Larry Young - 1966 - Unity

Larry Young

1966

Unity

01. Zoltan

02. Monk's Dream

03. If

04. The Moontrane

05. Softly As In A Morning Sunrise

06. Beyond All Limits

Recorded At – Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey

Drums – Elvin Jones

Organ – Larry Young

Tenor Saxophone – Joe Henderson

Trumpet – Woody Shaw

Unity is a wild post-bop ride, with Larry Young clearly showing he was in favor of the adventurous direction that John Coltrane and others were taking jazz by the mid-1960s. The lyrical soulfulness of the hard bop that dominated jazz music over the previous decade is still present, but the group is clearly interested in stretching out their musical chops. Larry Young had already tipped his hand the previous year with his Blue Note debut Into Somethin' by enlisting the restlessly creative tenor saxophone Sam Rivers into the fold, proving that he was no longer interested in simply being another Jimmy Smith clone. The group Young assembled for Unity is no less bold, with Joe Henderson taking up his usual role as a creative sideman no matter the session and a twenty-one year old Woody Shaw making his very first appearance on a Blue Note album. Rounding off the quartet was the top-of-the-heap post-bop drummer extraordinaire Elvin Jones, who always seems to lend an air of authenticity to outings like this one.

The two strongest tracks on Unity are penned by the horn players: "If" by Henderson, and Shaw's soon to be classic number "The Moontrane." Both tunes let the group really show off a collective spirit that - like the best of jazz music - still shines with individuality and originality. For many listeners, the highlight of the album will be the presence of Shaw, whose stature in the jazz world has grown immensely over the past couple of decades (Young & Shaw knew each other from growing up and playing together in Newark, NJ). But, be sure to take some time to savor Young's take on what the organ can do in jazz, how he is fully present yet never overpowers his bandmates, managing to make the record his own without drowning out the best they have to offer. I often feel that Young's musical prowess on the organ is best compared to what McCoy Tyner could do on the piano: both men possessing that innate ability to both drive the melody forward and to lay back in the cut.

Larry Young would continue to expand his musical vision over three more albums on Blue Note, before he went out on his own and made what many consider to be his crowning achievement in the cult classic Lawrence of Newark, an album that an old roommate of mine swore was one of the great jazz records of all time (you can be the judge here). Whatever your stance on the more avant garde direction that Young's music took after Unity, it is safe to say that all jazz fans will find something to like on his Blue Note debut, and for some it will open their ears to exploring even more of where a good deal of jazz music headed off to in the second-half of the 1960s.

On Unity, jazz organist Larry Young began to display some of the angular drive that made him a natural for the jazz-rock explosion to come barely four years later. While about as far from the groove jazz of Jimmy Smith as you could get, Young hadn't made the complete leap into freeform jazz-rock either. Here he finds himself in very distinguished company: drummer Elvin Jones, trumpeter Woody Shaw, and saxman Joe Henderson. Young was clearly taken by the explorations of saxophonists Coleman and Coltrane, as well as the tonal expressionism put in place by Sonny Rollins and the hard-edged modal music of Miles Davis and his young quintet. But the sound here is all Young: the rhythmic thrusting pulses shoved up against Henderson and Shaw as the framework for a melody that never actually emerges ("Zoltan" -- one of three Shaw tunes here), the skipping chords he uses to supplant the harmony in "Monk's Dream," and also the reiterating of front-line phrases a half step behind the beat to create an echo effect and leave a tonal trace on the soloists as they emerge into the tunes (Henderson's "If" and Shaw's "The Moontrane"). All of these are Young trademarks, displayed when he was still very young, yet enough of a wiseacre to try to drive a group of musicians as seasoned as this -- and he succeeded each and every time. As a soloist, Young is at his best on Shaw's "Beyond All Limits" and the classic nugget "Softly as in a Morning Sunrise." In his breaks, Young uses the middle register as a place of departure, staggering arpeggios against chords against harmonic inversions that swing plenty and still comes out at all angles. Unity proved that Young's debut, Into Somethin', was no fluke, and that he could play with the lions. And as an album, it holds up even better than some of the work by his sidemen here.

If you like 70s progressive rock bands like Yes and Emerson, Lake and Palmer, this may very well be the jazz album for you, as Young's innovative organ soloing here definitely broke new ground and influenced the Hammond sound later brought into the mainstream by those acts and others like them. That's not to say that this is in any way a jazz-rock fusion album, as the set remains firmly grounded in Hard Bop, even if it at times ventures off into more experimental realms, but what Young was doing here was nonetheless paving the way for much of the music that would come in the following decade in both jazz and rock.