12. “Seven Steps to Heaven,” Larry Young, from Of Love and Peace (1966)

Larry Young was often called the John Coltrane of the Hammond B-3 organ; Of Love and Peace gives some sense of how he earned that moniker. Recorded immediately after his most successful outing for Blue Note, Unity (1965), the album reflects Young’s avant-garde commitments, boasting two drummers separated into the left and right channels, and featuring free improvisations for which Young gave his band no instructions prior to recording.
 
“Seven Steps to Heaven,” though, is a standard: Miles Davis had written it for his 1963 transitional album of the same name. Davis actually recorded the whole album on the west coast, but was unhappy with the finished product—so he put together a second band in New York and reworked half the tracks. The new version of the song “Seven Steps” marked the very first time Tony Williams and Herbie Hancock would appear on record with Davis, and prefigured the ascendency of his second great quintet.
 
Davis’s ’63 original cooked with tightly wound rhythms and airtight solos; Young's slightly unglued version surpasses that recording’s intensity—and sounds in places like a fistfight between the organist and trumpeter Eddie Gale, known at the time for his work with free jazz pianist Cecil Taylor. Young’s playing is a brisk workout, studded with dissonances and off-kilter melodic asides; Gale, alto sax player James Spaulding, and tenor Herbert Morgan take turns soloing furiously alongside, around, and occasionally way outside the theme.