Unity

Recorded
Released

What do you get when four of the most advanced musicians in mid ’60s jazz turn their hands to a seemingly limited form? You get Unity, an album on which Larry Young, trumpeter Woody Shaw, tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson, and drummer Elvin Jones explode organ jazz into shards, then rebuild it as a highly charged, forward-looking form of progressive post-bop. Jones’ refusal to lay down the simple, soulful grooves of players like Ben Dixon and Donald Bailey, instead chopping up time and bringing the thunder as he’d done with John Coltrane, allows Shaw and especially Henderson to take their solos up and out. Three of the compositions are by Shaw, who was just 20 at the time, and Henderson contributes one. The horns stay out of it when Young and Jones dig into Thelonious Monk’s “Monk’s Dream,” though, letting the organist display a Jimmy Smith-esque virtuosity before Jones takes a machine-gun solo of his own.

Phil Freeman

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