Artist: Yusef Lateef

Yusef Abdul Lateef was an American jazz multi-instrumentalist, composer, and prominent figure among the Ahmadiyya Community in America. 

Although Lateef's main instruments were the tenor saxophone and flute, he also played  oboe and  bassoon, both rare in jazz, and non-western instruments such as the bamboo flute, shanai, shofar,  xun, arghul and koto. He is known for having been an innovator in the blending of jazz with "Eastern" music. Peter Keepnews, in his New York Times  obituary of Lateef, wrote that the musician "played  world music before world music had a name". 

Lateef's books included two novellas titled A Night in the Garden of Love and Another Avenue, the short story collections Spheres and Rain Shapes, and his autobiography,  The Gentle Giant, written in collaboration with Herb Boyd. Along with his record label YAL Records, Lateef owned Fana Music, a music publishing company. Lateef published his own work through Fana, which includes Yusef Lateef's Flute Book of the Blues and many of his own orchestral compositions. 

In 1949, he was invited by Dizzy Gillespie to tour with his orchestra. In 1950, Lateef returned to Detroit and began his studies in composition and flute at Wayne State University.

Lateef began recording as a leader in 1957 for  Savoy Records, a non-exclusive association which continued until 1959; the earliest of Lateef's album's for the Prestige  subsidiary New Jazz overlap with them. Musicians such as Wilbur Harden (trumpet, flugelhorn), bassist Herman Wright, drummer Frank Gant, and pianist Hugh Lawson were among his collaborators during this period.

In 1960, Lateef returned to school, studying flute at the Manhattan School of Music in New York City. He received a bachelor's degree in music in 1969 and a master's degree in music education in 1970. Starting in 1971, he taught courses in "autophysiopsychic music" at the Manhattan School of Music, and he became an associate professor at the Borough of Manhattan Community College in 1972. 

In 1975, Lateef received an Ed.D. from the University of Massachusetts Amherst; his dissertation was a comparative study of Western and Islamic education. Thereafter, Lateef served as a senior research fellow at the Center for Nigerian Cultural Studies at Ahmadu Bello University throughout the early 1980s. Returning to the United States in 1986, he took a joint faculty appointment at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Hampshire College.