The Doctor Is In... And Out

Back in town to perform his "Detroit Suite" with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra at Homecoming '76, master Motor City musician Yusef Lateef and his encyclopedia quartet stayed over for ten packed-house nights at Baker's Keyboard Lounge, where Kulchur's Frank Bach took the opportunity to talk with Yusef between sets.
Lateef (ne William Evans), a member of the Amadea movement of the Islamic faith since 1948, was a major force in the development of both music and consciousness in Detroit's creative music community during the 1950's. His early groups, based in Detroit and recording as a unit for Savoy Records in Newark, New Jersey, included teen-age jazz stars Louis Hayes (later the drummer with Horace Silver and with the Cannonball Adderley Quintet), Curtis Fuller (Jazz Messengers, Jazztet, now with Count Basie), Donald Byrd, Terri Pollard, and other soon-to-be-prominent Detroiters: Wilbur Harden, Ernie Farrow, Oliver Jackson, Frank Gant (now with Ahmad Jamal), Bernard McKinney (Kiane Zawadi), Hugh Lawson, and Will Austin.
Centered at the World 'Stage, later at Klein's Showbar on 12th Street, the Minor Key (Dexter & Burlingame), and after hours at the West End Hotel n Del Ray, Yusef promulgated a music which was wider and deeper in its influences and effects than any other music of the time. He popularized the serious use of the flute in improvisational music, pioneering the humming vocal effect so common today, and he later introduced the oboe, bassoon, argol, and other exotic reed instruments into the improvisational arsenal. West African, East Indian, Northwest African, Egyptian, South American, and Afro-American musical sources of every discipline were brought into the Lateef "bouk" (bag), fully integrated with Yusef's mature, full-toned improvisational conception, and played out into compositions and improvisations of tremendous beauty and feeling. Later recording for Chess, Verve, Prestige, and Riverside Records, Yusef left Detroit in 1960 to settle in New York. He joined the Cannonball Adderley unit in early 1962, signing as a leader with Impulse Records at the same time and recording a series of excellent Lps for them n the first half of the sixties. Yusef switched to Atlantic Records n the latter 60's and continues to record for them to this date,
Lateef's current quartet- pianist Kenny Barlron, bassist Bob Cunningham, and drummer AlI bert "Kuumba" Heath- is a travelling university of Afro-American improvisational music, offering n-depth studies in the individual instruments, group improvisation, composition in four dimensions, historical repertoire from preblues to post-fusion music, and the overriding genius of Brother Lateef, the complete saxophonist of modern music.
Their delightful and far-ranging repertoire includes Lateef compositions from the 1957 "Yusef's Mood"-a hard-cooking tenor saxophone feature which has Lateef digging out his many splendored roots and waving them wildly around n the air to his most recent works, interspersed with Heath's drum-centered compositions (he records for Muse Records as a leader) and some of Cunningham's poetry-cum-improvisation specials (Cunningham was the featured bassist in Sun Ra's mythical Arkestra for al most ten years). All four travel around their instruments like total masters of the craft, and Cunningham in particular plays as much as one could hope to hear in one night.
Yusef's busy schedule prevented us from conducting the n-depth interview we still hope to obtain from this legendary Detroiter, but he was kind enough to sit for a few timely questions. The results follow below: