It is impossible to neatly summarize Yusef Lateef's decades-long musical career. A deep musical thinker and multi-instrumental virtuoso (tenor sax and oboe chief among them), Lateef played music covering a profoundly broad range of styles. His burly hard bop excursions of the early '60s soon incorporated various Eastern instruments and scales. His later work, from the 1980s on, featured innovative compositional techniques and was more symphonic in nature, while continuing to use non-Western instrumentation to singular effect.