Kenny Dorham composed La Mesha as a dedication to his three-year-old daughter, Lamesha, creating a play on words by spelling the title differently from the child's name. The piece first appeared on Joe Henderson's landmark 1963 debut album Page One for Blue Note Records, recorded at Rudy Van Gelder's studio in Englewood Cliffs, a session that also introduced Dorham's Blue Bossa and Henderson's Recorda-Me, giving the album an unusually high yield of future standards. La Mesha is a ballad of uncommon structural sophistication. Its opening six measures contain arpeggios spanning well over an octave in less than one beat, demanding considerable technical facility. The bass line serves as what composer-transcriber Don Sickler called the magical ingredient, propelling the melody through the opening measures, then shifting to a two-feel pulse before moving to a back-beat pedal and finally opening into a spacious one-feel. The B section introduces rhythmic and harmonic hits within the ballad texture, creating dramatic punctuation in an otherwise contemplative form, and the final two measures deliver unexpected harmonic movement beneath a sustained melody note. Sickler praised Dorham as a master composer who used rhythm section instruments to enhance compositions in ways few arrangers attempted. La Mesha held particular prominence in the first published Second Floor Music folio, a collection of thirty Dorham compositions arranged for solo piano by Walter Davis Jr. The tune is recognized among jazz insiders as one of the most beautiful ballads in the repertoire, a sophisticated musicians' choice rather than a widely known standard.
