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Yusef Lateef

Yusef Lateef is an NEA Jazz Master

Renaissance man Dr. Yusef Lateef was born William Emanuel Huddleston in Chattanooga, Tennessee on October 9th, 1920. At the age of 5 he moved with his family to Detroit. Growing up in Detroit he came in contact and forged friendships with many a giant of jazz such as Kenny Burrell, Milt Jackson, Tommy Flanagan, Barry Harris, Paul Chambers, and Donald Byrd. By the time he graduated from high school he was a proficient tenor saxophonist. He started soon after graduation playing professionally and touring with different swing orchestras among them those of Hot Lips Page, Roy Eldridge and Lucky Millender. In 1949 he joined Dizzy Gillespie’s orchestra (using the stage name William Evans), and stayed with them for one year. In 1950 he returned to Detroit and to enrolled in the Wayne State University’s Music Department and studying composition and flute. During his tenure at Wayne State he converted to Islam and changed his name to Yusef Lateef. He stayed in Detroit until 1960 and during this decade he led his own quintet for a while, recorded his first album as a leader for the Savoy label, Stable Mates, and furthered his musical education by studying oboe with Ronald Odemark of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra.

In 1960 he returned to New York and enrolled in the Manhattan School of Music to further his studies in flute and music education. Over the next 10 years he recorded several records as a leader and played on many more under other musicians’ leadership, toured with Charles Mingus, Cannonball Adderley, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie and Babatunde Olatunji and obtained a BA in music and a MA in music education. Among the highlights of his recording career from this decade are Eastern Sounds, Live at Pep’s and The Golden Flute. One can already hear on these records the incorporation of different eastern musical influences into the more straight-ahead jazz idiom. These albums also are one of the first places one can hear Dr Lateef play different reed instruments including the bassoon, bamboo flute, shanai, shofar, argol, sarewa, and taiwan koto. During the 70s he taught courses in autophysiopsychic music (which comes from one’s spiritual, physical and emotional self) at the music theory department in the Manhattan School of Music. From 1972 till 1976, he was an associate professor of music at the Borough of Manhattan Community College.

In 1975 he was awarded a Ph.D. in Education from University of Massachusetts in Amherst, MA and he continues to be a professor there. Suite 16 or Blues Suite, Dr. Lateef’s first work for large orchestra, premiered in 1969 at the Georgia Symphony Orchestra in Augusta and it was performed in 1970 by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra at the Meadowbrook Music Festival, and recorded by the WDR Orchestra in Cologne. The NDR Radio Orchestra of Hamburg commissioned him to compose the tone poem "Lalit," in 1974. He also recorded his Symphony No.1 with the same orchestra later that year. He has toured the world with his ensembles and other musicians performing in concert halls and music festivals.

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Book Review

Soundtrack To A Movement: African American Islam, Jazz, and Black Internationalism

Read "Soundtrack To A Movement: African American Islam, Jazz, and Black Internationalism" reviewed by Ian Patterson


Soundtrack To A Movement: African American Islam, Jazz, and Black Internationalism Richard Brent Turner 256 Pages ISBN: 9781479806768 NYU Press 2021 The influence of Islam on African American jazz musicians post-WWII and the influence of those musicians in the spread of Islam in American cities are interrelated topics that, broadly speaking, are not part of most mainstream histories of jazz. Weave Black internationalism into the equation, that's to say how pan-global liberation/anti-colonial movements ...

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Building a Jazz Library

Yusef Lateef: An Alternative Top Ten Albums Blowing Cultural Nationalism Out Of The Water

Read "Yusef Lateef: An Alternative Top Ten Albums Blowing Cultural Nationalism Out Of The Water" reviewed by Chris May


A pioneer of global and modal jazz, the multi-instrumentalist and composer Yusef Lateef is only beginning to have his importance in the history of the music properly acknowledged. After languishing off-catalogue for decades, much of his output is being made available once more. A treasure trove of great jazz is out there waiting to be rediscovered. Lateef was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee. When he was five, his family moved to jny: Detroit, where he began his career playing ...

5
Album Review

Yusef Lateef: The Doctor Is In ...And Out

Read "The Doctor Is In ...And Out" reviewed by Chris May


The soul-jazz albums Yusef Lateef recorded for Atlantic between 1967 and 1976, of which The Doctor Is In...And Out is the tenth and final release, may prove to be among his most enduring releases. That suggestion will not chime with the sentiments of many of Lateef's longtime fans, who who dismiss the Atlantics as sell-outs and rate Lateef most highly for the hard bop / modal albums he released on Savoy, Riverside, Prestige and Impulse! before signing with Atlantic. But ...

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Profile

In Memoriam: Dr. Yusef Abdul Lateef

Read "In Memoriam: Dr. Yusef Abdul Lateef" reviewed by John Wesley Reed Jr.


Yusef Lateef defined music far from Western concepts while presenting cross-cultural fusions. His life was committed as a premier jazz saxophonist, flutist, and many woodwinds entering crossing musical boundaries. This journey ended on Monday, December 23, 2013 at his home in Shutesbury, Amherst, Massachusetts. Dr. Lateef was 93 years old. Dr. Lateef's distinctive sound came from a tenor saxophone, mystified with a big tone with blues indications. His style separated similar saxophonists during the 1940s. Playing in the ...

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Interview

Yusef Lateef's Secret Garden

Read "Yusef Lateef's Secret Garden" reviewed by Chris M. Slawecki


This interview was originally published in February 2000. Yusef Lateef will tell you--politely, firmly, insistently, frequently--that he does not play jazz. He was born Bill Evans in Chattanooga (TN), but grew up in Detroit a tenor saxophone student who in the 1940s worked and studied alongside the likes of Roy Eldridge, Dizzy Gillespie and Hot Lips Page. In the 1950s, he studied composition and flute at Wayne State University; shortly thereafter he assumed the name Yusef ...

8
Live Review

Yusef Lateef: Celebrating 75 Years of Music at Roulette in Brooklyn

Read "Yusef Lateef: Celebrating 75 Years of Music at Roulette in Brooklyn" reviewed by Scott Krane


Rarely in the history of contemporary American music has one artist iconized as many aspects of organized sound as Yusef Lateef who appeared in Brooklyn, New York on Saturday night, April 6, at the new Brooklyn version of the Manhattan performance space, Roulette, near the new Barclay's Arena. In a two-hour performance billed, “Yusef Lateef: Celebrating 75 years of music," the 92-year-old remnant of modern jazz displayed the breadth of his musical imagination in a four-part concert.The Grammy Award-winning ...

2
Album Review

Yusef Lateef: Roots Run Deep

Read "Roots Run Deep" reviewed by John Sharpe


Roots Run Deep forms a further installment in the ongoing strand of investigation into the marriage of words and music, which has found a home on the Paris-based Rogue Art label, that also includes Maison Hantee (2009). It's unusual in that though issued under the name of veteran multi instrumentalist Yusef Lateef, the work was actually conceived by filmmaker Nicolas Humbert and engineer Marc Parisotto. The two Frenchmen are credited with composition; having assembled the 34-minute program by matching the ...

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Obituary

Yusef Lateef (1920-2013)

Yusef Lateef (1920-2013)

Source: JazzWax by Marc Myers

Yusef Lateef, a saxophonist and flutist who was one of the last surviving members of Dizzy Gillespie's 1949 big band and who helped pioneer spiritual jazz in the mid-1950s, soul-jazz in the 1960s with Cannonball Adderley, and metaphysical jazz starting in the 1980s, died on December 23. He was 83. Yusef was among the first black jazz musicians to covert to Islam in 1948 through the Ahmadiyya Muslim movement and in later years eschewed the word “jazz"—viewing it as derogatory ...

Obituary

Yusef Lateef, R.I.P.

Yusef Lateef, R.I.P.

Source: Rifftides by Doug Ramsey

The roll call of distinguished jazz artists leaving us seems to grow longer by the day. Now comes news of the passing of Yusef Lateef, who died today in Detroit. He was 93. As a youngster in Detroit, Lateefmastered several reed instruments and early in his career became a respected performer, composer and educator. He was an inspiration and model for a generation of young Detroit musicians who in the 1950s moved to New York and themselves became influences in ...

Interview

Other Places: Yusef Lateef

Other Places: Yusef Lateef

Source: Rifftides by Doug Ramsey

At 92, Yusef Lateef continues to earn universal admiration not only for his artistry as a saxophonist, flutist, oboist and composer, but also for the warmth of his personality and eagerness to share his musical knowledge, which is wide and deep. Thanks to Rifftides reader Harris Meyer for alertingme—and you— to a recent installment of the radio program American Routes. Lateef told host Nick Spitzer about his career, his music and his philosophy. In his early development as a professional, ...

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Interview

Yusef Lateef @ 90

Yusef Lateef @ 90

Source: The Independent Ear by Willard Jenkins

Some years ago the Jazz Journalists Association, as a tribute to friend and colleague the late Harlem jazz writer Clarence Atkins sponsored a group of aspiring African American music writers to attend a journalism conference in California. I'm happy to say that for the most part they have continued to write particularly on jazz, and in fact two of them—Bridget Arnwine and Rahsaan Clark Morris—contributed to The Independent Ear's ongoing African American writers' series (continued with Karen Chilton in this ...

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Performance / Tour

Yusef Lateef 85th birthday benefit for the Give Hug Foundation

Yusef Lateef  85th birthday benefit for the Give Hug Foundation

Source: All About Jazz


Chip Shelton
saxophone, sopranino
Ian Dogole
percussion
Ofer Shapira
saxophone
Lena Bloch
saxophone
Michael Blicher
saxophone
Jay Sanders
guitar
Martin Perna
saxophone, baritone

Photos

Music

Recordings: As Leader | As Sideperson

Voice Prints

The ACT Company
2013

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Roots Run Deep

Rogue Art
2012

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Ballads & Dreams

The ACT Company
2012

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Cry! - Tender + Lost...

The ACT Company
2010

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Towards The Unknown

The ACT Company
2010

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Introducing Yusef...

The ACT Company
2008

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