A Coryell State of Mind

I hesitate to begin with the late great Larry Coryell. From 1966 until his death in 2016, he was the best guitarist on the planet, not strictly on a technical sense, although the case could be made that his knowledge of jazz, rock, Brazilian, classical, Indian and other styles qualified him for that title. Simply, Larry Coryell was the most generous guitarist, not only a superb recording artist who forged new styles, but who shared his enthusiasm for the instrument more than any other player. He was a teacher and a role model, moving past his own troubles to tutor and help anyone who ever asked.

Larry set out to be a journalist, only playing guitar in high school and college as a side gig. He learned how to read music while at college, which in the early 1960s was still a very important tool, especially if you wanted to be a jazz musician. Gigging with jazz musicians during his time at the University of Washington, he was encouraged to move to New York City, make the leap to professional. He did in September 1965. It took no time before he was deep into the jazz scene.

First with Chico Hamilton, then with Gary Burton, Larry immediately became an in-demand sideman in the jazz world. That is an important distinction; Coryell always remained at heart (and in his business model) a jazz player. His style was a little different, more trebly and biting than Wes Montgomery or Kenny Burrell, more fluid and inventive than Grant Green. He was the new thing in jazz guitar, but it didn't have a name yet.

There was never just one project; side tangents and guest spots in the jazz tradition were a constant throughout Larry's career. Although the Gary Burton gig was prestigious if an odd fit - delicate vibes against loud feedback guitar - it was the squalid East Village ghetto of musicians where Coryell felt most at home. In 1966, well ahead of the curve,  With like-minded next generation jazzbos like Bob Moses, Chris Hills and Jim Pepper, he formed the Free Spirits, combining rock, psych, folk and jazz in a vain attempt to get on the charts.

The project was typical Coryell; ahead of its time, signed to the wrong label, underfunded, temporary. It was also Ground Zero for the fusion of rock and jazz, predating Miles Davis, Larry Young or John McLaughlin by at least three years. More interesting was Count's Rock Band, a loose amalgamation of East Village musicians creating a much better mix of rock and jazz, taking long solos, treating rock songs like jazz standards. Although released on different labels, the two Count's Rock Band albums are cutting edge, even to this day.

Larry continued to appear on a dizzying number of albums as a session musician or guest artist, including with artists like Herbie Mann, Randy Brecker and Jimmy Webb. While normally floating from label to label with releases, he did manage to have a string of released from Vanguard Records. More important, Vanguard had a studio in the Village, Apostolic , so it was easy for Coryell to show up and record. Unfortunately, they were an odd fit, not knowing what to do with an artist trailblazing new paths between jazz and rock.

Typical of the situation was the album 'Spaces', featuring John McLaughlin and Billy Cobham, both before the Mahavishnu Orchestra, as well as Miroslav Vituos and Chick Corea. The defining jazz rock guitar summit to this day, the label just dumped it, having to re-release it with another cover after the Mahavishnu Orchestra became a huge international hit. Larry was there first, but didn't get the credit. No that he cared, off to record the next session, probably for another label.

With a wife and two kids, Larry was living like a rock star but playing jazz. The most famous story about his talent and taste was the session in May 1968, when he was supposed to play on 'Voodoo Chile', the slow bluesy version on 'Electric Ladyland'. A little late, he set up his amp while the rest of the band was playing. When Jimi Hendrix asked him to join, he declined. It sounded fine just the way it was, he wasn't need; he sat on his amp and watched them play instead. Not many people would turn down an offer to be on a Jimi Hendrix album.

He didn't look like a rock star; horn rim glasses and a too-easy smile made him accessible, even if his level of musicianship did not. He developed bad habits, drugs and lots of drinking, but there was a fundamental discipline that kept him going. He always included acoustic guitar numbers, even when stuff started to get really loud around the time of the 11th House in 1973. That band was a late attempt to match his main competition, John McLaughlin. Again, it made him look like a latecomer to the genre he invented.

His session work continued, with Charles Mingus, Stephan Grappelli, Sonny Rollins, and Chet Baker. A monthly column of guitar instruction was started in 1977 for Guitar Player magazine, continuing for twelve years, totally well over a hundred articles, books, videos, and eventually an excellent autobiography, 'Improvising', probably the only such book that came with guitar lessons and a free CD. Even his wife wrote perhaps the first (only?) book about the genre while it was happening, 'Jazz-Rock Fusion', in 1978.

Despite the discipline and hard work, Larry's lifestyle was starting to take its toll. As he describes in his autobiography, there were parts of his life that he had no memory of, such as playing with Jack Bruce and Mitch Mitchell for an entire tour. Even the older musicians were telling him to tone it down. The opportunity to play with John McLaughlin and Al Di Meola was subverted by too many hangovers. By the 'Standing Ovation', Larry is looking a little rough.

Rehabilitation meant moving away from the electric stuff, which he had been doing for years, especially on his duets albums with Philip Catherine. He was spending huge amounts of time touring in Europe in between guitar lessons and a constant string of releases on as many labels as would have him. It was a deep dive into classical music, challenging himself with Ravel's 'Bolero' or Stravinsky's 'Le Sacre Du Printemps', an impossible piece to play on guitar. Yet he managed it while also exploring more straight-ahead jazz in quartets during the 1980s.

By the end of the decade, Larry was hip deep in both Brazilian and Indian music, genres that he had explored earlier but where now he achieved mastery. The barrage of projects, each one unique and different, kept coming, including an ill-advised flirtation at CTI Records with smooth jazz (Rudy Van Gelder engineer, somebody probably likes it). The surprise was near the end of the 1990s, when Coryell took up loud electric guitar again after a twenty year gap, going back to the fusion trenches.

The fire was still, as was the technique; Coryell could replicate his own style from any period, something that even John McLaughlin can't do. Scorch earth policy ruled on CDs like 'Cause & Effect', exploratory fusion on 'Count's Jam Band Reunion', along with continued straight ahead playing on 'New High'. The product came even faster in the new millennium; finally, the public was starting to realize what a treasure he was, an irreplaceable musician.

As Larry grew older, he grabbed every opportunity to play, teach, and record. There were new ventures, such as a couple of hard fusion albums with Lenny White and Victor Bailey that showed spectacular playing and sympathy. There was new explorations of acid jazz/funk with the Wide Hive Players, digging deeper into rhythm and ensemble playing than ever before. There was even a reformation of the 11th House with Aphonse Mouzon and Randy Brecker.

Best of all, Larry kept spreading the word, preaching about music, his love of guitar. Many of his children became musicians, especially son Julian Coryell, an exceptional guitarist in his own right. Julian took it upon himself to remind the world just how influential and important his dad was, organizing a retrospective that included a reunion between Larry and the great Bernard 'Pretty' Purdie. Watching these two groove together after over thirty years apart is pure joy.

Larry Coryell finally went to the big jam in the sky in 2017 during the second of three nights at the Iridium in New York City. It was fitting; Larry was first and foremost a gigging jazz player, always in search of the next thing, always exploring the possibilities of the guitar. He was simply the best of his generation, both in technique and taste, overcoming his personal obstacles while spreading his love of guitar to anyone within earshot. No one could play more styles with such mastery yet always leave room for the other players.

The legacy he left behind is huge, both as a recording artist and as a teacher. No one was more free with advice and tips, revealing all his secrets. A true jazz man with an exploratory heart, there are over one hundred albums and CDs on dozens of labels released around the world, plus hundreds more as a guest on other people's work. I gladly seek each and every one out, each one a gem carbved from pure talent.

Younger Than Yesterday

Larry Young was a jazz organist who worked relentlessly between 1960 and 1978, as a front man but most especially as a sideman. Larry worked for virtually everyone, from Miles Davis to Jimi Hendrix, and he took the Hammond organ into new realms, but he is mostly forgotten today. His story outlines the history of the organ in jazz, somewhat forgotten today. Once the workhorse of the live band, after the fusion wars, the organ was largely forgotten in favor of a drier and more 'traditional' sound by both the musicians and the aging audience.

The organ was useful as a replacement for an orchestra, and with the advent of electricity became smaller and more affordable. Radio used it constantly, and it was still supplying background music for television soap operas at least into the 1970s. Most commonly it could be found in churches, both white and black, and it became a staple of gospel music. From there, it was just a matter of time before it slipped into secular music.

Jazz itself in the post-war period wasn't simply a shift into bop, cool, and post-bop. There was a segregation in the jazz audience between those in bigger cites and smaller cities, and between white and black audiences. It was the Afro-American clubs where rhythm & blues and soul jazz was most popular, a precursor to soul music and later funk. They were the ones who accepted electric instruments like the organ and the amplified guitar, while the white college crowd preferred the straight-ahead sounds of Miles Davis and Dave Brubeck, artists who resisted electricity for decades.

I had the supreme pleasure of interviewing Lou Donaldson for a documentary in 2012 and he was by far the most fun interview I ever did in my three decade career as a video producer. Lou knew everybody and had done everything, within reason, but he was a truly humble guy who went out of his way to make me and my tiny crew feel at home both at the club where he sat in for a few songs (so I could get some footage of him playing, and where he insisted on paying our bill) and at his home for many hours the next day. As is typical of these events, his comments after the camera was turned off were even more interesting than when the tape was rolling.

Specifically, Lou talked extensively about the business of being a jazz musician in the 1950s and 1960s. He claimed that he wasn't the best sax player, just the best who wasn't a junkie, a gross underestimation of his talents. He played in 'ghetto clubs', so he and other players at the time developed the soul jazz genre, where he could sneak a little bebop into a dance tune, but it still had to be dance-able. And he welcomed the Hammond, since it could also replace the bass player, making the money split better for each player. Despite his 'no fusion, no confusion' catch phrase, he was fusing the blues and even early funk into his music, as can be seen in the clip below, with great assistance by Dr. Lonnie Smith.

Hammond organists, starting with Jimmy Smith and continuing with Brother Jack McDuff, Richard 'Groove' Holmes, Jimmy McGriff and many others, dominated the soul jazz genre, along with sax players like Lou Donaldson as well as electric guitarists like Kenny Burrell and Grant Green. These guys wanted to sell a lot of records records and play a lot of clubs, and some, like Lou Donaldson, really wanted to make the audiences happy, even singing the blues like Wynonie Harris. This was a groove-oriented jazz, less interested in being esoteric, more concerned with being popular.

One of the many players who circulated through Lou Donaldson's band was Larry Young, straight from playing in R & B outfits in Northern New Jersey. Larry was born in 1940, his father an organist. The organ had been around since the turn of the century and had been used extensively, such as in church services, funeral homes, and accompanying silent movies. Not the most promising instrument for the post-bop world, yet in the hands of someone with a talent like Larry Young, it became something else entirely. He took the organ straight into the rock world and into the hottest fusion music ever created, yet he gets very little credit today.

Larry's first recording date was in 1960, first accompanying Jimmy Forrest, whose 'Night Train' was one of the foundational songs in soul jazz and later covered by James Brown, himself a pretty good Hammond player, as evidenced on the CD 'Soul Pride; the Instruments 1960-1969', where you can literally hear soul jazz morph into funk. He was soon leading his own small groups on a couple of albums in 1960 and 1962 before hooking up with Blue Note Records starting with 'Into Something' in 1964. The earliest stuff was very much in the soul jazz groove, such as 'African Blues.

One of the great abilities of the organ - with the right player - was to 'comp' like no other instrument. 'Comping' is short for accompanying, where a rhythm player could keep the song moving under another soloist, shifting chord patterns or int he case of a bass player doing a walking bass line. Larry became a very in demand session player during the early 1960s, used on many sessions by Grant Green and Kenny Burrell, among many others because of his superior accompanying skills. It also helped that he was based out of the same area as Rudy Van Gelder.

In the history of audio recording, Rudy Van Gelder must hold the record for most sessions as engineer ever, more remarkable as he held a full-time job as an optometrist for the first twelve or so years. From the late 1940s through 2015, he recorded literally tens of thousands of jazz sessions, first in his parent's living room, then after his custom studio was built in 1959, in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. Rudy is famous for his clean and unobtrusive sound, helped by a stunning array of highly talented musicians who arrived rehearsed and ready to play. In an age when we are used to a band taking three years to release an album, nearly everything done by Van Gelder was recorded in a single day, with amazing results.

It also helped that the volume level of most jazz groups were low, but that doesn't detract from Van Gelder's skill set, which kept increasing over the decades. He was particularly adept at recording the Hammond organ, a notoriously difficult instrument to capture because of the many tones and overtones covering a dizzying spectrum of frequencies. It was easy for visiting musicians to travel over from Manhattan, and Rudy usually had at least one session a day as well as cutting his own lacquers to ensure the sound was transferred right. And Van Gelder worked nearly exclusively with Blue Note, the major soul jazz label.

The Blue Note years were Larry's high point as a leader, with the self-penned standard 'Tyrone' on 'Into Something' (hell, even I covered that song) and the album 'Unity' probably his best know work. Larry was beginning to show a profound influence of John Coltrane in his playing, a common-enough occurrence in the mid-60s, except that he was one of the only organ players in that mode. He also began to be influenced, abet in a subtle way, by the unique stylings of Sun Ra, a man who orbited the jazz world in his own peculiar constellation. Sun Ra had the ability to play what he called 'space chords', and Larry started using them in his comping.

No too many players managed to be influenced by John Coltrane and Sun Ra at the same time, but Larry Young did. At the same time, he started heading into jazz-rock fusion, showing up on Miles Davis' seminal 'Bitch's Brew' double album as well as joining the nastiest of the early fusion bands, the Tony Williams Lifetime. The Lifetime started out as a traditional jazz trio of guitar, organ and drums, but playing at the volume and intensity of Cream or Jimi Hendrix. Jack Bruce, the bass player of Cream, even joined the band in 1970 for a brief period. And somewhere in all this work, Larry found time to record with Jimi Hendrix, a few tracks which were released years after the fact. The following track is a somewhat low-fi but extremely rare live recording of the trio.

Tony William's Lifetime seemed a doom group for the beginning; their first album was recorded carelessly by a jazz engineer (not Rudy Van Gelder) who didn't care for the volume, and it sounds harsh and extra distorted. McLaughlin was using an acoustic guitar with a pickup in the hole, about the worst choice of instrument for music at that roaring intensity. The jazz community rejected it outright, along with a couple of follow ups also featuring Young, but McLaughlin hit financial paydirt with his Mahavishnu Orchestra. Before that, he did record one electric album with Larry on organ as well as Buddy Miles on drums.

Totally committed to fusion, converted to Islam and wearing a sheik's garb on stage, Larry wanted to explore the free jazz / free rock hybrid even more, but the entire music world was retreating to safer pastures. Rock was into more structured progressive and safer boogie, while jazz embraced Lou Donaldson's 'no fusion, no confusion' motto. There was a short lived band called Love Cry Want, utilizing primitive synths on both drums and guitars, that gigged around in 1972, producing what Lester Bangs called 'shronk' that was louder and scarier than anything else I ever heard, but it went nowhere.

When John McLaughlin and Carlos Santana did a joint project, a fusion version of John Coltrane's 'A Love Supreme', they used Larry on the organ, both on the album and tour. It would be his last real high profile gig. He tried creating a hybrid jazz/funk outfit called Larry Young's Fuel, but two albums sold horribly. His last appearance on a record was in 1977, a duet album with keyboard player Joe Chambers; Larry's commercial stature was so low that he wasn't even mentions on the cover. He died shortly after suddenly, and the golden age of the jazz organ was officially dead.

Larry was the only guy to play with Miles, Hendrix, McLaughlin, Santana, Kenny Burrell, Grant Green, and a veritable host of other jazz greats. There was a couple of unreleased sessions, including a very good one from 1964 in Paris. While really excellent, with some of the only actual research ever done on his life, it goes back to the safer 'straight-ahead' period, where jazz purists feel comfortable. His later free funk/rock/jazz period is mostly forgotten, but Larry consistently managed to sound like no one else on the planet.

There was an inkling of interest around 2012, when the short-lived group 'Spectrum Road' was formed to celebrate the Tony Williams Lifetime. John Medeski, the only organist who could possibly try and sound like Larry, filled the keyboard, but the inclusion of Jack Bruce, right near the end of his life, skewed the project more towards him and less towards the rest of the group. At least it was something, if too little too late. Admittedly, Larry Young's later material is not for the faint of heart, it is intense and adventurist. You can't help but feel that he was punished for his ever-searching nature instead of treated like the natural treasure that he really was. That's a pity.