Larry Young – Turn Off The Lights
Larry Young – People Do Be Funny
Larry Young – Floating
One of the major things that originally drew me to funk-jazz was the sound of the organ. When I think back to some of my early favorite funk-jazz records, things that moved me to dig and collect, names like Big John Patton, Jimmy McGriff, Brother Jack McDuff and Jimmy Smith come immediately to mind. Over time I’ve come to rever Larry Young above them all perhaps because of the way he turned the conventions of organ playing on their head and started spinning them. Larry Young’s blue note catalog is highly prized but for me his true genius came through in the fusion material he recorded with Miles Davis, Jimi Hendrix (check Nine To The Universe for examples) John McLaughlin, Carlos Santana and Tony Williams Lifetime.
1970s fusion can often rub people the wrong way, I’m sure fans of Young’s Blue Note work weren’t fans of the work he did in the 70s with Tony William’s Lifetime or his own groups, but I do dig it when it’s done adventurously. Larry Young’s Fuel is a trip of a record. In contrast to the equally funky, but more or less straight ahead fusion records Herbie Hancock or Weather Report put out around this time, Young’s work is full of oddball quirky sounds, vocals and rhythms.
As a DJ I was primarily drawn to this record because of the monster dance floor track, “Turn Off The Lights.” This is a track that I love to play on the rare occassion I’m spinning at a place with dancers and I’m doing a set close to last call. It starts off with that thick bass line and those snappy drums and Laura Logan’s sultry, silky and sexily playful voice. But as all this sexy funkiness is building, about a minute into the song, Larry Young’s organ pierces through with some off-kilter and seemingly out of place sounds. I used to think those synth lines ruined the funk a slight bit and wished they weren’t there, but now I love those sounds. The variety of sounds Young creates as the 7 minutes of funk rolls on amp up the playfulness and it’s that playful character, in addition to the fantastic groove, that have made this one of my all-time favorite songs.
It’s only been more recently that I’ve really been able to appreciate both the funkiness and the looniness of tracks like “People Do Be Funny” and “Floating.” My younger purist ears simply skipped right by these and only dug “Turn Off The Lights,” but now I listen to these songs and I wonder what was going on in Larry Young’s head when he put all these wild sounds together. All the funky flourishes are ripe for producers and I hope heads will take up the challenge to relisten to classic fusion records like these to find the funk within.
Cheers,
Michael