Azar Lawrence: Spiritual Jazz With the Funk Left In

This week we're putting The Tonearm's needle on tenor saxophonist Azar Lawrence.

Lawrence is a veteran of Elvin Jones and McCoy Tyner's bands and a leader of his own group, The Azar Lawrence Experience, whose new album, Turn the Music Up, arrives September 25th.

We talk about his unique relationship with Pharoah Sanders, dodging McCoy Tyner’s broken piano strings, and how the fifty years between the first and latest recordings of his own songs trace his evolution as a musician.

(The musical excerpts heard in the interview are from Azar Lawrence’s Turn The Music Up)

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Dig Deeper

Artist and Album:

• Visit Azar Lawrence at azarlawrence.com and follow on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube
• Turn the Music Up (Trazar Records, September 25, 2026) — artist shop
• Discography and video — Lawrence's own catalog page, as leader and sideman
• Shadow Dancing — the 1985 Riza album, reissued by Light in the Attic
• Bridge into the New Age — the 1974 Prestige debut, with cover art by his brother Vincent Collier

The Cookers:

• The Cookers — the collective he joined alongside Billy Hart, Cecil McBee, George Cables, and Eddie Henderson
• Azar Lawrence at The Cookers
• David Weiss — trumpeter and the band's organizer, who also sat in with Lawrence's group on the West Coast

Mentors and Collaborators:

• McCoy Tyner — five and a half years in the band, and the subject of the acoustic-piano argument
• Atlantis — the 1974 Tyner album recorded live at Keystone Korner with Lawrence in the group; TALE's version of the title track opens side two of the new record
• Elvin Jones — NEA Jazz Master profile of the drummer who gave Lawrence his first major gig
• Dark Magus — Miles Davis, recorded live at Carnegie Hall on March 30, 1974, the night Lawrence was called to the stage without warning
• Woody Shaw — the trumpeter from the after-hours group with George Cables, Larry Gales, and Candy Finch

Pharoah Sanders:

• Pharoah Sanders — NEA Jazz Master profile
• Karma — the 1969 Impulse! album containing "The Creator Has a Master Plan," which Lawrence covers on Turn the Music Up as a tribute
• "The Creator Has a Master Plan" — background on the Sanders–Leon Thomas composition

Los Angeles Roots:

• Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra — Horace Tapscott's ensemble, Lawrence's entry into the L.A. scene
• Horace Tapscott — pianist, organizer, and the Arkestra's founder
• The Lighthouse Café — the Hermosa Beach club where Lawrence first spent time around Sanders
• Concerts by the Sea — Howard Rumsey's Redondo Beach room, 1971–1985, the other place they would go to hear him

Spiritual Study:

• Alfred and Bernice Ligon — the Aquarian Book Shop and Aquarian Spiritual Center, where Lawrence studied
• Alfred Ligon obituary — on the country's oldest Black-owned bookstore, opened in 1941 and destroyed in 1992

Venues:

• Village Vanguard — where the line ran out the door for Tyner's band, and where McCoy sat in with Elvin on his birthday
• NN North Sea Jazz Festival — where Cecil McBee joined Lawrence's quintet

Teaching:

• UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music, Global Jazz Studies — where Lawrence has taught since 2024

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