One of the many areas of Jazz where the Ken Burns documentary fails abysmally is with the Organ groups. I don’t know offhand when they began to become popular, but certainly they are an institution in Jazz by the mid 1950s. The casual Jazz fan is likely aware of Jimmy Smith; who does get his name mentioned and his picture shown for a brief moment in Burns’ mini-series. Smith is certainly the most influential and most successful of the Jazz organists. But perhaps more intriguing is the “John Coltrane of Hammond Organ”, Mr. Larry Young.
Born on October 7th, 1940 in Newark NJ, Larry Young began his career playing in the vein of Jimmy Smith. His first recordings come out in 1960. As Larry matures, he embraces modal jazz and takes that sort of approach to his organ playing. He experiments using the organ for free jazz. In 1969 he joins up with Tony Williams and John McLaughlin to create what might be the first “fusion” band and then goes on to appear on Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew. With Williams he performs for huge audiences in 1970 and when his time with Williams is over by 1973, Larry begins to become somewhat confused by the state of the music industry. He records two funky jazz records in the mid 1970s which do not sell at all. His last recording from 1977 seems impossible to find. In 1978 he had signed a lucrative record deal with Warner Brothers and was preparing for some high profile gigs in NYC (I assume playing music more like his traditional jazz as this was supposed to have been a very promising series of events) but he died suddenly on March 30th of 1978. 37 years old.
Larry Young is best known for his 1965 recording, “Unity”. This record is to many one of the greatest recordings in the history of Jazz. If I were to make a list of top 10 recordings in Jazz, Unity would be on the list along with Kind of Blue, Sketches of Spain, and A Love Supreme.
Please step on through the Orange squiggle. First stop, the greatest city in the USA: Newark NJ.
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