Yusef Lateef

Records)
With Randy Weston
Uhuru Afrika (Roulette 1960). Awards and honors
In 2010 he received lifetime the Jazz Master Fellowship Award from NEA National Endowment for the Arts which is an independent federal agency. Lateef's sound has been claimed to have been a major influence on the saxophonist John Coltrane whose later period free jazz recordings contain similarly 'Eastern' traits.

He is known for his innovative blending of jazz with "Eastern" music. Yusef Lateef (born William Emanuel Huddleston October 9 1920) is an American Grammy Award-winning jazz multi-instrumentalist composer educator and a spokesman for the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community after his conversion to the Ahmadiyya sect of Islam in 1950.