After the deaths of Jim Hall and Stan Tracey, it turned out 2013 hadn't quite finished with the great and the good of jazz.
On December 23 we also lost Yusef Lateef, 93, a pioneering musician who, in addition to being a fine tenor saxophonist and prolific composer, mastered a wide range of other instruments seldom or never heard in a jazz context before.
Whether some of Lateef's music should be considered jazz is debatable - he seems to have been ambivalent about the word himself - but he was among the first musicians generally thought of as jazzmen to take a serious interest in what we now call "world music".
He adopted an array of Asian and Middle Eastern instruments such as the shehnai and shofar, as well as playing the flute and bassoon - both instruments more usually heard in Western classical music than in jazz - and played them all with the conviction and authority he brought to his distinctive tenor work.
Lateef was not the name he was born with, or the one he originally performed under. Born William Emanuel Huddleston, he was known as Bill Evans when he played his early sideman gigs, but is not to be confused with the pianist, or the younger saxophonist, with the same name.
In 1950 while performing with Dizzy Gillespie's band he became a Muslim, and adopted the name he would perform and record under for the rest of his long life.