When Dangerous Minds launched three years ago, an album that I was listening to constantly at the time, and wildly enthusiastic about, so it was one of the first things I posted about here, was jazz organist Larry Young’s astonishing and little-known avant jazz masterpiece Lawrence of Newark.

I first heard the unorthodox sounds of Larry Young’s organ on a bootleg of him jamming in the studio with Jimi Hendrix (Later released as part of the 2010 West Coast Seattle Boy box set). If you can hold your own with Jimi, you’ve got to have chops and Young—sometimes called the “Coltrane of the organ”—had chops to spare.

What sent me out (er…. to Google) to find this, though, was a reference in a Nick Cave interview where he was saying how he and the musicians in the “mini-Seeds” Grinderman project had been grooving on Young’s monster of a song “Khadid of Space, Pt. 2 Welcome” in the studio.

With a recommendation like that—and knowing that Pharoah Sanders and guitarist James “Blood” Ulmer were all over this album, too—I just had to hear it.

It did not disappoint. Recorded in 1973, but not released until 1975 on the underground Perception Records label, Lawrence of Newark is a massive HUNK of music. Funky, psychedelic, both droning and jazzy simultaneously due to Young’s “modal” organ playing, it’s nothing short of exhilarating. There’s practically no other album like it. Look at the album cover. I’m a sucker for anything that even faintly reeks of Sun Ra-style Afro-Futurism and if you, too, are so inclined, you won’t be disappointed by Lawrence of Newark.

I was listening to the Grinderman albums and the (incredible) new 5.1 surround mix that Mute just released of Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! over the weekend (more on this later) and that got me hankering hear Lawrence of Newark again and I have probably played it four times since.

It’s an obelisk of “pure sound,” an inscrutable thing that cannot be adequately described, only experienced. It’s the musical enlivenment of a Richard Serra sculpture, perhaps…

Forget describing it, that’s impossible. Just CRANK IT UP and hit play. Prepare to be made absolutely helpless by the sound of Larry Young’s “Khadid of Space, Pt. 2 Welcome”
 

 
(Since Larry Young has been dead for well over 30 years and the CD out of print for several years, too. I feel no qualms in pointing you towards a download link at the Sophisticated Squaw blog.)