Released 30 years ago this month, Joe Henderson’s album “Lush Life: The Music of Billy Strayhorn” sparked one of the greatest career revivals in jazz. The veteran San Francisco tenor saxophonist, who died in 2001 at the age of 64, had spent the previous 15 years playing small U.S. clubs such as the Village Vanguard and Lighthouse (Japan and Europe offered more lucrative opportunities). Within months after the album’s February 1992 release on Verve Records, Henderson was headlining at Carnegie Hall, Davies Symphony Hall and the Hollywood Bowl.

“意乱情迷”蒂姆销量超过200000张e when an acoustic instrumental jazz album moving a tenth of that total was considered a major hit. But the record wasn’t just a commercial success. The title track garnered Henderson his first Grammy and a rare trifecta in DownBeat magazine’s critics poll: He earned top honors for album, artist and tenor saxophonist of the year (a first for him in each category).

虽然seizing the spotlight late in his career, Henderson also pulled Strayhorn (1915–67) out of Duke Ellington’s vast shadow. Henderson wasn’t the first jazz artist to record an album dedicated to the nonpareil composer and pianist, who lived openly as a gay man in pre-Stonewall America. But “Lush Life” helped spark an ongoing effort to disentangle Strayhorn’s creative partnership with Ellington, who wrote in his autobiography that “Billy Strayhorn was my right arm, my left arm, all the eyes in the back of my head, my brainwaves in his head, and his in mine.”

Henderson, who moved to San Francisco from New York City in 1972, had long been esteemed as a definitive post-bop player and composer, beginning with his series of seminal recordings for Blue Note in the mid-1960s. But he spent more than a decade scuffling through mid-career doldrums before “Lush Life.” The record’s success was jarring: In 1994, still coming to terms with his sudden change of fortune, he described the newfound fame as “a little bittersweet.”

“I’m 57 years old, and I’ve been here all the time,” he told me in an interview for the now-defunct weekly L.A. Village View. “It may be a little arrogant of me to say this, and I really mean it on a humble level: Whatever it is that’s happening now could have just as well have happened a long time ago.”

“Lush Life” was a game changer because it showcased Henderson’s extraordinary talent so effectively — in part thanks to the vision of Verve Records honcho Richard Seidel. The producer, who lives in San Francisco, was in the process of returning the label to its 1950s heights, and he wanted to record the tenor saxophonist playing the kind of ingenious original compositions that defined his classic albums for Blue Note and Milestone.

But Henderson told Seidel that he hadn’t written any new pieces for years, news that was disappointing if not surprising. “That gave me the idea for composer songbooks,” Seidel told The Chronicle. “I always loved Billy Strayhorn’s music, and Joe had already recorded Strayhorn’s ‘Chelsea Bridge’” on his 1967 Milestone debut “The Kicker.”

Working with Don Sickler as co-producer, arranger and music director, Seidel surrounded Henderson with an exceptional young rhythm section featuring pianist Stephen Scott, bassist Christian McBride and drummer Gregory Hutchinson. Wynton Marsalis joined the proceedings on three pieces, swinging briskly with Henderson on “Johnny Come Lately” and “U.M.M.G.” and leaning into the sumptuous ballad “A Flower Is a Lovesome Thing.”

Every other track used a different configuration, from the opening saxophone/bass duet on the sublimely sinuous “Isfahan” to the thrilling saxophone/drums workout on “Take the ‘A’ Train” (the Ellington Orchestra’s famous theme, which Duke always introduced by crediting Strayhorn). On the most dramatic track, the unaccompanied Henderson strips the world-weary ballad “Lush Life” down to its forlorn birthday suit. The producers’ fingerprints were all over the project, and yet Henderson sounds perfectly poised and utterly himself.

“Unlike almost any other record, it came out exactly as I had envisioned it,” Seidel said. “Joe was an open book and took every suggestion.”

Henderson’s sudden stardom didn’t surprise Bay Area jazz fans much. Randall Kline, who founded Jazz in the City in 1983 and has led the organization through its evolution into SFJazz, first hired Henderson with an all-star Latin jazz band led by John Santos in 1985. The saxophonist became a festival mainstay as Kline presented him in various settings around the city, from a Grace Cathedral recital with tabla master Zakir Hussain to a Herbst Theatre celebration with Latin jazz great Eddie Palmieri.

“For me it was the greatest thing going,” Kline said. “We did more and more stuff with Joe. He encouraged us so much, and whatever we proposed he was game for.”

When the SFJazz Center opened in 2013, it was an obvious move to name the intimate street-level venue the Joe Henderson Lab. That is, fittingly, where two top Bay Area tenor saxophonists are scheduled to celebrate what would have beenHenderson’s 85th birthdayin April, with Matt Renzi playing music from his classic album “State of the Tenor” April 21 andKristen Stromperforming compositions by her former teacher April 22. The fact that the Lab is next to practice rooms in the center’s education wing makes it ever more apt, as Henderson embraced the role of teacher and mentor on- and offstage.

Drummer Sylvia Cuenca first met Henderson as a student in 1984 when he performed with the San Jose City College Big Band as a guest artist. She moved to New York City the next year, and after she saw him play at the Village Vanguard he got her phone number. A few months later he called to hire her for a monthlong European tour. Her first international work, it was a trial by fire that she passed, becoming a regular in his band for the next four years.

“He wasn’t the kind of leader to give a lot of verbal direction,” she recalled. “He would say, ‘Play what you mean, and mean what you play.’ He also helped me to be mindful of the form of a song by constantly singing the melody behind solos. I learned how to be a more sensitive and musical team player in a small group setting.”

Famously taciturn onstage, Henderson loved to talk on the phone. He lived by himself in a 12-room house in St. Francis Wood, where he kept a television on constantly, tuned to CNN, Seidel said. After “Lush Life,” they went on to record albums focusing on the music of Miles Davis, Jobim and “Porgy and Bess.” Each one was nominated for a Grammy.

“Joe was such an unlikely star,” Seidel said. “He never spoke to the audience. Never announced the tunes. No matter how much of a phantom he was, in the studio he was right on it, totally focused, and usually playing his best solos on first takes.”