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Detroit-raised flutist, oboe player and tenor saxophonist Bill "Yusef Lateef" Huddleston (1920), who had briefly played with Dizzy Gillespie (1949-50),
converted to Islam in the 1950s (as was fashionable in those days) and moved to
New York in 1959 to study flute.
By then he had already become a sensation in Detroit in a sextet with trombonist Curtis Fuller (plus piano, bass, drums and percussion), and a pioneer of world-music thanks to his passion for Middle-Eastern and Indian music.
Lateef played tenor, flute, argol (an India double reed wind instrument) and "scraper" on Stable Mates (april 1957), containing his ballad Ameena, and established himself as a sophisticated composer on the twin release Jazz Mood (april 1957), playing flute in the eight-minute introduction, Metaphor, and penning the extended blues meditations Yusef's Mood and Blues in Space as well as the ten-minute exotic-sounding Morning.
Lateef's lyrical post-bop melodies were beginning to migrate into a dimension beyond jazz music.
He was less creative in the quintet with Wilbur Harden on flugelhorn and Hugh Lawson on piano that recorded Jazz and the Sounds of Nature (october 1957), containing the six-minute Seulb, and its twin release Prayer to the East (october 1957), containing the 13-minute Endura (but most pieces were either covers or Harden compositions), and then (one day later)
The Sounds of Yusef (october 1957) and its twin release Other Sounds (october 1957), containing the nine-minute Minor Mood.
The instrumentation included turkish finger cymbals, rabat/rebob (a one stringed Arabic violin) and Chinese gong.
An euphonium-piano quintet recorded The Dreamer (june 1959), with Moon Tree and Valse Bouk, and its twin album Fabric of Jazz (june 1959), with Arjuna, The Dreamer and Oboe Blues.
Lateef also played the oboe with the trumpet-piano quintet of Cry Tender (october 1959).
But he was distracted by several conventional hard-bop albums.
After he moved to New York, Lateef drifted away from hard-bop and refined an
exotic and sometimes abstract blues music that was only his own.
The ensemble music of The Centaur and the Phoenix (june 1961) for a nonet, such as Iqbal, led to
Eastern Sounds (september 1961), on which Lateef played
a variety of reed instruments backed by a traditional rhythm section of piano,
bass and tabla-like percussion, with pieces such as
Plum Blossom (for a Chinese clay flute), Snafu (for tenor sax), Blues For The Orient (for oboe).
If he never quite regained the compositional power of Jazz Mood,
and frequently stumbled into the predictable jazz of releases such as Into Something (december 1961) and The Three Faces (january 1962),
Lateef had found a new mission in the contemplative
world-music of Jazz Round The World (december 1963), a parade of ten brief ethnic pieces.
The milestones of this journey were
Medula Sonata, off Psychicemotus (june 1964), an album that emphasized the sound of the bamboo flute,
and
1984, off the piano-based quartet session 1984 (february 1965).
Unfortunately, the quality of his albums (mostly collection of covers) decreased rapidly, with larger and larger doses of funk and soul music leading to the
trivial fusion of Autophysiopsychic (october 1977).
Typical of the least worse is the live double-LP Ten Years Hence (august 1975), a quartet date with Lateef on tenor, flute, oboe, shenai (an Indian double reed instrument), African thumb piano and percussion.
In parallel, Lateef became an ambitious classical composer.
Orchestral works included:
Suite 16/ Blues Suite (1969),
the tone poem Lalit (1974),
the Symphony No 1/ Tahira,
The World at Peace, a suite for chamber ensemble co-composed with percussionist Adam Rudolph,
the four-movement suite The African American Epic Suite (1993) for orchestra and quintet.
His music found a new audience in the era of new-age music, his best album of
the time being perhaps the four-movement
Lateef's Little Symphony (june 1987) on which he played all instruments.
Metamorphosis (december 1993) was a summa of Lateef's styles, particularly the
longer
Metamorphosis and Biography of a Thought.
Sonata Fantasia (january 1997) introduced digital arrangements.
Like most prolific musicians, Lateef recorded an amazing amount of junk.
It takes a lot of patience to listen to his recordings.
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