On the surface, Symphonic Tone Poem for Brother Yusef is just another jazz tribute album. Scratch at it, and it reveals itself as both a fitting homage to Yusef Lateef (1920-2013) and an extension of his explorations and discoveries. Composer and master percussionist Adam Rudolph was one of Lateef's most frequent collaborators during his final two decades. They cut 15 albums together including 1997's The World at Peace and 2010's Towards the Unknown. Much earlier, Lateef was one of Bennie Maupin's personal mentors and influences in both Detroit during the 1950s and later in New York City. Lateef's recordings for Savoy, Argo, Riverside, Verve, and Atlantic melded jazz and blues with multi-instrumental incursions into global sounds.
In 2019, Claremont, California's Angel City Jazz Festival commissioned an original work to commemorate Lateef's centennial birthday the following year. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, however, the 2020 festival was canceled. Undaunted, Maupin and Rudolph recorded this five-movement work anyway. Though instruments are not credited, one can hear Maupin play bass clarinet, flutes, soprano and tenor saxophones, and more, while Rudolph provides a battery of percussion instruments, handles arrangements, and contributes careful, illustrative electronic processing. While certainly composed in places, there is abundant room for instinctual improvisation. The approach is both organic and disciplined; the music is at once meditative, eerie, and arresting.
Amid an electronic drone, an unidentifiable string instrument, bells, wooden chimes, and other sounds frame a lonesome bass clarinet amid moaning overtone vocals. The music is meditative and eerie. Maupin brings out his soprano and Rudolph frames it in layers of interlocking ambient backdrops and hand drums. The second movement takes a hypnotic approach as Maupin's flutes and single-syllable chants wind around looped, nocturnal electronics and a circular mridangam pulse adorned by bells, gongs, and cymbals. The abstract third movement weaves percussion and electronics into in a spacey mélange, as whistles, flutes, and an angular bass clarinet poignantly intone, bleat, and swell in the margins. The orgy of hand drums and electronics that introduce the fourth movement initially sounds like drum'n'bass from under the earth's surface as tablas, congas, timbales, and other drums create a rumbling dynamism. Maupin offers voices, then trilling shakuhachi flutes. His bass clarinet emerges atop a slower pulse from a drum kit and tablas in a tender modal solo. The blues inform the fifth movement. Lateef spent his years at Atlantic making magic from blues- and R&B-based forms. Maupin continually references its core with his resonant soprano and tenor saxes. Rudolph gives fragmental piano support while inserting string sounds, wafting ambience, and lush, textured spaces, providing Maupin plenty of room for improvisation. The track divisions are the only things that feel artificial here. Symphonic Tone Poem for Brother Yusef is, in actuality, a single, flowing, contemplative work that pays excellent tribute to Lateef's musical example, inspiration, and legacy.