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Parent Issue
Day
14
Month
June
Year
1974
OCR Text

Yusef Lateef, Part of the Search, Atlantic SDI 650 0598.

   This album is a lot of fun. It starts out with the sound of the dial being spun on a radio of many decades ago, and the dial lands on a Basie-jsh tune the likes of which Yusef used to play in the forties in big bands together with the likes of Dizzy Gillespie. And as the dial keeps spinning through this sea of nostalgia on Side 1 , we hear more glorious, bouncy blasts from the past, a la Ellington, Jimmy Lunceford and Ray Charles. We also hear, accidental on-purpose on the part of the person spinning the dial, a couple of short excerpts from a cleverly inane country song called "Oatsy Doatsy", which features Doug Sahm on guitar and somebody singing through a wah-wah pedal. Yes, this is an official nostalgia album. The record jacket even sports pictures of Yusef as a young man and as a baby, and is emblazoned with such backwards-in-history oriented slogans as "'Hommage au passe a l'egard de l'avenir."

    It's heart warming that there's somebody around like Yusef to make records with fresh new renditions of that great old music.

   There are also a few rhythm 'n' blues numbers, including some good old acapella. The acapella tune, like "Oatsy Doatsy", is pleasantly inane. It features such lyrics as these:

     I don't know what you 're talking about

   You better stop that stuff, y 'hear?

  Little bass drum say tcc-na-ta-tee

  Big bass drum say torn tom.

  And at the end of the album there's a mellow cocktail jazz tune. "Gettin' Sentimental", it's on this tune that Yusef blows most impressively, in a long straightforward solo. He is no acrobat on sax and flute on this one -- he eschews Coltranian, Dolphian and Sun Ra - esque wildness -- but he's, no doubt about it, pleasant to hear.

    Part of the Search is a very satisfying album: it's lively, great for parties or for listening to when you're trying to lift yourself out of a depression, and a good introduction to swing if you're not familiar with it.

    But don't cali it "jazz." Yusef refuses to use that term for his musical creations. As he explained in a recent interview at Baker's Keyboard Lounge in Detroit, 'it's not that I don't like the term jazz, it's that I don't understand what the word means, because it's so ambiguous, even by the dictionary-definitions. in Random House 1972 the first entry says 'to copulate.' Webster's Dictionary on Americanism defines it as 'that which is discordant and noisy.' Therefore I coined a word ior my music which defines it in my thinking, that is, 'autophysiopsychic' music, which means music that comes from one 's own physical, mental & spiritual self."

           ---Stephen Hersh