Yusef Lateef was born William Emanuel Huddleston on October 9, 1920, in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and moved with his family to Detroit in 1925. He converted to Islam in the mid-1950s, changing his name from Bill Evans (a different musician from the pianist of the same name) to Yusef Lateef. He emerged in the 1940s as one of the first jazz musicians to seriously study Afro-Asian musical traditions, becoming, alongside trumpeter Don Cherry, one of the first exponents of what became the world music jazz subgenre.

Though his primary instruments were tenor saxophone and flute, and he was a major contributor to establishing both flute and oboe as mainstream jazz instruments, Lateef also played a striking range of non-Western instruments, including bamboo flute, shanai, shofar, arghul, sarewa, and koto. He recorded steadily as a leader while also touring with Charles Mingus, whose own career is covered in full in his JazzProfiles.com profile, as well as Cannonball Adderley, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, and Babatunde Olatunji.

His 1987 album Yusef Lateef's Little Symphony won the Grammy for Best New Age Album. Beyond music, Lateef was a published author, writing two novellas and the short story collections Spheres and Rain Shapes, along with his autobiography, The Gentle Giant, co-written with Herb Boyd. He died December 23, 2013, in Shutesbury, Massachusetts, at age 93.

Lateef's deep engagement with non-Western instruments and musical traditions, decades before "world music" existed as a marketing category, made him one of jazz's genuine pioneers of cross-cultural fusion, expanding the instrumental and harmonic vocabulary available to every jazz musician who came after him.