| The Young Lions | |
| Type: | studio |
| Artist: | The Young Lions |
| Cover: | TheYoungLions.jpg |
| Released: | Last two weeks of August 1961[1] |
| Recorded: | April 25, 1960 |
| Studio: | Bell Sound (New York City) |
| Genre: | Jazz |
| Length: | 35:14 original LP |
| Label: | Vee-Jay VJLP 3013 |
| Producer: | Sid McCoy |
The Young Lions is an album by an ad hoc group of jazz musicians: Wayne Shorter, Frank Strozier, Lee Morgan, Bobby Timmons, Bob Cranshaw, Albert Heath and Louis Hayes. It was recorded at Bell Sound Studios in New York City in 1960 and released in 1961 on Vee-Jay Records.[2]
The album title echoes that of a popular 1948 novel by Irwin Shaw which had been made into a feature film shortly before the album was recorded. In the album's liner notes, saxophonist Cannonball Adderley uses Shaw's novel to make an argument about jazz. Adderley writes that there is a tension in modern jazz between tradition (as represented by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Thelonious Monk) and the avant-garde (which at the time included Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor and Jimmy Giuffre), and suggests that conformity to either traditionalism or the avant-garde is stifling of "true genius":
The "young lions" phrase was revived in jazz in the 1980s when, as in 1960, there was a tension between the modern jazz traditionalists and the avant-garde. A group of young musicians including Wynton Marsalis who played neo-bop jazz were frequently referred to in the jazz press as "young lions". Notably, the phrase was used as part of the title of an Elektra/Musician album which featured Marsalis, The Young Lions (A Concert Of New Music Played By Seventeen Exceptional Young Musicians).
Bonus tracks on CD reissue: