Jump to content

Larry young In Paris


danasgoodstuff

Recommended Posts

Got my copy at an event here in DC, an excellent interview that Michael Fitzgerald conducted with the producer of the project, Zev Feldman -- which was very interesting, and very entertaining too!  I only gave the 2nd disc a full spin last night, and bits of the 1st -- but I'm thoroughly blown away by the material, and also the nearly 60-page book (much more than a booklet, really) that comes with the package.  HIGHLY recommended, outstanding material and liners.

BTW, does anyone know if the building in the background of the iconic Into Something cover is still in existence?  It was in Paris, apparently.  There are some great, alternate photos of Larry in front of this building in the liners to the "In Paris" set -- all taken while Larry was there when these recordings were made.

 

 

Larry Young 200x200.jpg

Edited by Rooster_Ties
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Replies 98
  • Created
  • Last Reply

Top Posters In This Topic

I love "Into Somethin" and "Unity" but I think that the music on the set eclipses those albums.  Probably I think Jack Dieval's solos are the least compelling idea wise, but, the way Larry plays off and against his rhythms and the interplay they have on "La Valse Grise" and "Discotheque" is stunning.  You'll love this music, Jim :)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On ‎3‎/‎10‎/‎2016 at 0:16 PM, Rooster_Ties said:

BTW, does anyone know if the building in the background of the iconic Into Something cover is still in existence?  It was in Paris, apparently.  There are some great, alternate photos of Larry in front of this building in the liners to the "In Paris" set -- all taken while Larry was there when these recordings were made.

Answering my own question...

> The Maison de la Radio is indeed on the cover of Larry Young's 'Into Something'. The building was also known as Maison de l'ORTF back then.

http://www.organissimo.org/forum/index.php?/topic/63794-butch-warren-discography-question/&do=findComment&comment=1091417

Edited by Rooster_Ties
Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 3/10/2016 at 11:16 AM, Rooster_Ties said:

Got my copy at an event here in DC, an excellent interview that Michael Fitzgerald conducted with the producer of the project, Zev Feldman -- which was very interesting, and very entertaining too!  I only gave the 2nd disc a full spin last night, and bits of the 1st -- but I'm thoroughly blown away by the material, and also the nearly 60-page book (much more than a booklet, really) that comes with the package.  HIGHLY recommended, outstanding material and liners.

BTW, does anyone know if the building in the background of the iconic Into Something cover is still in existence?  It was in Paris, apparently.  There are some great, alternate photos of Larry in front of this building in the liners to the "In Paris" set -- all taken while Larry was there when these recordings were made.

 

 

Larry Young 200x200.jpg

Toying with the idea of buying the vinyl as I am assuming it would come with a larger book.  I am getting a little tired of the micro font used with many of the box set books.

So with book in hand, how say ye?  Is it readable?  Sincerely, the old grouchy guy, (apparently).

Edited by Eric
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Finally listening to this. I need to go to bed soon but I wanted to at least listen to the first couple of tunes. The chord structure on "Trane of Thought" reminds me of "Beyond All Limits" off Unity. The sound is quite good although the organ is (as expected) a bit too far in the background. So far there is a lot of inspired playing on this, though. Shaw is exceptional. Nathan Davis sounds great, too. I admit I'd never heard him before.

It's interesting to know that the song "Zoltan" was named after the composer Zoltán Kodály (another name I was unfamiliar with). The liner notes are a treat. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

9 hours ago, Lazaro Vega said:

Have you noticed how different Zoltan sounds without Elvin? 

Absolutely!  Brooks is doing the rolling triplet thing but it takes on a completely different character.  "Zoltan" is very very intense on this, particularly Nathan Davis and Woody Shaw.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 4 months later...
5 hours ago, BFrank said:

Thanks for sharing, man--my first thoughts being (and my fault for reading this past midnight) (1) I feel gladdened that the Paris release has engendered some measure of press coverage and critical (re)assessment, and (2) I feel compelled to complain about this article (also my fault).

There's a bit of narrative construction at work in Morris's article that I find questionable. I take no issue with a critic and/or theorist articulating some sort of conceptual bias when discussing music--I think this sort of thing can actually color and enliven the writing--so despite my feelings to the contrary, editorializing the playing of Grant Green is absolutely within rights. That being said, if a writer is going to introduce this sort of critical angle, I'd hope that amounts to something more substantial than avant-garde > soul jazz. That is the stuff of banality.

Maybe I'm being harsh on Morris because I've been guilty of this sort of thing in my own writing, but as someone who loves both the "early" (and, in some regards, more mannered) Young recordings and the more ballistic Lifetime-era stuff, it seems evident to me that inside and outside are equal parts of Young's continuum. Young was not some sui generis genius that emerged Aylerlike upon the sub-popular consciousness--he was a kind of technical gradualist, and a big part of his magic resides in the fact that he was able to both absorb and reconfigure convention in ways that were compatible with a wide variety of contexts. The dude basically translated Trane onto soul jazz organ--reverse engineered Ayler, Stockhausen, and Hendrix into the "anachronism" of the organ trio. To put it another way--I challenge anyone to find a single full album where Young plays without either (a) some kind of harmonic form or (b) some kind of tempo or rhythmic feel. (Really--if this exists, I want to hear it.)

Morris points to Unity as some kind of drastic overture to the dramatic tendencies of both energy music and Dolphy-an modernism, but that record operates within harmonic conventions that were already kind of old hat for Trane in '66, encompassing this spectrum from Monk to Giant Steps to Impressions but only barely nodding at the extreme textural freedoms of the '64-65 Impulse stuff. Yes, Of Love and Peace is crazier, but even that has a standard on it ("Seven Steps to Heaven")--even if the intent was to deconstruct and destroy "Seven Steps" (and I'd venture to say that it wasn't), the inclusion of a standard is only remarkable so much as it implies that Young cared enough in '66 to even question the utility of the harmonic form. That is very center of the aisle thinking in a year when Ayler was playing marching band music, Ornette was recording with his 10 year old son, and Coltrane was playing with Pharoah. (Incidentally, I've worked with Eddie Gale, and if you think that even that most radical wing of the avant-garde family tree was interested in completely dispensing with jazz convention, I can confirm that you are dead wrong.)

I think a bigger and much more important thesis than "Larry Young changed the music forever!"--which yes, he did, but how and why--is "not only did Larry Young alter the mechanics of the Hammond organ for all time, but he also made some very timely and still widely unheralded statements about the nature of innovation v. populism in jazz." For real.

I love Lawrence of Newark. That album is my shit--we listened to it on a loop on tour. But that album is hardly an "expansive summation of Young's free-form brilliance." It is technical and structured in a manner akin to the heaviest of 70's Miles and Mwandishi, drawing (too) from both afrocentric kosmigroov and Gypsy Sun and Rainbows-era Hendrix in liberal fashion. The record engages with psychedelic rock and presages hip-hop in both its textural complexity and commitment to rhythmic stasis. I'm no organ player and someone else can speak to Young's specific technical brilliance, but it's worth noting that Newark is (again) very modal in construction--and even as a keyboard player (here and elsewhere, like on the Woody Shaw session mentioned above) Young eschews Tynerian bombast and localizes his dynamism in the electricity of his instrument. Like Tyner, Young leans on pentatonic phrases and quartal harmonies, but they're remixed in real time by Young's insane drawbar facility.

Lifetime is also my shit, and though I am deeply fond of Emergency, Turn It Over is absolute top of the heap stuff for me. The original mix is an absolute swamp, but it's beautiful for that in a There's A Riot Goin' On kind of way. Laswell's remix is another matter altogether--and were one inclined to dig deep enough into that, it might help both (a) validate the addition of Jack Bruce and (b) recontextualize the music as less free jazz or even proto-punk and more a hybridization of psych rock and more traditional organ trio conceits.

For one thing, a lot of stuff got left on the floor that is waaaay closer in character to live Cream than either MC5 or Sun Ra. Bruce isn't there to play basslines--he's there to thicken the percussive texture of the band (in typical early 70's Bruce-ian fashion, the attack is overdriven and very hard). What is "Vuelta Abajo" if not a Tony Williams-ized, odd-metered take on the "Sunshine of Your Love"/"In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" lineage of sludgy, semi-chromatic rock riffs? When Bruce is extracted, it's telling that the band lightens up and plays (as on the solo sections of "Allah Be Praised" or "Big Nick") these lithe, often swinging basslines--not so far removed from (*gasp*) the stuff Young was doing on Unity or Talkin' About! This is Jazz 101--"ancient to the future" stuff.

(As an aside, I've often read Turn It Over as something akin to Muddy Waters's Electric Mud--a record yes, but also a sort of concept album whereby the musicians are both playing "at" genre as much as "with" genre. Lifetime has their screwed up, asynchronous bossa moment with "Once I Loved," their pithy Trane paean with "Big Nick," their self-consciously greasy and actually kind of ironic organ feature with "Allah Be Praised"--all funneled through this overloud psych rock bag.)

The last and maybe most important note is something that gets brought up on this board time and time again, and that's that recordings don't tell the full story. Money doesn't either. The idea that a musician will go conservative --> avant-garde --> conservative again (but because of money this time) is a convenient narrative that is, while often right, also kind of incomplete. I'm a tremendous supporter of and participant in so-called "experimental" aesthetics, and I can't abide by the notion that an ineluctable shift toward progressivism is the logical outcome for all intelligent musicians, all things being equal. The supposedly regressive/passive/populist organ trio stuff was always a part of Larry Young's music--as was the exploratory--and it was arguably the synthesis of and interaction between these two poles that fostered his most exciting work.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Larry was from Newark, Lawrence Of Newark...I wasn't there, but from all I can tell/have heard, Newark was like, a serious intersections of all things African-American, traditional, current, and futuristic. Not unlike Chicago, only Newark was always in the shade of NYC, so things could happen there a little more "locally" in terms of where the spotlight was seen. Same thing about Chicago, but Chicago did have its own family of labels, of all sizes.

I'll again direct anybody who cares to "The Revealing Time" from Buddy Terry's Natural Soul record - Larry, Woody, & Eddie Gladden plus Terry himself. I for one can't imagine such music being made without a complete openness to things coming in and moving through, no way to be that open at that place in that way and be solidified/calcified in the considerations of one's possibilities.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.

×
×
  • Create New...