Search - Larry Young :: Testifying

Excellent, mellow music

Clare Quilty | a little pad in hawaii | 04/09/2005

(5 out of 5 stars)

"I found this cheap in the used bin of a record store more than 10 years ago. I didn't know much about jazz then and didn't know who Young was but I liked the cover and the price was six bucks so I bought it. And it's an album I've literally probably listened to more than a thousand times over the past decade.



Young leads the group on organ; Thornel Schwartz plays guitar; Jimmie Smith drums and Joe Holiday plays tenor sax. The record was made in August, 1960, at Rudy Van Gelder's Englewood Cliffs home studio.



Young was a 19-year-old genius on the Hammond B-3 at the time, a disciple of Jimmy Smith, but within just a couple of albums he'd go off in directions of his own.



Still, there's something intensely amiable and reassuring about this extremely mellow collection of music. The title track was reportedly put together on a long, nighttime ride to New Jersey from a trip to the south and everything about it sounds like music that definitely should have taken shape in a bar car on a northbound train late at night."