Intro
He was born as William Emmanuel Huddleston (aka Yusuf Lateef) in 1920 in Tennessee. He died in 2013 and was eulogized by the 5th Qadiani-Ahmadi Khalifa (Mirza Masroor Ahmad) in his Friday Sermon of Jan-4-2014. Masroor alleged that he signed the bait form in 1948 (Yusuf Lateef wrote that he converted in 1949), his faith and art were closely intertwined. His conversion was no doubt one of the reasons he chose to stop performing in venues where alcohol was sold, among them nightclubs (a total lie). In 1957 he lived in the Ahmadiyya mission house in Detroit where he served as its imam and developed a curriculum for Islamic instruction for children and adults. It seems like he was taking advantage of not having to pay rent, and how much Islamic Knowledge could he have? In 1975, he earned an E.D.D in Education and wrote a dissertation wherein he heavily mentioned the Ahmadiyya Movement. Dr. Khalil Ahmad Nasir (former Ahmadiyya missionary-in-charge of the USA, 1948 to 1959) helped him with this PHD work.
It’s hard to decipher if some Jazz musicians were chanda paying Ahmadi’s. Most of them were just passing through and retained Ahmadiyya beliefs (like Jesus (as) is dead and etc.), however, they didn’t remain as Ahmadi’s.
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His wives and kids
Mr. Lateef is survived by his wife, Ayesha; a son, Yusef; a granddaughter; and several great-grandchildren. His first wife, Tahira, died before him, as did a son and a daughter.
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Rare photos
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1920
Yusef Lateef – Wikipedia
He was born on October 9, 1920 in Tennessee.
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1950’s–late
https://www.frieze.com/article/yusef-lateef#:~:text=For%20Lateef%2C%20who%20converted%20to,was%20sold%2C%20among%20them%20nightclubs.
In 1957 he lived in the Ahmadiyya mission house in Detroit where he served as its imam and developed a curriculum for Islamic instruction for children and adults. It seems like he was taking advantage of not having to pay rent, and how much Islamic Knowledge could he have?
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1975
An over-view of western and Islamic education.
He was an emeritus professor at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, MA from which he was awarded a Ph.D. in Education in 1975. His doctoral dissertation was entitled “An Overview of Western and Islamic Education.”
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1977
He can be seen in the below at the 1977 USA Jalsa Salana in St. Louis.
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1977-1978
This picture was taken in Rabwah 1977-78. Bola M. Kukoyi is the kid, via Alhaj Dhul-Waqar Yaqub. These pictures came from the camera of Abdus Sami Khaliq.
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2013
He died on December 23, 2013 at age 93, Yusef remained vital and active as a touring and recording artist, composer and educator.
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2014
Progress of Ahmadiyyat in 2013, Financial Sacrifice and Waqf-e-Jadid (alislam.org)
After the prayer I will also lead a Janaza of Yusuf Lateef Sahib of Boston, USA. He passed away on December 23, 2013 at the age of 93. Inna lil-lahay wa in-na elaihay rajayoon. To Allah we belong and to Him shall we return. He was born in 1920 on October 9 in Tennessee. He was an African American and was blessed to take bai’at in 1948 after reading the books of the Promised Messiah (as) and Hazrat Musleh Maood – Hazrat Mirza Bashir ud Din Mahmud, Khalifatul Masih II (ra).
He is listed among the early African American Ahmadis. He used to say often that it had become incumbent on him to do bai’at and if he had not done so he would be counted as having turned away from God and become one of those who had turned their face away from the truth.
He had obtained a doctorate in education and taught in different universities as a professor and had written several books including his autobiography. Because of his fame the news of his death spread all over the US and the world immediately and all the big US newspapers published this news.
When President Clinton had invited him to the White House and despite the fact that he was an African American and not a Pakistani he went there wearing the shalwar kameez dress.
He had won the highest award in his profession which is the equal of a Nobel Prize. Being an Ahmadi he never compromised his faith. He has written a great deal about music but never played at locations where alcohol was sold. He was blessed with the opportunity to perform Hajj and Umra. He would always make outstanding financial sacrifices and local secretary maal [finance] says that it was his habit to pay his obligatory chandas whenever any income check arrived.
He used to say that even today I have the same level of faith that I had when I had done the bai’at and that the way of Ahmadiyyat is the way of truth and it is that same path which was the path of the Holy Prophet Muhammad (sa). I am convinced that no one taking this path can come to destruction and I am convinced that by walking on this path I and my family will achieve salvation and it is my faith that Ahmadiyyat conveys the teaching that will help develop and foster brotherhood among all humanity.
He had been blessed to visit Qadian and Rabwah also. Last year he had come to the Jalsa in London. He had tremendous love for Khilafat. He had met Hazrat Khalifatul Masih III (ra) and Hazrat Khalifatul Masih IV (ra) and me also. He was ill when he came to the Jalsa last year and was in a wheelchair.
He was highly virtuous and strictly observed salat and attended Friday prayer with regularity. He loved everyone and treated all with affection and love and kindness. He was a sincere human being. He would deal with his non Ahmadi friends also with love and kindness.
He was blessed to serve the Jama’at in a variety of offices for a long period of time. He loved to convey the message of Islam and always carried Jama’at literature with him and conveyed the message to his friends, relatives and neighbors and while travelling by plane distribute to others. He had books of the Jama’at – Philosophy of the Teachings of Islam and books related to the training of children – published at his own expense for the blind.
He was a moosi. He is survived by his wife Ayesha Latif Sahiba and one son Yusuf Lateef Sahib. May Allah bless all of them patience and steadfastness and enable them to carry out the righteous deeds that Yusuf Lateef Sahib personified.
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Yusef Lateef | Frieze
In 1970, when asked the question: ‘What is jazz?’ Louis Armstrong reportedly replied: ‘If you have to ask, you’ll never know.’ In his essay, ‘Perennial Fashion – Jazz’ (1967), German theorist Theodor Adorno characterized the form as the ‘false liquidation of art’, identified by a ‘eunuchlike [sic] sound’, and ‘castration symbolism’. Apparently, Adorno didn’t get it.
Around the same time, artist, musician, and professor Yusef Lateef was asked by the Dean of the Manhattan School of Music, where Lateef was earning his master’s degree, to research the term ‘jazz’. What he discovered was an attendant list of definitions that included cultural references from the not-so-distant Jim Crow days: ‘skullduggery’, ‘tom-foolery’, and ‘to copulate’, among them. For Lateef (nicknamed ‘Teefski’ or ‘Teefi’ by his band mates) – who had played tenor sax for Dizzy Gillespie just out of high-school in 1949, toured with the likes of Hot Lips Page and Roy Eldridge, and would go on to record several dozen albums with storied labels Impulse! and Atlantic, as well as win a Grammy award in 1987 – the word ‘jazz’ became a misnomer, a term, he would proclaim, ‘that has nothing to do with the music’. In it’s place, Lateef chose to describe his musical works as ‘autophysiopsychic’, a Platonically inspired neologism that located the genesis and experience of music within the ‘physical, mental and spiritual spheres’.
As curator Alhena Katsof demonstrated in an exhibition of Lateef’s drawings and graphic notations at White Columns, the musician’s avant-garde practices extended far beyond the recordings for which he was better known. Among the works on paper, Untitled (all works undated), depicts an earth-toned, stump-like form with vibrant yellow roots probing beneath the surface as well as protruding from it. In the lower right-hand corner of the image, a text bubble surrounds an inscription in Arabic. For Lateef, who converted to the Ahmadiyya sect of Islam in the late 1950s, his faith and art were closely intertwined. His conversion was no doubt one of the reasons he chose to stop performing in venues where alcohol was sold, among them nightclubs.
In Elsewhere Plants, a triad of intricately detailed abstract forms, Lateef’s interest in compositional improvisation is apparent. Influenced by Arnold Schoenberg, Lateef’s musical scores often embraced a dissonance evoked by instrumental asynchronism and use of tempo intervals. Similarly, Lateef’s drawings relied on a mix of automatic drawing and contingency that recalls André Masson’s surrealist-inspired techniques, as well as Joan Miró’s works on paper. And, like Miró, Lateef’s abstract forms, as with his Trees, have a distinctly organic feel to them, with spindly tendrils and amoeba-like shapes populating his compositions. Similarly, Decadence – a dense network of connecting lines, geometric shapes, cell-like structures and sinuous forms – gives the sense of peering into a microscope, albeit in a decidedly altered state.
Lateef produced the majority of his drawing in the same studio in which he recorded and several of the works in the exhibition collapsed the boundary between his musical and artistic practices. As with Untitled, a chaotic cloud of vibrant orange, red and yellow-hued watercolours, as well as pen and pencil illustrations, Lateef introduces black ink into the composition by pouring small puddles onto the works’ surfaces, which he subsequently spreads out by blowing through a straw. In the fanned rivulets of ink that creep across the paper, Lateef, quite literally, transforms the image into a musical act. Lateef’s drawings are music for the eyes.
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Yusef Lateef, Innovative Jazz Saxophonist and Flutist, Dies at 93 – The New York Times (nytimes.com)
Yusef Lateef, a jazz saxophonist and flutist who spent his career crossing musical boundaries, died on Monday at his home in Shutesbury, Mass., near Amherst. He was 93.
His death was announced on his website.
Mr. Lateef started out as a tenor saxophonist with a big tone and a bluesy style, not significantly more or less talented than numerous other saxophonists in the crowded jazz scene of the 1940s. He served a conventional jazz apprenticeship, working in the bands of Lucky Millinder, Dizzy Gillespie and others. But by the time he made his first records as a leader, in 1957, he had begun establishing a reputation as a decidedly unconventional musician.
He began expanding his instrumental palette by doubling on flute, by no means a common jazz instrument in those years. He later added oboe, bassoon and non-Western wind instruments like the shehnai and arghul. “My attempts to experiment with new instruments grew out of the monotony of hearing the same old sounds played by the same old horns,” he once told DownBeat magazine. “When I looked into those other cultures, I found that good instruments existed there.”
Those experiments led to an embrace of new influences. At a time when jazz musicians in the United States rarely sought inspiration any farther geographically than Latin America, Mr. Lateef looked well beyond the Western Hemisphere. Anticipating the cross-cultural fusions of later decades, he flavored his music with scales, drones and percussion effects borrowed from Asia and the Middle East. He played world music before world music had a name.
In later years he incorporated elements of contemporary concert music and composed symphonic and chamber works. African influences became more noticeable in his music when he spent four years studying and teaching in Nigeria in the early 1980s.
How The Times decides who gets an obituary. There is no formula, scoring system or checklist in determining the news value of a life. We investigate, research and ask around before settling on our subjects. If you know of someone who might be a candidate for a Times obituary, please suggest it here.
Mr. Lateef professed to find the word “jazz” limiting and degrading; he preferred “autophysiopsychic music,” a term he invented. He further distanced himself from the jazz mainstream in 1980 when he declared that he would no longer perform any place where alcohol was served. “Too much blood, sweat and tears have been spilled creating this music to play it where people are smoking, drinking and talking,” he explained to The Boston Globe in 1999.
Still, with its emphasis on melodic improvisation and rhythmic immediacy, his music was always recognizably jazz at its core. And as far afield as his music might roam, his repertoire usually included at least a few Tin Pan Alley standards and, especially, plenty of blues.
He was born on Oct. 9, 1920, in Chattanooga, Tenn. Many sources give his birth name as William Evans, the name under which he performed and recorded before converting to Islam in the late 1940s (he belonged to the reformist Ahmadiyya Muslim Community) and changing his name to Yusef Abdul Lateef. But according to Mr. Lateef’s website, he was born William Emanuel Huddleston.
When he was 5 his family moved to Detroit, where he went on to study saxophone at Miller High School. After spending most of the 1940s on the road as a sideman with various big bands, he returned to Detroit in 1950 to care for his ailing wife and ended up staying for a decade.
While in Detroit he became a popular and respected fixture on the local nightclub scene and a mentor to younger musicians. He also resumed his studies, taking courses in flute and composition at Wayne State University and later studying oboe as well.
In the later part of the decade he began traveling regularly from Detroit to the East Coast with his working band to record for the Savoy and Prestige labels. By 1960 he had settled in New York, where he worked with Charles Mingus, Cannonball Adderley and the Nigerian percussionist Babatunde Olatunji before forming his own quartet in 1964.
He was soon a bona fide jazz star, with successful albums on the Impulse and Atlantic labels and a busy touring schedule. But he also remained a student, and he eventually became a teacher as well.
He received a bachelor’s and a master’s degree from the Manhattan School of Music, and taught both there and at Borough of Manhattan Community College in the 1970s. He earned a doctorate in education from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in 1975 (his dissertation: “An Overview of Western and Islamic Education”) and later taught there and elsewhere in New England.
The more he studied, the more ambitious Mr. Lateef grew as a composer. He recorded his seven-movement “Symphonic Blues Suite” in 1970 and his “African-American Epic Suite,” a four-part work for quintet and orchestra, two decades later. His album “Yusef Lateef’s Little Symphony,” on which he played all the instruments via overdubbing, won a Grammy Award in 1988, though not in any of the jazz or classical categories; it was named best New Age performance. Mr. Lateef said at the time that, while he was grateful for the award, he didn’t know what New Age music was.
In 2010 he was named a Jazz Master by the National Endowment for the Arts.
Mr. Lateef is survived by his wife, Ayesha; a son, Yusef; a granddaughter; and several great-grandchildren. His first wife, Tahira, died before him, as did a son and a daughter.
His creative output was not limited to music. He painted, wrote poetry and published several books of fiction. He also ran his own record company, YAL, which he established in 1992.
He remained musically active until a few months before his death. In April he appeared at Roulette in Brooklyn in a program titled “Yusef Lateef: Celebrating 75 Years of Music,” performing with the percussionist Adam Rudolph and presenting the premieres of two works, one for string quartet and the other for piano.
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Dr. Yusef Lateef | Majlis Ansarullah USA (ansarusa.org)
Dr. Yusef Abdul Lateef passed away on December 23, 2013 at the age of 93. Inna lil-lahay wa in- na elaihay rajayoon. To Allah we belong and to Him shall we return. He was born in Tennessee on October 9, 1920. He was blessed to take bai’at in 1948 after reading the books of the Promised Messiah (as) and Hazrat Musleh Maood (ra).
He is listed among the early African American Ahmadis. He would often say that it had become incumbent on him to do the bai’at and if he had not done so he would be counted as having turned away from God and would have become one of those who had turned their faces away from the truth.
He was an emeritus professor at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, MA from which he was awarded a Ph.D. in Education in 1975. His doctoral dissertation was entitled “An Overview of Western and Islamic Education.” In 2007 he was named University of Massachusetts’ “Artist of the Year.”
After earning a doctorate degree in education he taught in different universities as a professor and wrote several books including his autobiography. Because of his fame, the news of his death spread all over the world and many well-regarded US newspapers immediately published this news.
Dr. Yusef Lateef was a Grammy Award-winning composer, performer, recording artist, author, visual artist, educator and philosopher who influenced the international musical scene for more than six decades. In recognition of his many contributions to the world of music, he also gained the title of American Jazz Master in the year 2010 by the National Endowment for the Arts. In addition to his noteworthy, successful career, he remained a staunch Ahmadi Muslim until his last breath. After his demise, Hazrat Mirza Masroor Ahmad, Khalifatul Masih V (may Allah strengthen him with His Mighty Help) memorialized Dr. Yusef Lateef in his Friday sermon dated January 3, 2014 in the following words:
“Being an Ahmadi Muslim, he never compromised his faith. He has written a great deal about music but never played at locations where alcohol was served. He was blessed with the opportunity to perform Hajj and Umra. He would always make outstanding financial sacrifices and local secretary Maal [finance] says that it was his habit to pay his obligatory Chanda whenever any income check arrived.
He used to say, ‘Even today I have the same level of faith that I had when I had done the bai’at and that the way of Ahmadiyyat is the way of truth and it is that same path which was the path of the Holy Prophet Muhammad (sa). I am convinced that no one taking this path can come to destruction and I am convinced that by walking on this path I and my family will achieve salvation and it is my faith that Ahmadiyyat conveys the teaching that will help develop and foster brotherhood among all humanity.’
He had been blessed to visit Qadian and Rabwah also. Last year he had come to the Jalsa in London. He had tremendous love for Khilafat. He had met Hazrat Khalifatul Masih III (ra) and Hazrat Khalifatul Masih IV (ra) and myself as well even though he was ill when he came to the Jalsa last year and was in a wheelchair.
He was highly virtuous and strictly observed salat and attended Friday prayer with regularity. He loved everyone and treated all with affection, love and kindness. He was a sincere human being. He would deal with his non-Ahmadi friends also with love and kindness.
He was blessed to serve the Jama’at in a variety of offices for a long period of time. He loved to convey the message of Islam and always carried Jama’at literature with him and conveyed the message to his friends, relatives and neighbors and while travelling by plane distribute to others. He published various books of the Jama’at including Philosophy of the Teachings of Islam and other books related to the training of children, at his own expense for the blind.
He was also a Moosi. He is survived by his wife Ayesha Lateef and one son Yusef Lateef. May Allah bless all of them with patience and steadfastness and enable them to carry out the righteous deeds that Yusef Lateef personified.”
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Links and Related Essay’s
Just a few Jazz musicians converted to Ahmadiyya – ahmadiyyafactcheckblog
Yusef Lateef – obituary (telegraph.co.uk
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Tags
#ahmadiyya #ahmadiyyafactcheckblog #messiahhascome #ahmadiyyat #trueislam #ahmadianswers #mirzaghulamahmad #qadiani #qadianism #yusuflateef
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