Yusef Lateef was born William Emanuel Huddleston on October 9, 1920, in Chattanooga, Tennessee. His family moved briefly to Lorain, Ohio, in 1923, then settled in Detroit in 1925, where his father changed the family surname to Evans — making the future Yusef Lateef, for the first three decades of his life, William Evans, a name he shared with no relation to the pianist of the same name who emerged a generation later. Detroit in the 1930s and '40s was one of the deepest wells of jazz talent in the country, and the young saxophonist came up alongside future giants of the music: Milt Jackson, Tommy Flanagan, Barry Harris, Paul Chambers, Kenny Burrell, Curtis Fuller, Lucky Thompson, and the three Jones brothers, Hank, Thad, and Elvin. He was already proficient on tenor saxophone by high school, and at eighteen he left Detroit to tour professionally with swing bands led by Hartley Toots, Hot Lips Page, Roy Eldridge, Herbie Fields, and Lucky Millender. In 1949, Dizzy Gillespie invited him to join his orchestra, putting a twenty-eight-year-old Detroit tenor player on stage inside one of the bands that had defined bebop.

It was around this same turn of the decade that Evans converted to Islam through the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, taking the name Yusef Lateef — Yusef after the prophet Joseph, Lateef meaning gentle or amiable. The conversion reshaped more than his name. Lateef became one of the first prominent jazz musicians to seriously study Afro-Asian musical traditions, and, alongside contemporaries like Ahmed Abdul-Malik and later Don Cherry, one of the earliest exponents of what would eventually be marketed as "world music," decades before that term existed. Where his primary voice remained tenor saxophone and flute — instruments he played with a soulful, blues-rooted tone that never abandoned its hard-bop foundation — he also became a serious jazz voice on oboe and bassoon, both rare enough in the music to count as innovations on their own. Beyond those, he built an arsenal of instruments most jazz listeners had never encountered on a jazz record before him: bamboo flute, shanai (a double-reed Indian oboe), shofar, arghul, sarewa, xun, koto, and an assortment of West African flutes and percussion he picked up later in life. He didn't treat these as novelties or exotic color; he integrated them into fully worked-out compositions, often built on modal or non-Western scalar material rather than standard jazz harmony.

Lateef's studio career began in earnest in 1957 with Jazz Mood for Savoy, followed by a run of albums for New Jazz, Prestige, and Riverside — Cry! Tender, The Centaur and the Phoenix, Into Something — that established his group sound around Detroit-scene collaborators like pianists Hugh Lawson and Barry Harris. The best-known record from this stretch, 1961's Eastern Sounds for Prestige's Moodsville subsidiary, remains the album most listeners reach for first: a hushed, oboe-and-bamboo-flute-inflected session, recorded at Rudy Van Gelder's studio, that distilled his cross-cultural approach into something intimate rather than showy. A run of Impulse! albums in the mid-1960s — Jazz 'Round the World, 1984, Psychicemotus, The Golden Flute — pushed the exploratory side of his writing further, often with bassist Reggie Workman and drummer James Black. Moving to Atlantic in 1968 under producer Joel Dorn, Lateef's sound broadened again: The Blue Yusef Lateef leaned into soul-jazz, Yusef Lateef's Detroit (1969) was an explicit tribute to his hometown built around a hybrid of his working band and Atlantic's house R&B session players, and Hush 'N' Thunder (1973) and the CTI-era Autophysiopsychic (1977, produced by Creed Taylor) moved into jazz-funk and fusion textures without losing the reed and flute vocabulary that made his sound recognizable.

Throughout, Lateef toured and recorded as a sideman with some of the most important bandleaders in jazz, most extensively with Charles Mingus — whose own career, including that collaboration, is covered in full in his JazzProfiles.com profile — as well as with Cannonball Adderley's sextet, Dizzy Gillespie, and percussionist Babatunde Olatunji. In Detroit in the 1950s he had also crossed paths with a teenage Joe Henderson, one of the city's other formative tenor players; Henderson's own profile on this site documents that shared scene in more detail.

Lateef was also, unusually for a jazz musician of his generation, a serious academic. He returned to school in 1960 to study flute, earning a bachelor's degree in music from the Manhattan School of Music in 1969 and a master's in music education there in 1970, then joining the school's theory faculty and teaching a self-devised discipline he called "autophysiopsychic music" — music addressing the physical, mental, and spiritual dimensions of the performer at once. He became an associate professor at Borough of Manhattan Community College, and in 1975 earned an Ed.D. in education from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, writing his dissertation on a comparative study of Western and Islamic education. In the early 1980s he spent several years in Nigeria as a senior research fellow at the Center for Nigerian Cultural Studies at Ahmadu Bello University, an immersion that produced 1985's In Nigeria, recorded with local percussionists and singers in Lagos. He returned to UMass Amherst and Hampshire College as a Five Colleges emeritus professor, teaching there for the rest of his career.

Lateef was also a published author: two novellas, A Night in the Garden of Love and Another Avenue; two collections of short fiction, Spheres and Rain Shapes; and an autobiography, The Gentle Giant, co-written with journalist Herb Boyd. His most unexpected honor came in 1988, when Yusef Lateef's Little Symphony — a solo, multitracked four-movement suite he recorded in 1987 near his home in Shutesbury, Massachusetts, playing every instrument himself — won the Grammy Award for Best New Age Album, a category he'd had no prior association with. In 2010, the National Endowment for the Arts named him an NEA Jazz Master, the highest honor the United States bestows on a jazz musician. He continued recording into his final years, founding his own label, YAL Records, in 1992. Yusef Lateef died of prostate cancer on the morning of December 23, 2013, at his home in Shutesbury, Massachusetts, at age 93.

Lateef's defining trait was refusing to treat "world music" as a genre exercise bolted onto jazz vocabulary he'd otherwise leave untouched. His compositions for oboe, bassoon, shanai, and the various flutes he collected were written as fully integrated material — modal, often drone-based, frequently structured around non-Western scales — rather than as jazz tunes with an exotic solo dropped in. That instinct, combined with a tenor sound that stayed rooted in Detroit hard bop even as his writing wandered furthest afield, made him one of the music's genuine pioneers of cross-cultural fusion, expanding the instrumental and harmonic vocabulary available to every jazz musician who followed him — from the "world jazz" wing of the 1970s fusion era back to contemporary artists still mining non-Western scales and instrumentation for jazz composition.