BLP 4242

Larry Young - Of Love And Peace

Released - 1967

Recording and Session Information

Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, July 28, 1966
Eddie Gale, trumpet; James Spaulding, alto sax, flute; Herbert Morgan, tenor sax; Larry Young, organ; Wilson Moorman III, Jerry Thomas, drums.

1776 tk.2 Pavanne
1777 tk.4 Of Love And Peace
1778 tk.8 Seven Steps To Heaven
1779 tk.10 Falaq

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
Pavanne	Morton Gould	July 28 1966
Of Love and Peace	Larry Young	July 28 1966
Side Two
Seven Steps to Heaven	Miles Davis/Victor Feldman	July 28 1966
Falaq	Larry Young	July 28 1966

Liner Notes

LARRY YOUNG is a large, attractive, sincere, articulate and apparently peaceful man. His carriage is quietly dignified, and as salient with him as any physical feature. There is very little show about him, and no put on. To him, questions are requests for knowledge; and when he answers them, it is with words chosen carefully because the truth and the idea of it are in them, not because they are colorful sounds which can decorate the silence in the room.

There is much of the some quality in his music. It can have, as in Pavanne, the kind of unhurried drive that makes the room turn; or, as in Of Love and Peace, it can be a set of eerily pacific dialogues which flow in and out of each other without contrivance or elaboration. He is probably the only serious modern full time organist in jazz.

Young uses his organ as a moving point of reference for his group, not merely in terms of chord changes (he goes way past that), but also in the actual materials that he uses in both his solo and accompanying work. There are, for example, actual dissonances struck between Larry and the soloists which sound consonant because of the organ’s full, round sound.

In the last three of his twenty-six years, Larry Young’s development hos been astounding. His lost record, Unity (Blue Note 4221 BLP4221) showed a rare enough organist, one who didn’t just toss off crowd satisfying funk chords or standard neo-bop phrases borrowed from other instruments, but who played difficult extended lines which were obviously contemporary. Now it can be said that Larry Young has developed a brand new conception of the organ as an instrument of composition and of improvisation, and it is his belief that this realization has come about as the result of religious experiences.

Larry is a Suni Muslim (an older if smaller sect than Elijah Mohammed’s Nation of Islam) and he has found in Islam the kind of interior peace that accelerates growth. He believes in one God, but in all prophets. He is constantly speaking of the spirituality of his music, of how oneness with the creator has moved his music to o higher level. “There is more coming out of me as a being now, and so there’s more coming out of my music. Thoughts ore only thoughts, but if you have o spiritual foundation you can make music a part of your being.” Islam is a faith which ultimately affirms life, no matter the fatalism which Western writers have imputed to it, and this affirmation has been a help to Lorry Young’s attempt to create a dynamic music which is relatively free of tensions. “Since I learned to approach life as a positive phenomenon, I find my experiences now more uplifting. All of us are trying in some way to glorify the creator, or creation, if you’re not religious, and everyone who approaches the music must be approaching it for that reason. This keeps us working on a very high level, and keeps the music pure.”

Larry started his musical education almost from the cradle. His father, Larry Young Sr., is on accomplished musician who used to hove his rhythm and blues playing friends over to practice in the room adjoining the infant Lawrence’s. It was only a few years (Lorry says he was too young to remember) before Larry was himself making music. His father soon had him taking intensive piano training which continued until he was seventeen years old. “At seventeen,” says lorry, “I started connecting music with life,” whereas he now is involved with “correlating music with knowledge. When I was seventeen, I found that I had to dismiss all that formal training and concentrate on true musical self-expression.”

Young Larry was doing what most aspiring young jazz musicians do at his age: hanging around the jazz clubs in Newark (where he still makes his home) and sitting in at every opportunity, “finding out what was happening.” He made some memorable sessions at Lens and Lens where he played with men of the calibre of Philly Joe Jones, Johnny Coles, Charlie Persip and Hank Mobley, and where he also met some contemporaries with whom he was subsequently to record, like Woody Shaw and Herbert Morgan. He also accompanied several blues singers, including the great Jimmy Rushing.

When Larry was fourteen, his father opened a nightclub in Newark, The Shindig, and installed an organ. Larry Jr. was an immediate convert, finding in the organ a number of potentialities which no other instrument could begin to offer. “It’s a shame,” he says, “that so many jazz organists ore so commercial. This instrument can do almost anything, and can be used so many ways with other instruments. I keep hearing so many things that I con do. To me this record is only o beginning.”

The idea of using two drums come at a Muslim banquet just after he hod entered Islam. There were several drummers present, and Larry joined in on the organ. “It was a spiritual experience,” he recalls, “there was so much more life in the music. I felt that I hod to record that way.”

And here it is, a truly electric musical presentation, and considerable credit for the success of this record must go to the two drummers, Wilson Moorman III and Jerry Thomas, who play together so empathetically that they meld into one. All in all, as Larry emphasizes, this was a group effort, with all of the participating musicians (excepting Spaulding, who was otherwise employed) joining him in a two week non-playing gig by way of preparing for this date. It is to Spaulding’s credit that he could join this intimate group and play with such excellence.

Morton Gould’s familiar Pavanne takes on new life under Larry Young’s hand. This is a tune that Young heard when he was a teenager and hos always wonted to ploy. It opens with the breezy contrapuntal quality of one of Charlie Mingus’ early outdoor exercises and, after the bridge, gets into the context of the “Tradition of the Man,” with Herbert Morgan’s outspoken solo. Eddie Gale, who was at that bazaar where Larry first heard two drums, plays a growling, rasping solo which leads into Spaulding’s gentle scream. Then follows Larry’s solo, which is direct, imaginative, broadly conceived, and self-effacing enough to showcase the two drummers. It closes on a crescendo that is uplifting and powerful. An excellent job of setting up the date and introducing the musicians.

Of Love and Peace was so named because Young feels that people have confused the emotive material of the New Music with anger and frustration. It was done in one take, without arrangement. “I told no one how to play. I told them it was all free and that, since no one was doing anything contrary to anyone else, there could be no problem.” There was none. This is a remarkable piece which the listener might use to audition this record. The screams and wails which ore port of the vocabulary of the New Music are here, but Young’s provided here a context of positive self-expression and group harmony without regimentation, viz., “when you exercise control, you destroy individual knowledge.”

Larry heard Miles’ version of Seven Steps to Heaven and thought its changes were broad enough to allow the musicians to stretch out. There is considerable drive coming out of this swift and strong rhythm section, with Moorman and Thomas on top of everything but each other. Again Gale displays the form which justifies his place in Cecil Taylor’s most important band; Morgan shows what Young mean? when he called him “a comer with a correct ear and a very positive kind of knowledge,” and James Spaulding establishes his position as a leading new altoist. But it is Larry Young who is the moving reference, the unobtrusive leader, and his solo is considerably more linear than most organists ever try to be. This is Wilson Moormon’s first solo.

Faloq (dawn in Arabic when all creation arises and gives praise to Allah) is another spontaneous composition; Young told them the key, described the tonal center, let Jerry Thomas start, and then played a melody which the soloists could either use or not. Another successful piece, full of the sounds and colors of people in harmony. “As salt resolved in the ocean/I was swallowed in God’s sea,/past faith, post unknowing,/post doubt, past certainty”, wrote the Sufi poet Rumi, thinking much like Larry Young.

Larry Young dedicates this record to his mother and father.

—A. B. SPEILMAN