Adam Rudolph and Bennie Maupin pay loving homage to mentor Yusef Lateef by evoking his aesthetic rather than imitating his sound. In the process of creating Symphonic Tone Poem for Brother Yusef (Strut), which documents a virtual concert that transpired at the Angel City Jazz Festival on the centennial birthday of the transformative woodwindist-percussionist-educator Yusef
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How did the Maupin-Rudolph relationship begin?
AR: I first heard Bennie on Bitches Brew when I was 14. The Mwandishi Sextet was one of my favorite groups as a teenager; I wasn’t so aware of his work with Horace Silver and Lee Morgan. In 1974, a friend who worked at the Record Plant told me that Bennie and Herbie Hancock were recording there with Manfred Eicher. That was The Jewel in the Lotus, which is probably on my desert island [top] 10 records; it isn’t as well known as I feel it should be.
When I moved to Los Angeles, Bennie was one of the people I was hoping to connect with. I started playing in his band in 1980, and in several of his groups for the next few years. Then, in 1999, I started Go: Organic Orchestra, which I still have going. I was 44, and a lot of musicians around Los Angeles wanted to play with me and learn things I’d gleaned from my work with Don Cherry and Yusef. I thought this would be a good format for me to share with musicians from any background, whether they’re classically trained or improvisers or so-called jazz players or world music musicians. I invited Bennie, and he began to play with us regularly. I’d met Yusef in 1988. He heard our records, and in 2003 we created the piece for the Go: Organic Orchestra that Bennie mentioned. It’s documented on a record called In the Garden. Three generations of great woodwind players from Detroit were playing — Yusef, of course; then Bennie, 20 years younger; and Ralph Buzzy Jones, a musical associate of mine since I started playing in Detroit in 1973.
I developed my own system of conducting that’s related to a score which consists of what’s called “matrices and cosmograms.” Yusef was a motivator for that, and through his Repository of Scales and Melodic Patterns, which is one of the most studied and important books for anybody involved in improvised music, I was motivated to do a book called Pure Rhythm, which addresses my system of thinking about rhythm, which I call “cyclic verticalism.” Yusef also motivated me to start my own record label. I’d been exposed to the idea of self-determination in Chicago and Detroit, and after Yusef launched his label, YAL, I started Meta Records. I’ve put out 30-plus albums, many co-released by Yusef and I.
BM: It’s amazing that Adam could be present at such an important moment for me — recording The Jewel in the Lotus in Los Angeles — and that many decades later, Adam would have a profound connection to Yusef. Nothing happens by chance. I believe it’s all karmically connected. Yusef inspired me through his playing and through his life condition. He was always clean. He was always healthy. He was always seeking. It’s remarkable that I witnessed the things that he did in Detroit before he moved to New York.
Adam, let’s talk more about the 1970s and your experiences in Detroit and Chicago before you went to Los Angeles.
AR: As Bennie was describing, this is an oral tradition, transmitted from older musicians to the next generation. I might have been the last generation that really learned this music that way. I grew up in Hyde Park, on the South Side of Chicago. As a teenager, I played with Fred Anderson, Maulawi Nururdin, Billy Brimfield. Steve McCall, Henry Threadgill and Joseph Jarman were all my neighbors. I went to Oberlin in 1972, where I met [trumpeter] Charles Moore and [the writer] Herb Boyd, who were teaching there one or two days a week. Charles started inviting me to come to Detroit, and I spent a lot of time at the Strata Gallery with him and Kenny Cox and Danny Spencer and Charles Eubanks — all these incredible musicians. That environment was also my school. They actually pulled me on the bandstand on the Ann Arbor Blues and Jazz Festival in 1973 — where, coincidentally, Yusef was playing with his group. At the same time, I went to the Smiling Dog Saloon in Cleveland to hear Miles’ group with Mtume, where I also heard the Mwandishi sextet — I went every night. Bennie doesn’t remember me then, but I talked to him and Billy Hart.
Charles Moore was in Los Angeles. I came to visit, and ended up staying there. Don Cherry was living in L.A., and I started working with Don. Then I started working with Bennie — and I was like, “Well, I don’t need to go to New York.” I was also working with Charles Moore and Ralph Jones from Detroit, and Federico Ramos, the Uruguayan guitarist — we started a group called Eternal Wind that made three records. I started studying tabla really seriously then, and West African drumming. Bennie had an incredible group, with a lot of Chicago guys — Kenny Crutchfield and then Kenny Elliott were playing drums. I’d worked with Kenny Elliott, and I’d worked with both of them with Maulawi Nururdin back in Chicago when I was 16. Maulawi’s sister was married to Ahmad Jamal, and he actually also became an Ahmadiyya [Muslim] like Yusef; so he played oboe. Muhal and Roscoe Mitchell knew about Maulawi. One of my great moments was when I performed at Ravinia [in Illinois] with Yusef in the early ’90s, and I invited both Fred Anderson and Maulawi and they came to the concert.
Anyway, in 1988, I was living in Don Cherry’s loft in Long Island City, and Yusef somehow heard the Eternal Wind record, and invited us — along with Cecil McBee — to play a concert at Symphony Space, his first in New York since he returned from Nigeria, where he lived and did ethnomusicological research from 1981 to 1985. He published an incredible musicological study on the Sarewa Fulani flute, and he made some records there, including Yusef Lateef in Nigeria, which Orrin Keepnews released. It blew me away. He’d also released a record called Little Symphony [1987] for which he won the first-ever New Age Grammy. I remember he called me and asked, “What’s New Age music?” I explained it to him. He said, “Well, that’s OK.” He didn’t like to be called a jazz musician. He called his music “autophysiopsychic,” which means coming from the mental and spiritual physical self.
How did your relationship with Yusef Lateef progress from that point?
AR: I worked with Yusef for the next 25 years. We did many big collaborative projects, including the Go: Organic Orchestra with Bennie, but during the last 10 years we played primarily as a duet. At first we’d have a roadmap, which might be something inspirational from Yusef, like: “Imagine that we’re people who have been living on separate islands, and we’re two cultures encountering each other for the first time.” But the last several years, we didn’t have a score. We would just begin and listen, as I did with Bennie, and see where the music went. It’s all about language and it’s all about listening; Yusef and I developed a language together.
Over those 25 years, Yusef’s playing changed radically on all the instruments that he played, but he always sounded like himself. When you listen to Bennie on this recording, you recognize his voice, but he’s playing different than how he played on Jewel in the Lotus. It’s a different time, a different place, a different moment. You’re always cultivating what you do. Yusef told me, “With every record I do, I try to do something I’ve never done before.” All the records I made with him were done with different processes. I was living in California; he was in Massachusetts. Sometimes I’d fly there to play on the record, but sometimes he’d say, “I want you to record something.” It would be either with MIDI, with electronics or acoustic. I said, “Well, Brother Yusef, I don’t know what you’re going to do, so how can I know?” All he would say was, “vary your palette.” So I did whatever. Then he would add to that with electronics or his playing.
We did a project together called The World at Peace [recorded in 1995]. The Rockefeller Foundation commissioned Yusef to write this piece, and he invited me to write it with him. He suggested I write three compositions for half of the 12 instruments, then tell him only which instruments I had written for, the tempo and how many bars I wrote. Then, without seeing my pieces, he would compose for the other six musicians. At the same time, I was to follow the same process — composing without seeing his music. We wrote our music separately and we put it together and it was incredible. We took The World at Peace to Verona. Muhal had an AACM big band there with all the elders, Anthony Braxton and Joseph Jarman and Henry Threadgill. So here I am playing with Yusef, and I’m hanging out on the bus with all the musicians who were my influences when I was a teenager. I heard the Art Ensemble of Chicago when I was 14 years old. Joseph told me that Yusef influenced the Art Ensemble of Chicago’s idea of picking up instruments other than your main axe. Muhal also told me that they regarded Yusef — a master improviser, writing for larger ensembles, writing symphonic works from the late ’50s all through the ’60s — as someone who broadened the orchestral palette.
One thing I’ve noticed about every musician I met from Detroit is that they were all studious, what I call research-and-development musicians. I think Yusef impacted this. He introduced everybody in Detroit to the work of Joseph Schillinger. I asked Yusef how he got into musics outside his own culture. He said, “I knew that if I wanted a long career in music, I needed to study everything I could about every kind of music in the world.” When I met him, I was already in that direction. I’d been studying tablas and African drumming. I’d lived in Ghana. But his remark reiterated the idea of work ethic and studiousness. Studiousness implies a kind of humility, too, because you have to be open to new ideas, do things that you might not be an expert at, and not be addicted to the idea of what you think virtuosity is. What does it mean when one of the greatest tenor players of the blues makes a bamboo flute that has one hole in it and plays that? It tells you that they understand that music is about something greater than music, that it’s about mystery and vibration and spiritual intention.
Yusef used to say, “The tradition is to sound like yourself.” When I hear Yusef, I think every note he plays, in a way, is a tribute to Ben Webster or Coleman Hawkins — but he sounds completely like himself at the same time. Bennie mentions how profound an influence Yusef was on him, but actually, listening to Bennie now, although you hear his influences, he sounds 100 percent like himself. That’s the way you honor the tradition.