Yusef Lateef

Born William Emanuel Huddleston in Chattanooga, TN, Yusef Lateef moved to Detroit as a young child and grew up surrounded by its many jazz influences, forming relationships with many musicians in the area including Milt Jackson, Tommy Flanagan, Barry Harris, Paul Chambers, Donald Byrd, the Jones brothers (Hank, Thad and Elvin), Kenny Burrell, Lucky Thompson and Matthew Rucker. He played tenor in high school, and later with the swing bands of Hartley Toots, Hot Lips Page, Roy Eldridge, Herbie Fields and Lucky Millender before joining Dizzy Gillespie’s Orchestra in 1949. He converted to Islam in the mid-50s and continued music studies on flute and oboe as well as touring with Charles Mingus, Cannonball Adderley, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie and Babatunde Olatunji in the 1960s. In the early 1980s he spent a few years studying the Fulani flute (sarewa) in Nigeria. Throughout his career, he has appeared on hundreds of recordings and composed works for small ensembles and full orchestras. 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. His recording of "Yusef Lateef’s Little Symphony," on which he performed all the parts, received a Grammy Award in 1987. Lateef has published a novella and set of short stories, and has taught at the University of Massachusetts. He founded Yal Records and Fana Music.

At the Walker Art Center, Lateef will join another pair of multi-instrumentalists and former cohorts at the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), Douglas Ewart and Roscoe Mitchell. Based for many years in Minneapolis, Jamaica native Douglas Ewart was fascinated by experiments with materials to create sound as a youngster. He emigrated to the U.S. in his teens, ultimately studying music at the AACM, which he later served as president. Known for his design and production of a wide variety of wind and percussion instruments, Ewart is also celebrated for his clothing designs. Ewart has been involved in a diverse array of musical projects, typically involving his many flutes, digeridoos, saxophones and clarinets. Considered a key figure of the avant garde movement, Chicago native Roscoe Mitchell played saxophone and clarinet as a youth and performed with an Army band while in the service, playing alongside Albert Ayler and Rubin Cooper. After he returned to Chicago, Mitchell joined forces with fellow saxophonists Malachai Favors, Joseph Harmin, Henry Threadgill and Anthony Braxton. He played in Muhal Richard Abrams Experimental Band in the 1960s. An early member of the AACM, Mitchell played with the reconfigured Art Ensemble of Chicago, and was named Darius Milhaud Chair of Composition at Mills College in Oakland, CA in 2007.

Another frequent Lateef collaborator, percussionist Adam Rudolph, will round out the quartet. From Chicago, Rudolph first played with Lateef in 1988 and has recorded 14 albums with the saxophonist. Over his career, he has developed the use of the hand drums in experimental music, and has played with Sam Rivers, Pharaoh Sanders, L. Shankar, Fred Anderson, Don Cherry, Jon Hassel, Wadada Leo Smith, and Omar Sosa.

This concert is cosponsored by the Walker Art Center. Walker Art Center is located at 1750 Hennepin Ave, Minneapolis. FFI and tickets, call 612-624-2345.

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