Saturday, December 26, 2020
Teef - Yusef Lateef 1920-2013
© Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.
“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.”
Friday, December 25, 2020
Judy Garland’s Good Tidings - "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas"
When Garland sang ‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas’ in a film more than 75 years ago, she was consoling a nation at war; today, the song speaks as powerfully to a country beleaguered by Covid-19.
By Bob Greene
December 21, 2020, print edition of The Wall Street Journal
Copyright ©2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Appeared in the
“She was singing on the set of a motion picture that was being produced in wartime. She could have had no idea that her words would carry such present-tense power more than 75 years later.
The movie wasn’t about war—it was a musical about a Midwestern family, set in the early 1900s. The film, “Meet Me in St. Louis,” was released in 1944, and its star, Judy Garland, sang the words to Margaret O’Brien, who was playing her little sister.
Have yourself a merry little Christmas, let your heart be light.
Next year all our troubles will be out of sight.…
It was exactly what Americans, weary from the years of World War II, needed to hear: those words of hope—the promise that in the next year all, at last, would be well. From phonographs in living rooms and radios near battlefields, the words to “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” comforted mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, soldiers alone in the dark.
The song, written by Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane, reached inside listeners like an electrical jolt to their hearts. The soldiers and their families had been apart for holiday after holiday. They had said goodbye before the young men had boarded the packed ships that would transport them to faraway war zones; the only way to keep in touch was through the mail, and with combat raging that was sporadic at best. No telephone calls, not during that war; the families hadn’t heard each other’s voices for years. Then, with another Christmas approaching, there was a different voice, Judy Garland’s, speaking to, and for, all of them:
Next year all our troubles will be miles away.…
The song became a holiday standard; for a version in the 1950s, in peacetime, Frank Sinatra had the lyrics watered down a bit, to de-emphasize the baseline sense of deprivation. Some of the more pensive phrases were replaced with cheery words about decorating a Christmas tree.
But as Christmas approaches in 2020 it is the original that can cause listeners to pause and ponder what they have gone through in the long months since last Christmas. If, when the song was new, it brought a tender, fragile look to the eyes of its listeners, it is having a similar effect now, in a country in many ways changed yet at its core much the same as it ever was. In this year of so much illness and death, when we have been warned against surrounding ourselves with loved ones at the gatherings we always took for granted, there are those haunting words of yearning, over all the decades:
Once again as in olden days, happy golden days of yore,
Faithful friends who were dear to us, will be near to us, once more.…
What is it that we have in common with those Americans of the 1940s? Their ordeal, after all, was quite different from ours. Perhaps the connective thread is just this: the knowledge that the lives we take on faith, the daily assumptions about the world around us, can be yanked away so quickly by uninvited forces that overwhelm us. Which is why, as we are admonished to keep our distance, those words, in a fresh yet familiar context, can stop us in our tracks:
Someday soon we all will be together, if the fates allow,
Until then we’ll have to muddle through somehow.…
What is the message, as we do our best to muddle through this cold December? Probably the same as it was in 1944 — nothing more simple, or more complicated, than this: Have yourself a merry little Christmas now.”
—Mr. Greene’s books include “Duty: A Father, His Son, and the Man Who Won the War.”