Laurie Antonioli

oe Henderson made it clear from the beginning that if he and Laurie Antonioli were going to spend time together she needed to read up on literature. A budding singer who’d spent two years studying bebop in the innovative jazz program at Portland’s Mt. Hood College in the mid-1970s, she’d returned to her native Bay Area raring to go. Plunging into the roiling jazz scene, she started sitting in regularly with Mark Murphy at his weekly gig at the Dock, a Marin County joint in Tiburon. On Henderson’s recommendation Antonioli soaked up Dostoevsky and Camus, Kafka and Hermann Hesse, “and then we would talk about it,” she says. “Joe was very shy on the one hand, definitely not an extrovert, but he liked to chat and do long phone calls. He had a big influence on