Song of the Day: Yusef Lateef “Like It Is”

“Like It Is” is a gorgeous, minor-key jazz ballad that finds multi-talented reedman Yusef Lateef doubling on the flute and saxophone. The cut appeared on Lateef‘s 1968 LP for Atlantic Records, The Blue Yusef Lateef. Along with Lateef‘s impressive instrumental doubling act, the subtle work from the rhythm section of Hugh Lawson (piano) Cecil McBee (bass) and Roy Brooks (drums), the track is also notable for its gorgeous string section. Lateef apparently wrote the string parts himself and did his own arranging with the help of cult-favorite jazz producer and musician William Fischer (who is credited with “conducting” in the LP’s liner notes. The net effect is one of the most staggeringly gorgeous jazz tracks to come out of the late ’60s.

Yusef Lateef was born William Emanuel Huddleston in Chattanooga, Tennessee in 1920. Prior to his conversion to Islam in 1950, he also performed and recorded under the name William “Bill” Evans (not to be confused with the jazz pianist of the same name). Lateef was an impressive multi-instrumentalist as well as a composer. He had an incredible ability to rapidly learn and master a multitude of different instruments, both those featuring in jazz as well as those featuring more frequently in Middle Eastern and East Asian music. Although Lateef‘s main instruments were the tenor saxophone and flute, he also played oboe, bassoon, bamboo flute, shanai, shofar, xun, arghul and koto. One of the great iconoclasts of jazz, he recorded hundreds of LPs over the course of an illustrious career and continued to record and play right up until his death in 2013 at the age of 93.