The discovery of previously unheard/unreleased tapes from the dim and distant past by the often-deceased movers and shakers of the jazz firmament has always sent a buzz of anticipation through the jazz world. From Bill Savory's transcriptions of the Swing Era (now under the custodianship of the Harlem Jazz Museum) through to the Dean Benedetti tapes of Charlie Parker to Larry Appelbaum's discovery of a previously unknown live performance of John Coltrane with Thelonious Monk, our understanding and enjoyment of jazz has correspondingly been enriched. It's been 38 years since the last Larry Young release, and Resonance has come up with an album of Young performances that have never been heard before, except on their initial broadcast on France's ORTF radio station over 50 years ago. It took a while to gain access to these remarkable recordings by the Hammond organ legend, as Zev Feldman explains in the liner notes: “In December of 2010, I started down the road that led to the discovery of the recordings in this album by reaching out to one of the richest of all the European archives, INA, the Institut National de L'Audiovisuel of France, an initiative of the French government, which oversaw media vaults including the world-famous RTF (Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française)/ORTF radio (Office de Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française) archives, which contained a wealth of broadcasting treasures documenting, among other things, the work of some of the greatest American jazz artists who ever traveled to or lived in France.” It was in those archives that Feldman struck gold; 10 cuts “featuring Larry as either a leader or, in the case of several of the tracks, Larry as a sideman with the great tenor saxophonist, flutist and bandleader, Nathan Davis”. It's quite a find – even Feldman confessed he was “floored” by their discovery. For a start, we have an example of Young in a piano trio context; bear in mind he had been an assiduous classical student of Olga Von Till in Newark, New Jersey who had studied under Bela Bartók (one of Von Till's other young students at the time was a young Bill Evans, but that's another story). What emerges is a very accomplished young musician (he was 24-25 when these tracks were made). Some tunes, such as ‘La Valse Gris’, ‘Discotheque’ and ‘Larry's Tune’, fit into the free and easy jam session format of the ORTF programme Musique aux Champs Elysées and are suggestive of his early work on the Prestige label. However, the tracks with Woody Shaw and Nathan Davis are by a set working band as Young and his front line were working in at a club called the La Chat Qui Peche. Numbers with this band, such as ‘Black Nile’ and ‘Zoltan’, are suggestive of his work on the Blue Note label, which had begun around the time of these recordings with Into Somethin’ from November 1964 – interestingly the cover art for this album of Young outside the ORTF's Round House TV Studios at Buttes Chaumont, Paris, were taken by Francis Wolff at the time of the sessions featured here. It's an exciting discovery, more so because Young is an artist that maybe has not been given his due (he certainly believed this during his lifetime) and this is a release that should reawaken interest in a musician who was dubbed ‘the John Coltrane of Hammond organ’.