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About Yusef Lateef

284

Talkin' Blues

Yusef Lateef: Eastern Sounds Turns 50

by Alan Bryson
September 13, 2011

Think back fifty years to the days portrayed on the TV series Mad Men. In 1961, John Kennedy and Billboard's Easy Listening Chart were inaugurated, a freedom riders bus was fire-bombed in Alabama, Rock Hudson was on the big screen, and Doris Day was selling albums. As teenagers and their swinging parents were twisting their brains out to Chubby Checker or the “authentic music by the King Curtis Combo," East German communists began construction of the Berlin ...

474

Album Review

Yusef Lateef: Ten Years Hence

Read "Ten Years Hence" reviewed by Bert Bailey

by Bert Bailey
October 28, 2008

This 2008 release of a live 1975 performance at San Francisco's Keystone Korner may appeal to Lateef completists, but those still new to him or curious about his fame might consider starting elsewhere.The first of Ten Years Hence's five long numbers is Bob Cunningham's three-part “Samba De Amor," which begins with the bassist bowing and plucking alongside the sound of cowbells, horns, whoops and other vocalizations, and Lateef on transverse flute. Fully five minutes on, a light but ...

285

Album Review

Yusef Lateef: Eastern Sounds

Read "Eastern Sounds" reviewed by Jeff Dayton-Johnson

by Jeff Dayton-Johnson
September 3, 2006

Eastern Sounds, newly remastered by Rudy van Gelder (the storied engineer who recorded the original September 1961 session), marks an early stage in Yusef Lateef's development. In particular, the record highlights two characteristics that would come to define his artistic identity: a spiritual streak and a fascination with non-Western music. Like John Coltrane (whose path resembles Lateef's in these respects) on “My Favorite Things," Lateef here frequently incorporates “Eastern sounds" in the form of modal vamps.This musical cross-pollination ...

551

Profile

Yusef Lateef: Roots & Routes

by Tom Greenland
January 24, 2006

Yusef Lateef is one of the first practitioners of “our music" to embrace “the other", those peoples and cultures far removed geographically and often ideologically from the sounds and sensibilities of North America. A renaissance man for the new millennium, Lateef is a philosopher, organologist, composer/arranger/performer, educator, author and acoustic Argonaut. He'll be in town in January for “Detroit: Motor City Jazz" at Jazz at Lincoln Center, a concert series featuring fellow Detroit alumni Charles McPherson, Ron Carter, Marcus Belgrave ...

435

Album Review

Yusef Lateef: Psychicemotus

Read "Psychicemotus" reviewed by Norman Weinstein

by Norman Weinstein
November 15, 2005

This is a welcome reissue of one of a series of fine Impulse! albums by multi-instrumentalist Yusef Lateef that have never taken their deserved place among the major recordings of the '60s. I suspect part of the reason for their neglect has to do with the image, helped by both the Impulse!, and later Atlantic labels, in portraying Lateef as a purveyor of hopelessly arcane musical exotica. The weird title of this album doesn't help any more than the 2005 ...

324

Jazz From The Vinyl Junkyard

Yusef Lateef: Jazz 'Round the World

by C. Andrew Hovan
August 16, 2004

Yusef Lateef Jazz 'Round the World Impulse! 1963With a recent article in JazzTimes covering the history of Impulse Records and the role that prime mover John Coltrane made in securing the label's place in history, it occurred to me that there are still holes in the catalog's reissue program. Aside from Archie Shepp and Pharoah Sanders, both heavily caught up in Coltrane's trajectory, multi-instrumentalist Yusef Lateef was a vital member of the ...

335

Album Review

Yusef Lateef: The Golden Flute

Read "The Golden Flute" reviewed by David Rickert

by David Rickert
June 13, 2004

It’s a shame that Yusef Lateef is relegated to the second tier of jazz musicians, left as an artist who is known more for his work as a sideman. His abilities as a multi-instrumentalist place him a category with Roland Kirk, yet with none of the acclaim. It’s true that on his Atlantic releases Lateef was saddled with inferior material, but his earlier recordings are adventurous, melodic, and quite satisfying. The Golden Flute is a marvelous recording from 1966 that ...