The hellfire-preacher mannerisms that stars like Jimmy Smith popularised have often dominated the Hammond organ’s personality in jazz – but not for 1960s/70s Hammondist Larry Young. Young died at 38, leaving a few great Blue Note sessions, work on Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew, and some raw fusion with the Tony Williams Lifetime. These newly unearthed 1964-65 recordings recently turned up in broadcaster ORTF’s archives, featuring the then Paris-resident’s radio shows with American and French musicians, fascinatingly including little-known Stan Getzian sax maestro Jean-Claude Fohrenbach. Trumpeter Woody Shaw’s blistering, high-register playing and Nathan Davis’s nonchalant tenor-sax ruggedness mingle with a series of breathtaking Young improvisations – twisting and quirky on Trane of Thought, sleek and then petrifyingly fierce on Wayne Shorter’s Black Nile, percussively wayward on regular piano on the Monk-like Larry’s Blues. The dominant style is earthy, early-Coltraneish hard-bop, and there are long processions of solos – but Young’s elegantly reckless improvisations lift this music into another league.
