So it would be easy to overlook Young's debut album for Prestige, at age 19, and the Prestige/New Jazz albums that followed it, and that would be a huge mistake. Artists grow, mature, and develop in different ways over the course of lifetimes, but that doesn't negate the importance of their earlier work. I've written before about how today's young Coltrane fans betray a great impatience with Trane's early work on Prestige with the Red Garland trio, and I've said how much of a mistake I think that is. And sometimes artists grow and develop in ways that not only don't eclipse their earlier work, but don't live up to it.
What's the best Miles Davis? Some would say the groundbreaking nonet sessions for Capitol in 1948-49. I've argued that Birth of the Cool, and not Kind of Blue, is the most important album of the 1950s, but many would disagree. Kind of Blue remains the most popular jazz album of all time, and its fans are legion. Others would argue for the jazz-rock fusion of Bitches Brew. Others--probably fewer--would go for the later stuff like Big Fun and Jack Johnson. But while many would not want to make the case that Miles kept getting better and better, few would argue that he should have kept doing the same thing.
Igor Stravinsky had a long and successful life as a composer, but his youthful Rite of Spring and The Firebird are what he's remembered for most. William Wordsworth lived to be 80, and wrote poetry all his life, but he's remembered for the work he did before the age of 30.
The Beatles are celebrated for Rubber Soul and Sergeant Pepper, but for sheer enjoyment, it's hard to top "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" or "Ticket to Ride." And so it is with Larry Young. Jazz changed a lot over the years that Young was making music, and he changed with it, but if you love soul jazz, it's hard to beat the burning, churning music that this teenager turned out on his debut album.
A contemporary review of Young's first Blue Note album talks about Young "freeing the Hammond organ from a jaded rhythm’n’blues context," just as other jazz writers have talked about Kind of Blue liberating jazz from the sweaty clichés of bop, but this is frankly bullshit. Bop wasn't a cliché and rhythm and blues is not a jaded context, certainly not the way Larry Young was playing it in 1960.
Young came from Newark, halfway between the jazz mecca of New York City and the organ hotbed of Philadelphia. He had begun to make a name for himself with rhythm and blues bands in his father's Newark clubs when he was signed by Prestige. He came into the session young, but fully formed in technique and jazz awareness.
He leads a trio for most of this session: organ, guitar and drums. The guitarist is Philadelphian Thornel Schwartz, who we've heard before on two Johnny "Hammond" Smith sessions, and who was developing a reputation as an organist's guitar player. He would eventually work with nearly all the major jazz organists.
If someone tells you they're going to play you an organ album featuring Jimmie Smith, you don't expect him to be the drummer, but in this case, that's exactly what you get. This is the other Jimmie Smith, like Larry Young a Newark native, and youthful. He was fresh out of Juilliard and making his recording debut. He would go on to have a fine if mostly unheralded career. He starts the session off with a blistering drum intro to J. J. Johnson's bebop standard "Wee Dot," taken here in a version that favors soul over bop, and gives a whole new feeling to the tune.
They are joined on the second number by an old favorite, at least an old favorite of mine: Joe Holiday, whose melding of mambo and bebop in three 1953-54 albums remains a highlight of my Prestige Odyssey. Holiday contributes an original composition, "Exercise for Chihuahuas," and comes back again later in the session to take the lead on a familiar standard, "Flamingo," best known for Earl Bostic's R&B chart-topping version in 1951.
If you think turning a bebop standard like "Wee Dot" into a soul jazz burner is a feat, how about making a soul jazz conflagration out of a Sigmund Romberg warhorse, "When I Grow Too Old to Dream"? But they do that too, and the same with Rodgers and Hart's "Falling in Love With Love."
The rest of the album is two Larry Young originals. "Some Thorny Blues" is a virtuoso piece written for Thornel Schwartz, and he comes through. "Testifying" is a remarkable piece of soul, with catchy rhythm and blues riffs morphing into the sonority of a church pipe organ.
So if you think you know Larry Young from his fusion and free jazz phases, it's worth going back and checking out where he started from. This is soul jazz and hot and fresh as sweet potato pie from a Muslim street baker in Newark. Testifying was the name of the album, and Esmond Edwards produced.
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