Listening to Prestige 497: Yusef Lateef

LISTEN TO ONE: Plum Blossom

By 1961, Yusef Lateef had completed his move from Detroit to New York. In 1960, he enrolled in the Manhattan School of Music. He would continue his studies off and on, eventually getting a BA (1969) and and MA (1970), then going on to get his Ed.D. And he was, although still playing in a jazz context, using jazz musicians and recording for a jazz label, already moving counter to a lot of what jazz was expected to do, perhaps more toward what he would come to call autophysiopsychic music --“music from one's physical, mental and spiritual self.” He was continuing to work a lot with musicians who had come with him from Detroit--in this case, Barry Harris and Ernie Farrow,

half-brother of Alice McLeod, who became Alice Coltrane--and who had become accustomed to his middle eastern influence and his often unusual instruments. But he had begun working with a New Yorker on drums--Lex Humphries, who had been with him on two previous albums for Riverside.

Lateef called this one Eastern Sounds, and that's a fitting title. Most of the compositions are his, and they reflect his love for Arabic music, but not just that. The sounds are truly eclectic. "Blues for the Orient" is a good example of this, starting with the two-worlds yoking in the title. Lateef plays the flute, and to my ear it's more Near Eastern than what we used to call "the Orient" - China, Japan, Korea, etc. But it's haunting and multicultural. And at the same time, Barry Harris, accompanying him, is playing the blues.When Harris takes an extended solo, he starts off on his own world music tangent, but then brings it around to the blues--and not the soul jazz, funk-drenched blues that were becoming so popular in the early 1960s, but very boppish, very Detroit-ish blues, earthy and cerebral at the same time. He and Lateef complement each other in unconventional but undeniable ways.

"Plum Blossom" is in a way more western, in other ways not. Harris is definitely in a boppish mood, and Lateef is not far away, but he's working with a most unusual instrument. The session notes call it a bamboo flute, but that it is not. It's sometimes called a xun, sometimes a Chinese globular flute. It looks a little like an ocarina, with it's globular shape, but it's played more like a jug from a rural jug band, by blowing into the top, but with finger holes around the ovoid shape.

It's not hard to tell why Lateef reached out of his Detroit orbit to pull in Lex Humphries. Probably best known in 1961 as the drummer on Art Farmer and Benny Golson's immensely popular and solidly hard bop Meet the Jazztet album, but he was capable of reaching outside what were usually thought of as jazz time signatures, which is what made him so valuable to Lateef and later to Sun Ra. His drumming on this session is a revelation, outside the box but always on point. 

So you have three musicians, two from Detroit and one from New York, two searching outside the normal traditions of jazz and one working creatively within those traditions. Redefining jazz, yes, but jazz is always about redefinition, so it's not so far-fetched to say that Lateef, Harris, Humphries and Farrow are working in the tradition, playing jazz, finding new ways, and the old ways, to play jazz.

Ernie Farrow contributes importantly as well, playing bass and also an instrument called, in the session log and liner notes, a rabat, but Rabat is the capital of Morocco, not a musical instrument. He seems to have been playing a rabab, an Arabic stringed instrument played with a bow. Both the xun and the rababare ancient instruments.

But the biggest splash was not made by one of Lateef's compositions, but by an unlikely selection. One of the three non-Lateef numbers was Jimmy McHugh's "Don't Blame Me," from an obscure 1932 Broadway revue called Clowns in Clover, but that's not the unlikely one. Obscure Broadway revues or obscure grade B films often produced memorable tunes (like the melody from the forgotten 

prison break movie Unchained), and "Don't Blame Me" had already entered the jazz repertoire, with recordings by Teddy Wilson, Coleman Hawkins and J. J. Johnson. No, much more unlikely for an against-the-grain jazzman with a taste for the Near East were two lush orchestral themes from big-budget movies, "Love Theme from The Robe" and "Love Theme from Spartacus."

And even more unlikely, not only did  "Love Theme from Spartacus" become the breakout hit from the album, it remained one of Lateef's most popular numbers, and a lot of other jazz musicians subsequently had a go at it, including Bill Evans, Ramsey Lewis, Gabor Szabo and Ahmad Jamal. And it's not hard to see why. It has a good groove from Harris, very full and very beautiful, and exotic flute solos from Lateef. It gets to you.

Eastern Sounds came out on Moodsville, and it certainly sets a mood. It generated three 45 RPM singles, although two of them were "Love Theme from Spartacus," once with "Snafu" from this session, and once with "Sea Breeze" from the earlier Cry! -- Tender. The other 45 was "Blues for the Orient," which was coupled with the standard "I'll Remember April," from Into Something, recorded in December of 1961. Esmond Edwards produced.