Larry Young

Larry Young, who also performed under the name Khalid Yasin, advanced an equally groundbreaking style on the organ throughout the 1960s that Jimmy Smith had introduced during the previous decade. Free-flowing, eddying harmonies, forceful melodic arcs, and improvisations colored by rock textures stood apart from the prevailing blues-and-soul emphasis on steady grooves that had come to define most organ work. He transported John Coltrane’s late-1960s methods to the instrument, producing dense sonic layers and leaving a decisive imprint on every date in which he took part across those two decades.

Newark, New Jersey, was the city of his birth in 1940. Although his early training centered on piano, he eventually took up the organ in various R&B groups during the 1950s. A 1960 recording with Jimmy Forrest preceded his debut Blue Note date as leader. Mid-decade collaborations with Grant Green kept Young in a hard-bop framework even while his own experiments were already under way. He also teamed with Joe Henderson, Lee Morgan, Donald Byrd, and Tommy Turrentine, and he crossed Europe in 1964. By the time he returned to Blue Note later that year, Young had established himself as an emerging force of change. Coltrane’s post-bop sensibility increasingly shaped both his performance and his writing, steering the music toward more abstract and intellectually demanding territory. The 1965 release Into Somethin’ signaled this new direction to listeners, while Unity—cut the same year—has remained his most celebrated album. Appearances alongside Coltrane, sessions with Woody Shaw and Elvin Jones, and membership in Miles Davis’s group in 1969 followed. Further work with John McLaughlin occurred in 1970, and Young joined Tony Williams’ Lifetime alongside McLaughlin and Jack Bruce in the early 1970s. Only two additional albums appeared, issued on Perception and Arista; both proved inconsistent yet contained moments of interest. Neither company grasped the direction Young pursued or how to market the results. He died in 1978 at the age of thirty-eight. With only a modest catalog to his name, he continued to puzzle the labels that released his music. Mosaic later compiled his Blue Note output into the boxed set The Complete Blue Note Recordings of Larry Young. Fantasy reissued the early New Jazz session Testifying in a limited 1992 edition, and Blue Note itself issued the anthology The Art of Larry Young.