Sabir Mateen

Sabir Mateen (born April 16, 1951) is a musician and composer from Philadelphia who plays primarily in the avant-garde jazz idiom. He plays tenor and alto saxophone, B♭ and alto clarinet, and flute. As a young man, Mateen was originally a percussionist, and he started playing flute as a teenager. From there he moved to alto and then tenor saxophone. He started out playing rhythm and blues in the early 1970s which led him to the tenor saxophone chair of the Horace Tapscott Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra. He has performed or recorded with musicians including Cecil Taylor, Sunny Murray, William Parker, Alan Silva, Butch and Wilber Morris, Raphe Malik, Steve Swell, Roy Campbell, Jr., Matthew Shipp, Marc Edwards, Jemeel Moondoc, William Hooker, Henry Grimes, Rashid Bakr, and Hamid Drake. He is a member of the band TEST, with Daniel Carter.