Lawrence Of Newark
Released
Organist Young was in a wildly creative zone in the late ’60s and early ’70s; he played on Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew, the first three albums by drummer Tony Williams’ Lifetime, and the Carlos Santana/John McLaughlin spiritual guitar summit Love Devotion Surrender. This unjustly obscure 1973 album crosses contemporaneous work by saxophonist Pharoah Sanders (who guests, albeit pseudonymously) with Davis’s On The Corner; Young, guitarist James “Blood” Ulmer, bassist Juini Booth, Cedric Lawson on electric piano, and a roomful of percussionists create a swirling, psychedelic, at times dubby cloud of space-jazz that’s more atmospheric than tune-based, but utterly mesmerizing.