I met with drummer Kresten Osgood (left) and Emil Jørgensen, founder of Blackout Music to discuss the idea for a crowd-funded project for a vinyl release of the Universal Quartet album.
The meeting went well – in fact, far better than I could have imagined.
First, I found some interesting things out:
1) The band has already recorded a follow-up album and are having difficulty working out how to get it released.
2) Yusef Lateef has written a symphony to celebrate his 90th birthday and wants to return to Copenhagen one last time in his life to perform it with the quartet and the Danish national symphony orchestra.
3) There is a recent film documentary about Lateef and especially about his relationship with the Jazzhus Montmartre in Copenhagen.
4) Lateef paints and sells his own artwork by mail order. We suspect that many of them remain in his collection. He also writes poetry and essays about music theory and practice.
We spoke about these aspects and ways of integrating them into a web project. However, more important will be convincing the rest of the band (and Lateef in particular) that this will be a good thing to do. Making the symphony performance possible will be key to that.
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Tagged: Emil, Kresten
- Published:
- September 10, 2011 – 10:36 pm
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- By dubber
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Avant-garde jazz group The Universal Quartet recorded and released their eponymous album in 2009 [Listen on Spotify]. The recording features two prominent Danish jazz musicians Kresten Osgood (drums) and Kasper Tranberg (bass) as well as American percussionist Adam Rudolph and jazz legend Yusef Lateef.
The CD was released by Danish independent jazz label Blackout Music and its worldwide release in 2010 coincides with Lateef’s 90th birthday.
Yusef Lateef is unique in the history of jazz. He had his recording debut in 1949 on a session with Dizzy Gillespie and has gone on to play with many of the heaviest innovators in jazz – like Count Basie, John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, Cannonball Adderley, Joe Zawinul and Art Blakey, to name a few. Yet Lateef is an important innovator himself. He is recognized as one of the best improvisers on the flute, while his saxophone playing is deeply original and respected throughout the world. Today Yusef Lateef is playing with unabated strength and creativity. This recording is his first since 2000.
Lateef’s relationship with Denmark is one that mirrors that of many of his contemporary leading black American jazz players who left the USA for Europe to find a more tolerant society, and a more enthusiastic reception for experimental and improvisational music forms. To commemorate this, he was inducted into the Ben Webster Foundation, which uses the ongoing royalties of Webster’s career to support and foster Danish jazz music.
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- Published:
- August 27, 2011 – 7:42 pm
- Author:
- By dubber
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