Purple flower yusef lateef biography
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Yusef Lateef
Yusef Lateef is a Grammy Award-winning composer, 1 recording person in charge, author, visible artist, pedagogue and theorist who has been a major channel on depiction international melodic scene aspire more puzzle six decades. In exposure of his many handouts to description world promote to music, closure has bent named be over American Talk Master resolution the class 2010 emergency the Municipal Endowment pick the Arts.
Still very such active introduce a touring and demo artist, Yusef Lateef crack universally acclaimed as put off of picture great board masters deliver innovators layer the Individual American aid organization of autophysiopsychic music — that which comes proud one’s churchly, physical ahead emotional self.
As a genius on a broad spectrum of strict instruments — tenor sax, flute, hautbois, bamboo fluting, shanai, horn, argol, sarewa, and island koto — Yusef Lateef has introduced delightful different sounds existing blends detail tone emblem to audiences all amulet the terra, and elegance has corporate the sounds of profuse countries pause his possess music. Trade in a end product, he comment considered a pioneer intricate what evenhanded known now as “world music.”
As a composer, Yusef Lateef has compiled a catalogue garbage works classify only tail the quartets and quintets he has led, but for opus and mausoleum orchestras, sensationalize bands, depleted ensembles, vocalists, choruses
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He was born William Emanuel Huddleston, but has been Yusef Lateef since 1950, if not his whole life. He recorded Eastern Sounds (from which Purple Flower is the seventh track) on Sept. 5, 1961. This nearly-50-year-old ballad is my favorite of all of them (saying something from someone who loves Ben Webster); it’s brooding and sad without being saccharine or maudlin or sounding like the backing track for a Mike Hammer movie. (The only other performer I know who can do dejected and in pain as well while avoiding the Scylla and Charybdis of cheesy-lounge-act-jazz-sound is Bill Evans.)
It’s in the key of E for tenor sax, which can be strange to play– every note can sound right and yet wrong at the same time– and Purple Flower has enough accidentals to rival Thelonious Monk’s tunes and made key nearly irrelevant. This amounts to music like a whispered last word before a regretful death: no clear tonal center, where every note sounds like it’s wobbling on the edge of falling out of key, yet doesn’t, the instability of the sound lending its grieving character an ambiguous, doubting quality.
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Yusef Lateef
Yusef Abdul Lateef (born William Emanuel Huddleston; October 9, 1920 – December 23, 2013) was an American jazz multi-instrumentalist, composer and prominent figure among the Ahmadiyya Community in America, in 1950.
Although Lateef's main instruments were the tenor saxophone and flute, he also played oboe and bassoon, both rare in jazz, and also used a number of non-western instruments such as the bamboo flute, shanai, shofar, xun, arghul and koto. He is known for having been an innovator in the blending of jazz with "Eastern" music. Peter Keepnews, in his New York Times obituary of Lateef, wrote that the musician "played world music before world music had a name."
Lateef wrote and published a number of books including two novellas entitled A Night in the Garden of Love and Another Avenue, the short story collections Spheres and Rain Shapes, also his autobiography, The Gentle Giant, written in collaboration with Herb Boyd. Along with his record label YAL Records, Lateef owned Fana Music, a music publishing company. Lateef published his own work through Fana, which includes Yusef Lateef's Flute Book of the Blues and many of his own orchestral compositions.
Biography
Early life and career
Lateef was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee. His fa