Reminder: Suga’ in My Bowl now airs weekly on WBAI, except for the last Sunday of the month! Please update your calendars, pass the word on to friends, and share on social media if you like the show.
The next show will air on Sunday Janury 5, 2014 from 11:00 PM – 1:00 AM Monday Eastern Standard Time on WBAI, 99.5 FM in the NYC metro area or streaming online at wbai.org. This installment of the program will be a memorial to the recently deceased Yusef Lateef. We’ll feature a 2010 interview with Lateef and a new interview with long-time collaborator and friend Adam Rudolph. The original show also featured an interview with journalist and educator Herb Boyd, who co-wrote Lateef’s autobiography The Gentle Giant.
Yusef Lateef is a Grammy Award-winning composer, performer, recording artist, author, educator and philosopher who has been a major force on the international musical scene for more than six decades. He is universally acknowledged as one of the great masters and innovators in the African American tradition of autophysiopsychic music — that which comes from one’s spiritual, physical and emotional self. In 2010, he was declared a Jazz Master by the National Endowment of the Arts.
As a virtuoso on a broad spectrum of reed instruments — tenor saxophone, flute, oboe, bamboo flute, shanai, shofar, argol, sarewa, and taiwan koto — Lateef has introduced delightful new sounds and blends of tone colors to audiences all over the world.
As a composer, he compiled a catalog of works not only for the quartets and quintets he has led, but for symphony and chamber orchestras, stage bands, small ensembles, vocalists, choruses and solo pianists. His extended works have been performed by the WDR (Cologne), NDR (Hamburg), Atlanta, Augusta and Detroit Symphony Orchestras and the Symphony of the New World. He won a Grammy in 1987 for his recording of “Yusef Lateef’s Little Symphony,” on which he performed all the parts.
As an educator, Lateef devoted much of his life to exploring the methodology of autophysiopsychic music in various cultures and passing what he learned on to new generations of students. He was a Five Colleges professor at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, MA, from which he was awarded a Ph.D. in Education in 1975. His doctoral dissertation was entitled “An Overview of Western and Islamic Education.”
As an author, Yusef Lateef has published a novella, A Night in the Garden of Love, and two collections of short stories, Spheres and Rain Shapes.
Listen for our On the Bandstand segment with NYC metro area appearances of Suga’ guests at the end of the first hour.
Produced, engineered, edited, and hosted by Joyce Jones.
Photo: Yusef Lateef. Creative Commons licensed by Flickr user Tom Beetz via Wikimedia.
At this time, we don’t have information on memorial and funeral arrangements. See our blog and Facebook page for updates.
Web Extras:
Read his obituary in the The Guardian newspaper.
Watch Lateef and Rudolph in a live 2010 performance in Milan, Italy:
Suga' in My Bowl 
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