Listening to Prestige 322: Yusef Lateef

Yusef Lateef, like many musicians who worked in this contemporary American musical form, created by African American artists, hailed as America's signal cultural achievement, did not like the word jazz. It's understandable, and I've written about it before--the lowlife origins of the word, the not always attractive associations that have grown up around it. As Lateef told Marc Myers of Jazzwax,

I feel the word is a misnomer. It has meanings and connotations that debase the art and belittle those who play it. Performing music that inspires listeners and puts them in touch with themselves is a beautiful and challenging and difficult expression. There’s communication between the artist and the listener, and hopefully both are better people and more enriched as a result.

...If you look it up, you’ll see that its synonyms include “nonsense,” “blather,” “claptrap” and other definitions that reduce the music to poppycock and skulduggery. I find that the word “jazz” is a meaningless term that too narrowly defines the music I play, and it adds a connotation that’s disrespectful to the art and those who perform it. 

I do like the word. I feel that it has been ennobled by the people who have played it. It has been elevated from the profane to the sacred, without losing a touch of the profane, by Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker, Ben Webster and Eric Dolphy, Erskine Hawkins and Bug Jay McNeely. It has gone to college with Dave Brubeck, to the Philharmonic with Norman Granz, to high society with Louis Armstrong and Bing Crosby. It has gone into concert halls with the Modern Jazz Quartet. And if America's greatest art form had its roots in the bawdy houses of Storyville in New Orleans, the mob-controlled speakeasies of Chicago, the urban corruption of Boss Pendergast in Kansas City, then it has something in common with Hamlet, which was written by an actor, about as lowlife and raffish a profession as you could find in Elizabethan England. Great art comes from folk roots, and the folk are where you find them.

It's also difficult to find a word to replace it. Lateef, in the same interview, suggested:

autophysiopsychic music. This means music from the physical, mental and spiritual. I think it’s an adequate term.

It's hard to dispute its adequacy, and it's certainly better than the "social music" that Miles Davis put forth, but it's not likely to catch on.

The 1960s were  a time during which a lot of musicians were chafing at the name "jazz" (in Art Taylor's book Notes and Tones: Musician-to-Musician Interviews, he asks a lot of his subject what they think of the term, and they mostly don't like it), but they were also a time during which musicians were questioning what the music was, and what its boundaries were. Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy were the most famous of these, but Lateef was one of the important figures in this jazz revolution.
Lateef, in discussing his bending of barriers, credited the spiritual element that he brought to the music, but that's hard to quantify, although there's a direct correlation to something that is quantifiable. He was one of the earliest convert to Islam among American jazz musicians, embracing the religion in Detroit in 1948, and this brought him into contact with Detroit's Islamic community. These days greater Detroit, particularly Dearborn, is home to one of America's largest Islamic communities, but even then the influence was there if one was open to it, and Lateef was. From a Syrian fellow assembly line worker at the Chrysler plant he began to learn about Middle Eastern music, and it was to have a profound effect on the music he would make.

Lateef was not the only jazz musician to turn to the Middle East for inspiration (we've heard Herbie Mann's "Tel Aviv" in a 1957 Prestige recording), but he may well have been the most profoundly influenced.  So his spiritual quest became a musical quest, and it didn't stop with the tonality and instrumentation of the Middle East. As he told Marc Myers:

When I was beginning to explore spiritual music in the mid-1950s, there was some resentment. My early albums as a leader for Savoy—Jazz for the Thinker and Prayer to the East—were different than anything else that had been recorded. I realized then that if I was going to continue, I had to change the format. I started studying [Karlheinz] Stockhausen, a classical composer who was changing music with his embrace of electronics and new theories. After listening to composers like him, I knew I had to go beyond what I already knew.

When he signed a recording contract with Prestige, Lateef was still living in Detroit. He had recorded one earlier Prestige album, and the two game-changers for Savoy, but for all of these, he would pile his musicians and instruments into a station wagon, drive all night to New York, make the record, then back to Detroit. The Motor City had one of the most vibrant and active jazz scenes in the Midwest, and had sent an all star cast of musicians to New York, but Lateef was one of the last holdouts. He would not move east until 1960, and when he made this recording for Prestige, it was sill under those conditions, so all of the musicians on this date were Detroiters.

One of them, Lonnie Hillyer, who become known in the 1960s for his long association with Charles Mingus, was the stuff of legend in Detroit for an episode he wasn't even directly involved with. When Miles Davis lived there in the early 1950s, he was deep into heroin addiction, and his trumpet was generally in a pawnshop, so when he got a gig he'd have to borrow one, and the trumpet's owner had to hope it wouldn't end up in a pawnshop at the end of the evening. On this particular night, Miles had touched up young teenage trumpet student Lonnie Hillyer. When Lonnie's mother found out, she was furious. She went straight to the club, marched up onto the stage, and snatched the horn away from Miles in mid-solo.

Hillyer was all grown up in 1959, and like the rest of his bandmates, used to playing with Lateef every night. This was a tight group of Detroiters that Lateef brought to Englewood Cliffs, and they were able to hang tight with the leader as he pushed boundaries. These were all musicians who had  grown up in the jazz cauldron of Detroit, and who were fully equipped to understand and abet the fusion between jazz and autophysiopsychic music.

Lateef brings us both: what we already knew of as jazz and what we were to discover by listening to his music, in this album, in the earlier Prestige and Savoy albums, and in recordings to come.

He has not brought any of the exotic Midde Eastern instruments that he has mastered to this session, like the arghul, which he played on his 1957 recordings for Prestige, but he does play both the flute (at this point not unusual on a jazz recording) and the oboe (still unusual) in addition to the tenor sax, and these allow him to find a range of sounds and feelings beyond the usual. He plays four of his own compositions and three standards: Jerome Kern's "Yesterdays," Tadd Dameron's "If You Could See Me Now," and "Seabreeze," a swing-era tune credited to Larry Douglas, Fred Norman, and Rommie Bearden, the last named more commonly known as Romare Bearden, one of the great painters of his generation.

Cry!-Tender was released on New Jazz. Weinstock was creating quite a renaissance for New Jazz in his tenth anniversary year -- and that in addition to the new labels he was starting. Quite a lot of diversification, presumably for tax reasons. Cry!-Tender wasn't actually released until mid-1960, but a lot of New Jazz product was shipping as 1959 wound down, some of it cut in the waning months of the year, some of if off the shelf.

Here's a quick rundown of the last quarter of the year:

• NJLP 8224 Meet Oliver Nelson, recorded 10/30/1959
• NJLP 8225  Kenny Dorham - Quiet Kenny, recorded 11/13/1959
• NJLP 8226  Jerome Richardson, Roamin' with Richardson, recorded 10/21/1959
• NJLP 8227 Ray Bryant Trio, delayed release of a 1957 recording
• NJLP 8228 The Ray Draper Quintet Featuring John Coltrane, delayed release of a 1957 recording
• NJLP 8229 - Johnny "Hammond" Smith - That Good Feelin', recorded 11/4/1959

Two 45 RPM singles came from the session. "Dopolous" / "Yesterdays" was released on New Jazz, "Seabreeze" came out on Prestige, paired with "Love Theme From Spartacus" from a later session, which was to become Lateef's biggest hit.

Order Listening to Prestige Vol 2

 

Listening to Prestige Vol. 2, 1954-1956 is here! You can order your signed copy or copies through the link above.

Tad Richards will strike a nerve with all of us who were privileged to have
lived thru the beginnings of bebop, and with those who have since
fallen under the spell of this American phenomenon…a one-of-a-kind
reference book, that will surely take its place in the history of this
music.

                                                                                                                        --Dave Grusin

An important reference book of all the Prestige recordings during the time
period. Furthermore, Each song chosen is a brilliant representation of
the artist which leaves the listener free to explore further. The
stories behind the making of each track are incredibly informative and
give a glimpse deeper into the artists at work.

                                                                                                                --Murali Coryell