BLP 4187

Larry Young - Into Somethin'

Released - February 1965

Recording and Session Information

Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, November 12, 1964
Sam Rivers, tenor sax #1-4; Larry Young, organ; Grant Green, guitar; Elvin Jones, drums.

1464 tk.3 Plaza De Toros
1465 tk.5 Tyrone
1466 tk.9 Backup
1467 tk.10 Paris Eyes
1468 tk.23 Ritha

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
Tyrone	Larry Young	November 12 1964
Plaza De Toros	Grant Green	November 12 1964
Side Two
Paris Eyes	Larry Young	November 12 1964
Backup	Larry Young	November 12 1964
Ritha	Larry Young	November 12 1964

Liner Notes

“ONE thing about Larry Young,” Grant Green was emphasizing as he talked about this album, “is that he’s really an organist. He knows that instrument; and furthermore, unlike some other organ players in jazz, Larry never gets in your way. On the contrary, he keeps building in and around what you’re doing while always listening so that his comping is always a great help. He’s much more flexible than organists usually are, and that makes it possible for him to comp specifically for each different player. Man, he even comps in a particular way for drums. “Another thing,” Green continued, “is that Larry is always identifiable right away. You know it’s him. It’s his sound, his imagination and the way he creates melodic lines. His sense of melody is very fresh and very much his own.”

The organ skills of Larry Young, furthermore, are, in a sense, a continuation of a family tradition. As Leonard Feather points out in his notes for Talkin’ About (Blue Note 4183), a Grant Green album on which Larry Young and Elvin Jones also appear, “Larry is the first important young jazz organist to claim second-generation status in this profession.” Larry Young, Senior, is on organist and was the first major musical influence on his son. The father, moreover, provided an organ in the family home so that Larry Young, Junior, who had studied piano, could gravitate easily and at his own pace to the organ.

The younger Larry Young was born on October 7, 1940. His background includes study of both classical and jazz music. (Bud Powell was a particular force in Young’s early indoctrination into modern jazz.) From about 1951 to 1958, Young was relatively inactive musically; but a strongly reawakened interest in the organ, encouraged by his father, propelled Young back into music in 1958. After a rhythm and blues apprenticeship, Young gained wider experience with Lou Donaldson; worked around New York and New Jersey with Kenny Dorham, Hank Mobley and Tommy Turrentine, among others; and then began heading his own units.

Young went to Paris in November, 1964, and has since created a European following through his quartet at Le Chat Qui Peche. One reason for his decision to spend some time in Europe is Young’s persistent concern with widening his experience so that he can express a greater diversity of emotions and insights in his music. But Young has no intention of becoming an expatriate. With regard to jazz, he points out, “the States are the basis of it all and I won’t stay in Europe so long that I’ll lose my roots.”

The strength of Young’s roots in the blues and in corollary foundation blocks of the jazz language are evident throughout this album. Also clear is Young's variegated imagination as a composer. The opening Tyrone is named by Young after his five-year-old son. Written in 6/8, Tyrone in actual performance achieved what Young calls “a very good floating feeling.” Young adds that the tune is constructed, in a way, “like a loose leaf notebook. You can always take away from it or add to it. And it’s also built so that, as here, you con stretch out on solos.”

The loping theme of Young’s Tyrone presages the relaxed groove that is characteristic of the album as a whole. As Young begins his solo, what is instantly characteristic of his playing is clarity of sound; nimbleness of execution; lean, pungent chording; and a resilient beat. By contrast with organists who confuse the instrument with an artillery weapon, Young is an unusually resourceful and graceful improviser on that powerful instrument. Conscious of dynamics and of the force of understatement, his is a disciplined but infectiously pulsating approach to the organ. The uncluttered lines and penetrating sound of Grant Green fuse bracingly with Young’s lithe conception. Complementing both of them is the dark-toned, passionate tenor of Sam Rivers. Boston-based and long admired by jazzmen who have played that city, Rivers has an emotional directness and rhythmic surge that presage a rising reputation. And of Elvin Jones, perhaps the most graphic assessment of his worth on a date is that of Grant Green: “All I can say about Elvin is that he lifts that beat all the way up into the air!”

Plaza De Toros is a Grant Green excursion into the terrain of Spanish musical feeling. This blending of jazz with Spanish idiomatic devices, including rhythmic shapes, is refreshingly unforced. Green’s soaring, quicksilver solo swings effortlessly while sustaining melodic interest. The “cry” in Sam Rivers’ succeeding improvisation, while basically jazz in inflection, also calls to ear the winding passion of a flamenco “cantador.” Worth noting here, and on the other tracks, is the spring-like thrust of Young’s organ accompaniment which is never muddy nor consumed with its own capacity for smothering everyone else. And when Young breaks into solo, there is again that clean, incisive structuring of melodic lines which bristle with Young’s delight in transcending the usual murkiness of jazz organ playing as he proves how light-footed the instrument can be.

Paris Eyes, as the title might indicate, was written by Young in expectation of his trip to that city of light. The gentle theme connotes anticipation, and its execution also indicates how mellow a soloist Young can be. Sam Rivers too directs his lyricism into more luminous, softer textures without, however, losing any of the virility that is so endemic to his playing. Here again, Young’s deft, provocative accompanying patterns provide a rich, multi-colored base for the hornman. Grant Green eases into the joyful mood, and then Young constructs a kind of advance paean to the expansive way of life that he hopes to find in Paris. In the background, Elvin Jones keeps the time alive with promise.

Backup is a glowing blues with Young’s particular stomp of melodic finality. His lines in retrospect have an aura of inevitability, as if their shape had always existed but simply required someone to fill in the notes for them to come into pulsating being. Grant Green’s solo here animates Young’s appreciation of that remarkably consistent guitarist: “Grant never lets up, never lags. He’s always right in the groove.” And when one is speaking of roots, there is not the slightest doubt of Green’s total command of the blues idiom — as he demonstrates in Backup. Rivers too tells a basic, personal blues story, crisply propelled by Young and Jones. And think on that word, “crisply.” How often hove you heard an organist to whom that term can accurately apply?

The final Young original, Ritha, is performed by a trio of Young, Green and Jones because Young felt the song was better suited to that framework than to a quartet. A wistful, caressing tune, Ritha further underlines Larry Young’s value as a writer of jazz originals. Like others of his melodies, it is the kind of tune which, if fused with the right words, could have considerable currency for singers in search of material of quality. In this version, the song’s sinuous line is explored with cohesive sensitivity by Green and Young while Elvin Jones makes the drums sound as if they were breathing.

In Larry Young, BLUE NOTE has one of the more rare contemporary phenomena in jazz — a thoroughly skilled jazz organist who recognizes the virtues of clarity and spareness as well as the need to keep attuned to the individual, expressive needs and directions of his colleagues. Into Somethin’ is a notable album, both as a forum for a satisfying organist on the ascendant and also as an illustration of flowing small combo jazz in which four firm individualists ore also capable of interrelating as on unusually well integrated unit of vivid spirit and a robust but never soggy beat. It is the kind of record that is easy to revisit; and that con also be said of its leader whose jazz future ought to be as sanguine as his musical temperament.

— NAT HENTOFF

Cover Photo by FRANCIS WOLFF
Cover Design by REID MILES
Recording by RUDY VAN GELDER