Cranbrook Art Museum, Horizons-Upward Bound, and Cranbrook Upper Schools partner to host the creative research and performance collective Autophysiopsychic Millennium for a summer residency culminating with a public performance, “Something Else in the Garden,” at Cranbrook’s Greek Theatre. RSVP is encouraged, please sign up below.
Autophysiopsychic Millennium (APPM) is a creative research and performance collective that explores, experiments, and studies the music philosophy and spiritual works of world-renowned multi-instrumentalist musician, composer, author, visual artist, professor, Afro-Futurist, and Detroit native, Dr. Yusef Abdul Lateef. Autophysiophyschic Music is the term he developed to describe what the world today calls Jazz, Blues, Gospel, Hip-Hop – Black Music. He described autophysiopsychic music as music that comes from one’s physical, mental, and spiritual self.
As a Black-led collective of musicians, APPM pushes back on the use of the commercialized term “jazz,” and aims to reclaim the genre through Lateef’s teachings. Dr. Lateef left a number of important resources for composers and listeners on the study and methods of this music. He was also an Afro-Futurist, an early progenitor of the movement that sets the tone for the future of what Blackness is as defined by Black people. With Sci-fi novels to music prophesying about the robot age, Dr. Yusef Lateef’s work remains largely under-researched in both music circles and academic settings.
Autophysiopsychic Millennium presents workshops and performances as a series conducted thus far in Chicago, Detroit, New York (Carnegie Hall), Ann Arbor, and now, Bloomfield Hills. Cranbrook has commissioned a new, site-specific performance that will draw on Lateef’s 1988 Afrofuturist novella Night in the Garden of Love.
Throughout the summer, visitors to Cranbrook Art Museum will find a listening room inside the artist’s lounge in the museum’s galleries featuring the album Live at Cranbrook, recorded by Dr. Yusef Abdul Lateef’s quartet in what is now Larson Gallery on April 9, 1958, as well as archival materials related to the concert, 65 years after it occurred. Check out more details on Lateef’s performance on Cranbrook Kitchen Sink Blog.
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