I got a call from Scott Merzbach, a reporter at the Daily Hampshire Gazette, on Monday afternoon with the news that Yusef Lateef had died. I asked Scott if he knew the time of death? For at around 11 that morning, what seemed like a random thought about Brother Yusef crossed my mind, and I paused for a minute to think about him. Yusef had a powerful spiritual aura. I always felt elevated in his presence, a little more grounded in the journey. I’ll never forgot the sound of his voice, husky and mellifluous, but one you sometimes needed to lean in closer to hear. He embodied the archetype of the “Gentle Giant,” after which one of his Atlantic recordings was named. Gentle Giant is also the title of the autobiography he wrote with Herb Boyd and published in 2006.
After speaking with the Gazette (go here for the article, which includes recollections by Avery Sharpe, Ron Freshley, and Glenn Siegel), I listened to his albums The Golden Flute and Morning, then found this footage of him and Kenny Barron playing Leroy Carr’s classic blues, “In the Evening.” It was filmed in Paris in 1972, which was the same year I first saw him at the Jazz Workshop in Boston. He played the blues on oboe there too, and when I met him 13 years later and was still exclaiming over it, he gave out a hearty laugh.
Yusef Abdul Lateef was born William Emmanuel Huddleston in Chattanooga, Tennessee, on October 9, 1920, and spent his formative years in Detroit where he became a leading figure on the local scene following World War II. He played with the bands of Lucky Millinder and Dizzy Gillespie in the late ’40s, but remained in Detroit until 1960, when he moved to New York and joined Charles Mingus’s orchestra. During his brief tenure with Mingus, he was the featured soloist on “Prayer for Passive Resistance.” If this was all Yusef ever recorded, he’d have earned his renown, but after a few months with Mingus, he joined Cannonball Adderley. Just as Cannonball made Miles Davis’s group a sextet in 1958, so Yusef led to the expansion of Cannonball’s group to six members with a trumpet/alto/tenor-flute-oboe front line.
Yusef’s own recordings for Savoy, Prestige, Riverside, Impulse and Atlantic between 1956 and the mid-’70s are among the most stylistically wide-ranging of that dynamic period. He was one of the first jazz artists to explore Middle Eastern, Far Eastern, and African music and instrumentation, and in this respect especially he influenced John Coltrane. Over the past 25 years, Yusef released dozens of discs on his own label, YAL Records, and these ranged from symphonic works to duos with Adam Rudolph; small combo jazz featuring Tom McClung, Avery Sharpe, and Steve McCraven; and a series of tenor invitationals, blowing sessions with Von Freeman, Rene McLean, Archie Shepp, and Ricky Ford.
The Detroit Free Press gave Yusef Lateef prominent, native-son coverage on Tuesday. The paper’s jazz critic, Mark Stryker, wrote, “Mr. Lateef’s reputation in jazz was as broad as the shoulders of his towering frame. He gained notoriety…for his influential experiments with what would come to be known as ‘world music.’ But the heart of Mr. Lateef’s musicianship was a profound understanding of the blues, best expressed through the wailing, cavernous tone he produced on the tenor sax. It was a sound braised by soulful bent pitches and to-the-point phrasing that grabbed you by the collar and refused to let go.”
Ken Irwin, the host of Java Jazz on WMUA at UMass, sent this note to a jazz radio group on Tuesday. “Yusef was such an important part of our community here in Amherst, and touched the lives of so many. Certainly one of the finest human beings that I have had the pleasure to know, and without doubt a giant of music…I will always remember him in his office at UMass working with his students at the piano and sharing his immense knowledge. We all loved Yusef and can’t imagine Amherst without him.”
Posted below is the Swiss-produced documentary Brother Yusef. Released in 2005, the hour-long film moves at a quiet, contemplative pace that befits its subject. It shows Yusef walking in the deeply wooded area around his home in Shutesbury, Massachusetts, reading poetry, and singing “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child.” He reflects on Lester Young as “a soul player;” the importance of listening to one’s heart; and his feeling that gratitude is the truest manifestation of spirituality. He recalls John Coltrane’s visit to his Teaneck, NJ home in 1968 when Trane was looking to move to the area. Alas, he died only two weeks later. Yusef relates a poignant story involving hot chocolate that’s at the heart of their final encounter.
(photo by David Redfern)
Yusef Abdul Lateef, who converted to Islam in 1948, earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the Manhattan School of Music, and a doctorate in education at the University of Massachusetts. He called his music, “autophysiopsychic,” and assiduously avoided the term “jazz.” His obituary went so far as to call the NEA Jazz Masters Award that he received in 2010 the “National Endowment for the Arts Award.” Yusef was of the era when “jazz” was often used by critics, moralists and cultural snobs as a pejorative to dismiss or disparage the new music of African Americans. Duke Ellington rejected the term, too, and like Duke, Yusef created music and experimented with forms and textures that might have earned him Ellington’s highest compliment, “beyond category.”
But Brother Yusef’s aversion to the commonly accepted term, one that has long outlived its negative associations, was never meant to distance himself from the tradition itself. As recently as the 2005 interview seen in this film, he cites Dexter Gordon, Gene Ammons, Sonny Stitt, Don Byas, Ben Webster, and Stan Getz, tenor saxophonists who epitomize the mainstream of modern jazz, as players who succeeded in finding their “own voice.” For Yusef, this was the “real challenge, the personal search of those who have the courage to be…individualistic.” Brother Yusef found his voice within the jazz tradition, too, but he’ll long be remembered as a man whose individualized range of expression was as big and courageous as the dialogue he honored between his heart, mind, and soul.