Listening to Prestige 400: Larry Young

This is my 400th entry in this Listening to Prestige project, and I started it almost exactly five years ago--June 14, 2014. I've learned a lot, listened to a lot of great music, brought myself up to a new decade, and still enthusiastic. The artists and the music of the 1950s, the bebop and hard bop eras, are the most familiar to me, so now I'm venturing into uncharted waters.

The organ was the hot new sound as the decade rolled over, and soul jazz gained prominence. Shirley Scott was Prestige's big organ star, either with her trio, as in the September 27 session we just listened to, or in a quintet with Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis -- and still to come, with Stanley Turrentine. Prestige also introduced Jack McDuff, who came to the label with Willis "Gator Tail" Jackson, but went on to

become a major star in his own right, and Johnny "Hammond" Smith, who added the organ to his name to differentiate himself from guitarist Johnny Smith, and ultimately dropped the Smith part altogether and became Johnny Hammond.

And Larry Young, the youngest of these new organists, 19 when he made his debut album for Prestige and still a week shy of his 20th birthday on this session, for his second album. Young was really just passing through Prestige--he would only make one more album for the label--and for that matter, he was just passing through this phase of his career, the Jimmy Smith-influenced popular soul jazz sound of the day.

Young's muse was to be a restless one, taking him into Coltrane-influenced free jazz and then into fusion, but these Prestige albums, though not predictive of the explosive changes he was going to go through, certainly give us a healthy serving of his youthful talent. Guitarist Thornel Schwartz and drummer Jimmie Smith are back from the previous session, joined by Prestige veteran Wendell Marshall on bass. They play some Young originals, one standard ("Little White Lies," by Walter Donaldson, dating back to 1930), and three tunes by his contemporaries: Ray Draper, Horace Silver, and Morris "Mo" Bailey, Philadelphia-based saxophonist-composer-arranger.

That's enough variety to keep a session interesting, and though this is generally thought of as being Young's Jimmy Smith apprenticeship period, and although he's working in the soul jazz idiom that he would leave behind, there's plenty of individual voice here, and plenty of excitement.

"African Blues" is a good representative of his composing skills, and how he works with his own material. Soul jazz is supposed to be a sort of simplified form, and certainly there's a danceable groove here, but Shirley Scott has shown how much experimentalism an organist can bring to a solid beat, and so does Young. His groove is, if anything, even solider and funkier, and his inventiveness -- and that of Thornel Schwartz, whose rapport with him is always centered -- is a thing to enjoy.

"Little White Lies" is a cute tune, and vocalists like it, but it hasn't drawn all that much attention from jazz musicians. Maybe vocalists like it because the negativity of the lyrics makes a nice contrast to the bouncy tune, and that gets lost in an instrumental. But Young and Schwartz have some evil fun with it, and make the journey very worthwhile.

Nobody knows funk better than Horace Silver, and he has few peers as a composer, so "Nica's Dream" is a solid choice for young Mr. Young. It's become a jazz standard, mostly instrumental, although DeeDee Bridgewater wrote a vocalese lyric to it and killed it in performance, and a few others have essayed her version, notably Yvonne Sanchez, a Cuban-Polish jazz singer now making an expat career in Czechoslovakia. Silver first recorded it in 1956 with the Jazz Messengers. In 1959 Art Farmer and Blue Mitchell each did it, and then in 1960, as soul jazz was gaining a foothold, it was really discovered, and recordings were made by Young, Sabu Martinez, the Mastersounds (the Montgomery brothers), Curtis Counce, and Horace Silver again. Since then, it's become a beloved standard. Young does it proud.

He also showcases a Philadelphia comrade and not so well known composer, Mo Bailey, whose career as a saxophonist was cut short by illness, but who remained active as a successful composer and arranger into the disco era and beyond. His "Midnight Angel," as interpreted by Young, is haunting but funky.

This was released as an album on New Jazz, Esmond Edwards producing. No singles were released from the session.

Listening to Prestige Vol. 2, 1955-56, and Vol. 3, 1957-58 now include, in the Kindle editions, links to all the "Listen to One" selections. All three volumes available from Amazon.
The most interesting book of its kind that I have ever seen. If any of you real jazz lovers want to know about some of the classic records made by some of the legends of jazz, get this book. LOVED IT.– Terry Gibbs