Purple flower yusef lateef biography

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.

Yusef Lateef is a Grammy Award-winning composer, performer, recording artist, author, visual artist, educator and philosopher who has been a major force on the international musical scene for more than six decades. In recognition of his many contributions to the world of music, he has been named an American Jazz Master for the year 2010 by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Still very much active as a touring and recording artist, Yusef Lateef is universally acknowledged as one of the great living masters and innovators in the African American tradition of autophysiopsychic music — that which comes from one’s spiritual, physical and emotional self.

As a virtuoso on a broad spectrum of reed instruments — tenor saxophone, flute, oboe, bamboo flute, shanai, shofar, argol, sarewa, and taiwan koto — Yusef Lateef has introduced delightful new sounds and blends of tone colors to audiences all over the world, and he has incorporated the sounds of many countries into his own music. As a result, he is considered a pioneer in what is known today as “world music.”

As a composer, Yusef Lateef has compiled a catalogue of works not only for the quartets and quintets he has led, but for symphony and chamber orchestras, stage bands, small ensembles, vocalists, choruses

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