Swing Time: Cory Henry
The former Snarky Puppy keyboardist looks past the “art of love” on his latest solo meditation
Cory Henry owes a nod of thanks to a thief who’s still on the loose. “I started these songs about a year and a half ago,” the singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist says about the unexpected origins of his new album, Something to Say. “Then, when I first moved to Cali, my car got broken into and they stole the hard drive with all the tracks on it. At first, I tried to mimic what I’d already recorded, but then it became a whole different thing.”
Henry is lucky that it did. While the original versions probably would have turned out just fine, the rebooted Something to Say kills. Drawing from his varied influences— jazz, gospel, soul, hip-hop, funk, on and on—the 33-yearold, Brooklyn-born Henry, who self-produced the album, glides seamlessly through myriad moods, styles and song subjects throughout the 11- song set. The opening track, “Don’t Forget,” is reminiscent of a classic ‘70s R&B radio smash, with its driving bass, wah-wah guitar and amiable vocal. “Please don’t forget what you’re living for/ Please don’t forget what you’re fighting for,” Henry sings, offering the first of many positive messages tucked within his tunes. “GawtDamn,” one of four tracks on the album featuring Henry’s band the Funk Apostles, is simply “about the finest woman you ever saw.”
His lyrics take deeper dives as the album progresses. A consecutive series of songs— the Sly Stone-influenced “Rise,” “Icarus,” “No Guns,” “Black Man” and the samplebased “Say Their Names”— tackle weightier topics.
“On my first record, Art of Love, I talked about love because we all experience love in some kind of way. On this album, I wanted to kind of get away from that a little bit and talk about some other things that I see,” Henry says. “I like how Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye used their voices to speak up and talk about things that they saw and lived through, and how it inspired their generation and their people. I want to do that with my music, and this is my first chance as a lyricist and a vocalist to try to go there—to challenge myself and challenge the listener and bring up different points of view.”
Henry’s arrival at this place in his career might seem somewhat circuitous but, to him, it’s all been of a piece. Before his solo career truly kicked into high gear, he’d already sealed his reputation as one of the most exciting keyboard players in contemporary jazz. The majority of the nearly 25 million YouTube views that Snarky Puppy racked up for a 2014 Netherlands performance of “Lingus”—back when Henry was a member of the oversized ensemble—are almost certainly due to his extended, incendiary Korg synth solo. But Henry is also enamored of the classic Hammond B-3 organ.
So how did a musician, who wasn’t born until that instrument—once ubiquitous in soul, blues, gospel and rock—lost popular ground to synthesizers and other electronic keyboards, discover its legacy sound?
“In church, man, when I was about four or five,” Henry says. “I saw it every day. I felt like it commanded the audience, like it was always playing under the preacher or under the prayer or whatever the case might be. People would just revere the organ. It is definitely a big part of who I am.”
Henry’s musical journey has since taken him in numerous directions. As he was fine-tuning his gospel chops, Henry was also soaking up the music his father listened to on the radio. (He boils those early tutorials down to “Prince and Sade, jazz, James Brown, Parliament, all sorts of different stuff.”) By the time Henry started making his first recordings, he thought nothing of cross-pollinating those genres: One of his earlier albums, The Revival, charted on both Billboard’s gospel and jazz album lists.
“I had my own gospel group when I was 16, called God’s Chosen,” he says when asked about the first genre that touched his soul. “We used to travel around the Tri-State Area. I used to sing with them and lead the 15-piece choir.”
The keyboardist discovered jazz early as well, and by the time he joined Snarky Puppy, he was already quite advanced in his mastery.
“Somewhere in New York, they invited me up to sit-in and then, the next thing I knew, I was just in the band,” he says with a laugh. “Sometimes there were more people on the stage than in the crowd. But what I liked about it the most was that I’d never seen a group of people so dedicated to music; they would do anything to achieve to their goals. I really appreciated that experience, and it gave me a push when it came down to wanting to do my thing.”
Henry left Snarky Puppy in 2018 to concentrate on his solo career, releasing Art of Love with the Funk Apostles. He’ll make another full recording with them when time allows but, for the moment, he’s reveling in the total independence he enjoyed while creating Something to Say. While Henry did call on several other collaborators to co-write and help flesh out most of his tracks, on the aforementioned “Don’t Forget” and “Anything 4 U” he plays every instrument himself: guitar, bass, all of the keyboards and even drums.
“All through my life, I’ve always been trying to do my thing,” Henry says. “Snarky was another piece of me doing that thing. What I’m doing now isn’t that different from what I’ve always done, which is to make music the way I wanted to.
