Yesterday I was struggling to nail down a One Track Mind track to cover when Larry Young's Lawrence of Newark came up on the Pico Pod. Then I realized how much the organ players have been neglected from this series. If we're going to make amends here, then there's probably no better choice of jazz organist to highlight in this space than the man also known as Khalid Yasin, but most everyone called him Larry.
For you see, you can find parallels to the saxophone when it comes to jazz. For every Charlie Parker bebop innovator on an instrument, there was also a Coltrane figure who took it beyond bop. For example, Milt Jackson might be considered the vibraphone's Parker while Bobby Hutcherson is its Coltrane. Bud Powell and Bill Evans on piano. Kenny Clarke and Tony Williams on drums. And so on.
Which brings us to organ. If Jimmy Smith was the Hammond B3's Bird, Larry Young could surely be considered its Trane. While Young started out at the dawn of the sixties sounding much like Smith (as have every other organist by then), by the middle of the decade he was getting away from the greasy, soul-jazz of Smith and adapting Coltrane's modal experiments to the instrument.
As any casual Young fan will tell you, he achieved modal organ nirvana on his 1965 masterpiece Unity, one of the finest Blue Note releases ever. Consisting of a quartet of Young joined by Joe Henderson, Woody Shaw and Elvin Jones, young assembled an eager, sympathetic group of first-rate players (Elvin being borrowed from J.C's band for this session). The name of the album was inspired by the unusually high level of interplay among the participants; everyone seems to be listening as much as playing. In particular, Jones and Young seems to be reading each other's minds like open books.
Unity was also buttressed by a strong set of songs; four of these six compositions were originals by band players. More to the point, the twenty year old trumpeter Shaw contributed three of them. One of them, "The Moontrane," is deserving of it's own spotlight.
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