Teef - Yusef Lateef 1920-2013

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“In his pursuit of varied tone-colors he also played oboe and bassoon, but he was noted above all for his full, sturdy sound on tenor saxophone and his tasteful solos on flute.”

- Lee Jeske, The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz

“Lateef avoided the confusion of yet another Evans in the catalogue by adopting a Muslim name in response to his growing and eventually life-long infatuation with the music's of the Levant and Asia. One of the few convincing oboists in jazz  … he has suffered something of Rahsaan Roland Kirk's fate in finding himself dismissed or marginalized as a 'speciality act',

working apart from the central dramas of modern jazz. Like Kirk's, Lateef's music was cartoonized when he came under Atlantic's wing, making albums that were enthusiastically promoted and received, but which rarely represented the best of his work.

Savoy's reissue programme catches him blowing rough, burly tenor alongside two solid, hard-bop rhythm sections,....

Live At Pep's [Impulse!] stands up extremely well, substantiating Lateef's often queried jazz credentials. He plays with great spirit and an authentically bluesy drive that makes the exact choice of instrument (oboe, saxophone, shenai, flute) pretty much irrelevant.

Like Kirk, the tenor saxophone is Lateef's 'natural' horn, but in his best period he made jazz whatever he was playing. In approach, he is somewhat reminiscent of the pre-bop aspect of Sun Ra's long-time associate, John Gilmore, working in a strong, extended swing idiom rather than with the more complex figurations of bebop.”

- Richard Cook and Brian Morton, The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, 6th Ed.

Like all artists, musicians move on. They continue to create in new and different ways. It’s how they grow and develop. [It doesn’t always work, but I suspect they learn more from their failures than from their successes because they examine the former and take the latter in stride.]

That certainly was the case with one of my favorite reed and woodwind player, Yusef Lateef, as the following overview of his career by Richard Cook will attest. 

In Yusef’s case, his music found new avenues of expression: stylistically, geographically and contextually.

In addition to expressing himself on a host of unique [to Jazz] instruments, he also became a teacher of some renown at the Manhattan School of Music, the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Hampshire College and Ahmadu Bello University in Nigeria.

Yet whatever the style or the setting, when it was expressed on the tenor saxophone, Yusef’s big, bold, blustering and bluesy sound was the quality of his music that always had the greatest appeal to me.

 - Richard Cook’s Jazz Encyclopedia.

“The remarkable Lateef has been playing jazz for more than 60 years. He started on alto, then switched to tenor, and in the 40s worked with Lucky Millinder and Ernie Fields before settling in Chicago in 1949. He was briefly with Dizzy Gillespie's big band but had to leave owing to his wife's illness. At this time he was still plain Bill Evans, but he changed to Yusef Lateef when he became a Muslim. Now in Detroit, he began working again in the mid-50s and made small-group records for Savoy and Prestige, mostly on tenor, though he also took up flute at Kenny Burrell's suggestion. At this point he sounds like a bluff, hard-swinging tenorman in the grand manner, and these records offer much straightforwardly enjoyable blowing. 

But as the Detroit scene declined, Lateef relocated to New York around 1960. and besides leading his own groups he joined Cannonball Adderley's band for two years from 1962, an attractively dark foil to the leader's customary cheeriness. He also began making records for Impulse!, an association which produced some of his best work: the first, Jazz 'Round The World (1963), showcased his new interest in bassoon, oboe, shenai and argol, and the subsequent Live At Pep's (1964) showed them in a live context. In the later 60s and 70s he moved labels to Atlantic, and made some of his most extravagant work, several records mixing up jazz, funk, gospel, poetry, assorted grunting and weird electronics, and latterly these moved in the direction of near Muzak. 

In 1981, he spent four years teaching in Nigeria, and since his return he has continued on a course which might be described as Yusef's world music: his own label, YAL, has documented sprawling works which seem to be couched in a discouraging dialect of New Age mysticism, sometimes in collaboration with the Californian drummer Adam Rudolph, and the music has been wispy and insubstantial to match. Yet there have also been some remarkable two-tenor fisticuffs with the likes of Archie Shepp, Von Freeman, Ricky Ford and Rene McLean, which suggest that Lateef's prowess on tenor remains considerable. An enigmatic man.”