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 Genres: Jazz, World Music, 1950s
Yusef Lateef is a Grammy Award-winning composer, performer, recording artist, author, educator and philosopher who has been a major force on the international musical scene for more than six decades. He is universally acknowledged as one of the great living masters and innovators in the African American tradition of autophysiopsychic music – music which comes from one’s spiritual, physical and emotional self.
Lateef was born in Chatanooga, Tennessee in 1920, and grew up in Detroit, Michigan where he began his career as a saxophonist touring with a number of swing bands. In 1949, he was invited by Dizzy Gillespie to tour with his world-renowned orchestra. In the 1950s, Lateef began recording as a band leader and as a guest performer on other artists’ albums, most notably Cannonball Adderley. As a virtuoso on a broad spectrum of reed instruments – tenor saxophone, flute, oboe, bamboo flute, shanai, shofar, argol, sarewa, and taiwan koto – Yusef Lateef has introduced delightful new sounds and blends of tone colors to audiences all over the world.
As a composer, he has amassed a catalogue of works not only for the quartets and quintets he has led, but for symphony and chamber orchestras, stage bands, small ensembles, vocalists, choruses and solo pianists. His extended works have been performed by the WDR (Cologne), NDR (Hamburg), Atlanta, Augusta and Detroit Symphony Orchestras and the Symphony of the New World. He won a Grammy for his recording of Yusef Lateef’s Little Symphony, on which he performed all the parts, in 1987. In 1993, Lateef was commissioned by the WDR Radio Orchestra to compose The African American Epic Suite, a four part work for orchestra and quartet based on themes of slavery and disfranchisement in the United States. Lateef’s synthesis of American jazz with Eastern influences is his trademark, and his colossal impact on the music of others continues to be felt to this day.
Songs (click on song title for more information):
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