Larry Young’s Self-Questioning Jazz

The organ has been a jazz instrument since the nineteen-twenties, when Fats Waller recorded solos at a converted church in Camden, New Jersey, but it didn’t come to the fore until the mid-nineteen-fifties, when Jimmy Smith fused his bebop virtuosity with gospel exhortations. The organists who followed, such as Brother Jack McDuff, Shirley Scott, and Baby Face Willette, also merged contemporary jazz with popular rhythm-and-blues traditions. But one organist in particular, who led his first record date at the age of nineteen, in 1960, pushed the jazz organ headlong into modernity: Larry Young.