Vanderbilt’s Blair School of Music presents Yusef Lateef Symposium
About the Symposium
Learn more about the event and purchase tickets here.
The life, music, and visual art of Dr. Yusef Lateef will be celebrated September 12-13, 2025, as the Vanderbilt University Blair School of Music hosts the Yusef Lateef Symposium. The two-day conference will include panel discussions, viewings of the Yusef A. Lateef Collection housed at Vanderbilt, a film screening, visual art displays and live music performances.
An esteemed group of musicians, educators and writers will be on hand to lead the panel sessions, including the late musician’s widow, Ayesha Lateef, who will participate as a panelist with jazz luminaries Ralph Jones and Alex Marcelo, along with phone participation by Sonny Rollins, moderated by Charlie Apicella.
The Symposium will include a screening of the acclaimed documentary Brother Yusef directed by Nicolos Humbert and Werner Penzel. The 2005 film features the artist’s recollections of his collaborations with John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie, and others. Anecdotes and reflections about music-making are interspersed with Lateef's vocals and instrumental playing.
Day two of the conference will culminate with a special evening Ingram Hall performance by Autophysiopsychic Millenium, a creative research music collective inspired by the works of Yusef Lateef. The ensemble is led by a trio of musicians: Detroit’s LuFuki, and Chicago’s Angel Bat Dawid and Adam Zanolini.
The Yusef Lateef Symposium—led by Blair faculty members Douglas Shadle, associate professor, musicology; Ryan Middagh, director of jazz studies; and Holling Smith-Borne, director of the Wilson Music Library—builds on Vanderbilt’s growing reputation as a major center for jazz and avant-garde music. The Blair Big Band student undergraduate jazz ensemble has received national acclaim, and Blair has hosted recent residencies with numerous boundary-breaking artists and composers, including Wadada Leo Smith,
Gabriela Lena Frank, Jessie Montgomery, Sarah Kirkland Snider, the Del Sol Quartet, and 48 St. Stephen.
Through Vanderbilt’s partnership with the Nashville-based National Museum of African American Music (NMAAM), the university has acquired several special collections supporting research and instruction on jazz, including the Dizzy Gillespie and Yusef Lateef collections. Outside the NMAAM partnership, the Wilson Music Library recently acquired the Phil Schaap Collection, which has extraordinary potential for research and pedagogical use.
“We are delighted to be hosting this Symposium,” said Middagh. “It is an excellent next step for our jazz program as we strive to advance jazz performance and pedagogy and work to position Vanderbilt as a leader in this art form. Interdisciplinary collaborations, such as this symposium, bring together artists on the vanguard of the discipline with our world-class Vanderbilt faculty and students, which is what makes our work here at Blair special.”
Yusef Abdul Lateef (October 9, 1920 – December 23, 2013) was an American jazz multi-instrumentalist, composer, and prominent figure among the Ahmadiyya Community in the United States. Born in Chattanooga and raised in Detroit, Lateef went on to perform with Hot Lips Page, Roy Eldridge, Dizzy Gillespie, Charles Mingus, Cannonball Adderley and Grant Green. He received a Grammy Award in 1988 for Yusef Lateef’s Little Symphony, honored as Best New Age Performance.
Most known for his work on tenor saxophone and flute, Lateef also played oboe and bassoon, and non-western instruments such as the bamboo flute, shanai, shofar, xun, arghul and koto. He coined the term “autophysiopsychic” to describe his “music from one’s physical, mental and spiritual self.”
The Yusef Lateef Symposium is made possible by a Seeding Success grant from the Vanderbilt Office of the Vice Provost for Research and Innovation.
