VMP Magazine

Prejudice and apprehension for the existence of the pipe organ has often, in the past, biased the judgment of those who have taken unkindly to the ...

This is not a jazz album.

“I don’t play jazz — in case you’ve heard that’s what I play,” Yusef Lateef told an Ann Arbor Sun reporter in 1976. “That term doesn’t apply to my music, and it doesn’t apply to me.” Lateef described his music as autophysiopsychic. This is music from the mind, the soul, the body. Music that comes, he said, “from the mental, physical and spiritual self.” Just as it is powerful to say what you are, to claim your space proudly, it is just as powerful to say what you are not. And this is not a jazz album.

In 1967, Roberta Flack wasn’t the household name we know today. She was a music teacher in Washington, D.C., but in the evenings, she would head over to a club called Mr. Henry’s. Those occasional performances turned into a three-times-a-week gig. Henry Yaffe, the eponymous Mr. Henry, eventually transformed an apartment above his club into a room just to showcase her talent. 

It’s late 1961, and Lee Morgan is a man without. He’d lost his place to live; his wife, Kiko, whom he’d married just a year earlier, had left him; and, desperate for drug money, he’d sold his trumpet. There was a silence in his life. But silences always find a way to get filled, and maybe this is a story about that. Maybe this whole album, 1962’s Take Twelve, is a story about filling silences, about figuring out sounds, about figuring out how to begin again.