Nachlese:
Howard Mandel im Arts Journal (mit einigen Youtube-Links):
Indeed, Dr. Yusef Lateef enjoyed and shared with all who’d listen a fabulously creative, accomplished life to age 93, ending 12/23/13. He’d made music professionally starting when he was 18 in Detroit, and early on became a seeker and experimenter, eventually a scholar, philosopher and educator based at University of Massachusetts, Amherst. I’m grateful to have encountered him in person, although I’ve respectfully disagreed with his indictment of the term “jazz” as defaming an art and discipline that he took to be humankind’s noblest expression. He acknowledged that he was from the jazz tradition, and I believe the many jazz people as high-minded as he was long ago saved the j-word from being saddled with negative connotations.
Lafeef called what he did “autophysiopsychic music . . . from one’s physical, mental and spiritual self, and also from the heart.” However his activities were categorized, whether his recordings were found in hard-bop, soul jazz, New Age or world music bins — he always put his all into his efforts. Decades back, I was entranced by Lateef’s use of extended techniques, narrative solos and reed instruments from North Africa, the Middle East and Asia into relatively straightahead “jazz” formats, including Cannonball Adderley’s sextet.
http://www.artsjournal.com/jazzbeyondjazz/2013/12/unforgettable-sounds-a
Mandels Fazit zum Konzert in Ludwigshafen ist allerdings nach wie vor zu freundlich formuliert … „a record of it may be forthcoming“ – really? Ich werde sie natürlich kaufen, aber brauchen tut die Welt sie dennoch nicht.
Don Heckman in der LA Times:
Lateef initially was best known as a dynamic tenor saxophonist with a big tone and a strong sense of swing. But his persistent creative and intellectual curiosity led him to the discovery of an array of other instruments as well as a fascination with various international forms of music.
He was an early advocate for the flute as a credible jazz voice. And his performances on the oboe as early as the ’50s and ’60s were definitive – and rarely matched – displays of the instrument’s jazz capabilities. He searched the globe for more exotic instruments, while mastering, among others, the bamboo flute, the Indian shenai, the Arabic arghul, the Hebrew shofar and the West African Fulani flute.
Tall and shaven-headed, his powerful presence offset by a calm demeanor and the quiet, articulate speaking style of a scholar, Lateef combined thoughtfulness and a probing intellectual curiosity with impressive musical skills. Early in his career, he established his role as a pathfinder in blending elements from a multiplicity of different sources.
His first recordings under his own leadership, released on the Savoy label in the mid-’50s, already revealed a fascination with unusual instruments: In addition to tenor saxophone and the flute, he also plays the arghul. Several of Lateef’s original compositions on those early albums also integrated rhythms and melodic styles from numerous global musical forms.
„In any given composition,“ wrote Leonard Feather in The Times in 1975, „there may be long passages that involve classical influences, impressionism, a Middle Eastern flavor, or rhythmic references to Latin America.“
[…]
Lateef’s desire to pursue his own musical path — as a performer, a composer and an educator — led, in 1981, to his refusal to perform in nightclubs. For the next four years, he lived in Nigeria as a senior research fellow at Ahmadu Bello University. Returning to the U.S., he taught at the University of Massachusetts and Amherst College.
In the succeeding decades, Lateef performed in concert halls, colleges and music festivals in Japan, Russia, Europe, the Middle East, Africa and the U.S. He often led seminars and master classes outlining his belief in the presence of autophysiopsychic music principals in cultures around the world.
„To me,“ he told the Times in 1989,“ it feels as though there’s a kind of aesthetic thread running through the improvisational musics of the world. If you’re alive and your heart is beating, you’ll find it, and that’s what makes the relationship between you and the world.“
[¨…]
In 1950, he studied flute and composition at Wayne State University in Detroit. Converting to Islam in the Ahmadiyya movement, he took the name Yusef Lateef, which translates roughly into „Gentle Joseph.“ Over the next two decades, he alternated between leading his own jazz groups, working with such artists as percussionist Babatunde Olatunji, guitarist Kenny Burrell, bassist/composer Charles Mingus, pianist Kenny Barron, alto saxophonist Julian „Cannonball“ Adderley and guitarist Grant Green, while continuing his education.
http://www.latimes.com/obituaries/la-me-yusef-lateef-20131225,0,7549278.story
Peter Keepnews in der NY Times:
Mr. Lateef started out as a tenor saxophonist with a big tone and a bluesy style, not significantly more or less talented than numerous other saxophonists in the crowded jazz scene of the 1940s. He served a conventional jazz apprenticeship, working in the bands of Lucky Millinder, Dizzy Gillespie and others. But by the time he made his first records as a leader, in 1957, he had begun establishing a reputation as a decidedly unconventional musician.
He began expanding his instrumental palette by doubling on flute, by no means a common jazz instrument in those years. He later added oboe, bassoon and non-Western wind instruments like the shehnai and arghul. “My attempts to experiment with new instruments grew out of the monotony of hearing the same old sounds played by the same old horns,” he once told DownBeat magazine. “When I looked into those other cultures, I found that good instruments existed there.”
Those experiments led to an embrace of new influences. At a time when jazz musicians in the United States rarely sought inspiration any farther geographically than Latin America, Mr. Lateef looked well beyond the Western Hemisphere. Anticipating the cross-cultural fusions of later decades, he flavored his music with scales, drones and percussion effects borrowed from Asia and the Middle East. He played world music before world music had a name.
In later years he incorporated elements of contemporary concert music and composed symphonic and chamber works. African influences became more noticeable in his music when he spent four years studying and teaching in Nigeria in the early 1980s.
Mr. Lateef professed to find the word “jazz” limiting and degrading; he preferred “autophysiopsychic music,” a term he invented. He further distanced himself from the jazz mainstream in 1980 when he declared that he would no longer perform any place where alcohol was served. “Too much blood, sweat and tears have been spilled creating this music to play it where people are smoking, drinking and talking,” he explained to The Boston Globe in 1999.
Still, with its emphasis on melodic improvisation and rhythmic immediacy, his music was always recognizably jazz at its core. And as far afield as his music might roam, his repertoire usually included at least a few Tin Pan Alley standards and, especially, plenty of blues.
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"Don't play what the public want. You play what you want and let the public pick up on what you doin' -- even if it take them fifteen, twenty years." (Thelonious Monk) | Meine Sendungen auf Radio StoneFM: gypsy goes jazz, #158 – Piano Jazz 2024 (Teil 1) - 19.12.2024 – 20:00; #159: Martial Solal (1927–2024) – 21.1., 22:00; #160: 11.2., 22:00 | Slow Drive to South Africa, #8: tba | No Problem Saloon, #30: tba