Date: April 6, 2013
Venue: The Roulette (NY)
Review, photos and videos by Dawoud Kringle
On a night promising to be the last of the cold weather, Roulette played host to a great master of music, and of life; Yusef Lateef. The very idea tends to inspire awe; a quarter of a century of making some of the most beautiful and sublime music the ear can hear.
Yusef Lateef’s biography and resume read like a Renaissance man’s Renaissance man. Born in Chattanooga TN, he later moved to Detroit where he grew up with musicians like Milt Jackson, Paul Chambers, Elvin Jones, and Kenny Burrell. At the age of 18, he began touring with a number of swing bands led by Hartley Toots, Hot Lips Page, Roy Eldridge, Herbie Fields and Lucky Millender. In 1949, he toured with Dizzy Gillespie’s orchestra. It was around this time he converted to Islam. Over the years he’d also worked with Cannonball Adderly, Donald Byrd, Art Farmer, Curtis Fuller, Grant Green, and others. His association with John Coltrane made deep impressions on both men. He made his first recordings as a leader in 1957. Since then, he has recorded 54 recordings as a leader, toured the world, become a world class virtuoso on several instruments, composed many major works (including several symphonies), wrote several influential textbooks on music, authored two novels, two collections of short stories, and an autobiography. He is an emeritus Five Colleges professor at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, MA, from which he was awarded a PhD in Education in 1975, and was named University of Massachusetts’ “Artist of the Year” in 2007. In 1985 he became a senior research Fellow at the Center for Nigerian Cultural Studies at Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria, Nigeria, where he did research into the Fulani flute. He has collaborated with other master musicians such as Barry Harris, Kenny Barron, Hugh Lawson, Albert Heath, Roy Brooks, Ernie Farrell, Cecil McBee, Bob Cunningham, Adam Rudolph, Charles Moore, Ralph Jones and Frederico Ramos.
