The performance that changed everything

Ted Gioia remembers his first ever jazz show, seeing Yusef Lateef in LA. It changed his life.

17 seconds into the performance by the Yusef Lateef Quartet. I honestly wanted to jump up, and tell everybody in the nightclub:

This is the moment I’ve been waiting for.

I knew in that instant that everything in my life had been leading up to this. And I’d been wasting my time with rock and pop and classical music. My destiny was jazz.

I had a similar experience with jazz. It was perhaps 1986 in Toronto and my friend Winston Smith, who worked at my local bookstore, Writers & Co. Invited me to go see Mal Waldron and Steve Lacy at The Rivoli on Queen Street. Winston fed me a steady diet of novels and poetry by African American writers like John Edgar Wideman and Nathanial Mackey and he turned my head when it came to music. And while the records he leant me were one thing seeing two master improvisers at work live was another thing altogether.

Waldron and Lacy were a phenomenal duet. Together they spanned the history of the genre. Waldron was one of Billie Holiday’s accompanists and Lacy played with the likes of Cecil Taylor. Their set was full of Monk tunes and original compositions that strayed wildly from the head as they entered into free music together. It was my introduction to this kind of jazz.

Unlike Gioia this performance didn’t make me want to play the music. I found it raw and intimidating and had no way in with the limited guitar technique I had. There were no guitar players making this music other than Sonny Sharrock and so what it did was light a fire in me for this music and art that approached this kind of intensity and thoughtfulness.

Life changing.

Go read this amazing blog post about these two musicians and their long history together.