Intellectually curious and later disdainful of the label 'jazz' for his sound, Yusef Lateef incorporated an array of instruments and world styles as a performer and educator.
Photo: luc verpoortBy Don Heckman, Special to the Los Angeles Times
December 24, 2013, 7:27 a.m.
Yusef Lateef, a Grammy Award-winning multi-instrumentalist, composer and educator who brought the sounds of world music to jazz and became one of the first jazz musicians to convert to the teachings of Islam, has died. He was 93.
Lateef died Monday at his home in Shutesbury, Mass., his family announced.
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."
Like a number of musicians – from Duke Ellington to his contemporaries, Max Roach and Sonny Rollins – Lateef objected to the use of the word "jazz" to describe his work. He preferred, instead, the phrase, "autophysiopsychic music," which he defined as "music which comes from one's physical, mental and spiritual self."
He also acknowledged the importance of the blues, in his music and elsewhere.
"The blues," he said in an NPR interview in 2003, "is a very elegant musical form which has given birth to wonderful compositions. I recognize the blues. In fact, if the African had not been brought to America as a slave, the blues would never have been born."
http://www.latimes.com/obituaries/la-me-yusef-lateef-20131225,0,7549278.story#ixzz2oUjrFwWC
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