoke Sessions in 2023 with George Cables, Donald Harrison, Gerald Cannon, Lenny White and Mike Clark, marking fifty years since “Realization”, his 1973 debut.

“His technique is as impeccable as it is invisible,” Josep Mestres of Jazzucrist writes in the festival’s introduction. At the Jamboree he’s joined by Matyas Gayer on piano, Arnie Somogyi on double bass and Stephen Keogh on drums.

Text by Aina Torrents