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 | A Rare Performance at the Luckman LOS ANGELES - In a rare West Coast concert appearance, Yusef Lateef and Randy Weston will perform at the Luckman Fine Arts Complex, Cal State L.A., on Saturday, April 28, at 8:00 p.m. Joining Yusef Lateef will be composer/percussionist Adam Rudolph and Eternal Wind (Federico Ramos, Ralph Jones and Charles Moore). Since the 1950s, research scholar and composer/performer Dr. Yusef Lateef has been a pioneer in the multicultural expression of "autophysiopsychic" music - "coming from the physical, spiritual and mental self." He has recorded over 60 records that creatively, succinctly, and clearly provide a path for the new generation of "World" composers and musicians. He has contributed to the legendary groups of Dizzy Gillespie, Charles Mingus and Cannonball Adderly, and led his own ensembles in tours worldwide. Currently a Five College Professor at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, Dr. Lateef was a Senior Research Fellow at Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria, Nigeria from 1981 to 1985. "Since my return from Nigeria," he has written, "I've been experiencing an ongoing dialectic reality in my approach to melody, rhythm, harmony, form, and aesthetics." Dr. Lateef has composed for the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, the Augusta, Georgia Symphony Orchestra and the Symphony of the New World. His composition, The African-American Epic Suite, was recorded and performed by the Köln (Cologne) Radio Orchestra and received its U.S. première by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra in 1998. Numerous publications to his credit in both music and literature include "Repository of Musical Scales and Patterns," and the novella Night in the Garden of Love (Vantage Press). In concert with Eternal Wind, Dr. Lateef performs on the soprano and tenor saxophones, shenai, Germanic C and alto flutes, piano, oboe, bamboo flute and Chinese globular flute. Eternal Wind co-founder Adam Rudolph is a master percussionist and composer who has been in the vanguard of the development of cross-cultural improvisational music for over 20 years. Combining music-making ideas from around the globe, his compositions weave what he terms "an audio syncretic musical fabric." Rudolph has performed in concerts throughout the U.S., Europe and Brazil with Don Cherry, Jon Hassel and Hassan Hakmoun, among others. His repertoire of world rhythms come from the Balinese, Cuban, Ghanaian, Haitian, Hindustani and Moroccan traditions, layered on top of his strong foundation in American improvisational jazz drumming. While living in Ghana in 1977, Rudolph met the Gambian griot Foday Musa Suso, with whom he formed the Mandingo Griot Society in Chicago - the first band to blend traditional African music with R&B and jazz. Although voted "Percussionist Deserving Wider Recognition" in a Down Beat International Critics Poll, Rudolph has "never been interested in trying to showcase technique on the drum" - his performances are "always in the service of greater spiritual and emotional expression." To honor Yusef Lateef's sixty years of performing, Beyond the Sky - featuring ten compositions by Rudolph and Lateef, three of which were co-composed - premièred at Lincoln Center's Alice Tully Hall in February, 2000. In celebration of Dr. Lateef's 80th birthday, the CD was recorded the following day, and later released through YAL and Meta Records. For five decades, pianist/composer Randy Weston has used the 20th century African Diaspora artform of jazz to manifest a musical free zone that exalts the spirits, rhythms, hopes, dreams, dignity and beauty of the people who are "darker than blue." The first musician to connect the dots drawn by Dizzy Gillespie and Chano Pozo's Afro-Cuban fusions with the ancestral power points of the Motherland, Weston has transcended time, space, language, and culture barriers with music that touches the universal human soul. Randy Weston was born in 1926 in Brooklyn into a musical household. Although he first picked up the drums, he switched to piano around age fifteen, and turned professional in 1949. After early apprenticeships with Art Blakey, Kenny Dorham and Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson, Weston emerged with a mature sound influenced by Duke, Monk and Nat "King" Cole. In 1955, Down Beat's annual poll cited him as "Best New Talent" on piano. He hooked up with Gillespie big band trombonist/arranger Melba Liston in 1958, who became a crucial element in every major statement from him since. In 1967, an 18-country African tour under the auspices of the State Department led to a six-year sojourn in Tangier, Morocco. There he ran a club and began three decades of interaction with the Gnawan musical healers. King Hassan II of Morocco honored his contributions in a 1998 ceremony. According to Luckman Fine Arts Complex Director of Music Programming and Research, flutist James Newton, "Each of these composers, steeped and raised in the African American improvisational tradition, have expanded their music into new horizons, with the culture of Africa at the core of that expansion. The Luckman is honored to present two Grand Masters who have had a major influence on the shaping of creative composition and improvisation. The opportunity to hear artists of this caliber on the same night is something that normally happens only in Japan and Europe." WHO: WHEN: WHERE: TICKETS: PARKING: INFO:
Yusef Lateef "During his precious passages of tenor saxophone, Lateef emotes with an animalism that is deep, passionate, and almost ritualistic in its intensity." - Willard Jenkins, Jazz Times, on The African-American Epic Suite Randy Weston "Piano music is as old as the piano...but not until Randy Weston put the enormous hands of his 6´7? frame to the piano did exactly what happens in his playing emerge from that ancient instrument.... When Randy plays, a combination of strength and gentleness, virility and velvet emerges from the keys in an ebb and flow of sound seemingly as natural as the waves of the sea. " - Langston Hughes Adam Rudolph "Double Concerto proved a masterful blending of jazz styling and instrumental prowess." - Daily Variety "A percussion wizard..." - Down Beat
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