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The profile · researched 7 October 2026
The analogue holdout: Adrian Younge's 1973 cut-off and a very busy 2026
A Los Angeles composer who taught himself five instruments rather than keep sampling the records he loved, and who now runs a tape-only studio, a reissue-minded jazz label and a release schedule of three albums in six months. He is currently crossing North America as the live support on Cortex's autumn tour.
Fontana, a law degree, and an MPC
Adrian Younge was born in Los Angeles on 7 May 1978 and grew up in Fontana, east of the city. The music started in the late 1990s, playing bass and keyboards in a band before he moved towards composition, but it ran alongside a second career that most producers do not have: he took a Juris Doctor, worked in MTV's legal department, practised as a lawyer and taught entertainment law at his own alma mater.
The turn came from the sampling itself. He began with an MPC 2000 in 1996, and in chasing breaks worked out that what actually moved him was the source material — late-'60s and early-'70s soul and jazz records — rather than the act of cutting them up. So he learned to make the source instead. He taught himself drums, bass, keys, saxophone and flute, and set about capturing the same warmth on period equipment. By his own count he now has more than forty albums to his name.
That self-description holds up on paper: venues on the current tour bill him as a self-taught multi-instrumentalist and an Emmy-winning composer, the Emmy coming for his score to the Apple TV series Home.
Linear Labs: no digital, no exceptions
Younge's studio, Linear Labs, sits in north-east Los Angeles and is stocked exclusively with equipment made between 1968 and 1973. Everything goes to tape with no digital sweetening. He has been blunt about how non-negotiable this is, telling KZSC in 2026 that if he were not able to record analogue he would simply stop making music, and arguing that tape mandates a kind of performance nothing else will.
The reasoning he gives is not nostalgia. His case is that an artist should use the best tools available for the specific art they are making, and for his art those tools happen to be fifty-odd years old. He is careful to add that other people's routes are their own.
The label of the same name releases his solo work. He also runs Artform Studio, a record shop in Los Angeles, which keeps him close to the crates the whole method came out of.
Scores, Wu-Tang, and the Jazz Is Dead project
The catalogue splits roughly three ways. There is screen work: the score for Black Dynamite in 2009, then Marvel's Luke Cage for Netflix across 2016 to 2018, written with Ali Shaheed Muhammad of A Tribe Called Quest. There is production for other people, including full-length albums for Ghostface Killah and tracks touching Jay-Z, Wu-Tang Clan and Kendrick Lamar, plus an album made with the Delfonics. And there is his own Venice Dawn-era writing, beginning with Something About April in 2011 and continuing through two sequels.
The American Negro, in 2021, sat apart from all of that — an album with an accompanying podcast on systemic racism in American history, bringing in voices including Chuck D and Michael Jai White.
The institutional project is Jazz Is Dead, founded in 2017 with Muhammad and the promoters Andrew Lojero and Adam Block. It pairs Younge and Muhammad with musicians whose records they grew up studying: Roy Ayers, Lonnie Liston Smith, João Donato, Tony Allen, Ebo Taylor. Twenty-seven volumes appeared in the label's first six years, and it is at around thirty official releases as its tenth anniversary approaches. The operating principle Younge describes is collaborative rather than archival — everyone writes and plays together — and he frames the whole thing as a preservation of analogue humanity.
Three records in six months
2026 has been the densest year of his discography. On 17 April came Younge, a self-titled record of nine orchestral instrumentals that runs 26 minutes and 34 seconds: short pieces written, as the label puts it, by a hip-hop producer applying the discipline of classical and cinematic composition, with Lalo Schifrin and David Axelrod audible as reference points. Portschute opens it and Il Mattino closes it; AllMusic, reviewing a record billed as his magnum opus, called it a brief and narrow-scoped set but singled out Clockwise for the melody that surfaces around the 90-second mark.
Three months later, on 17 July, he went the other way entirely with Afro-Disco Makossa, a six-track EP and the first Linear Labs release built for a dance floor. It is the fruit of a question he set himself: what would a Ghanaian producer in 1976 have made if he had decided to build an American disco record for his home town? Highlife vocal lines sit over Afrobeat rhythm, a direction he traces back to working with Tony Allen and Ebo Taylor. Track titles run from Feel the High Life to Fire in the Disco; a CD pressing followed on 11 September.
The third is a duet record nearly a decade in the making. Proud of Me, with the London singer ALA.NI, arrived on 6 October 2026 on Linear Labs. The two met at a Los Angeles session in 2018, where Younge wrote instrumentals by day and ALA.NI wrote lyrics to them each evening and sang them the next morning — five songs in the first week. The first half of the album dates from that session, the second was finished in 2020 before the pandemic, and Younge added string arrangements at Linear Labs afterwards. The title track was written after she learned her father had been diagnosed with cancer. She has described the earlier material as a dialogue with what she was living through at the time.
Where he is right now
Since 9 September 2026 Younge has been on the road as the live special guest on Cortex's North American tour, billed as Le Jazz Est Mort and presented through his own ArtDontSleep and Jazz Is Dead operations. The run opened at the Hollywood Palladium and has worked through Seattle, the UC Theatre in Berkeley, Vancouver, First Avenue in Minneapolis on 24 September, the Vic Theatre in Chicago on 26 September, Toronto, The Egg in Albany on 2 October and the Agora in Cleveland on 4 October, reaching the Howard Theatre in Washington on 6 October. Four dates with his name on them remain on sale, including the Knockdown Center in Queens on 12 October; the El Cajon date on 22 October is listed as postponed.
The pairing makes sense of his whole method. Cortex are the French jazz-funk group led by the pianist Alain Mion, with Mohamed Ouaraz on bass, Victor Dubois on drums and Virginie Hombel and Sandy Malonga on vocals and keys — a band with more than 220 documented samples to their name and over 120 million streams, which is to say one of the catalogues Younge's generation of producers was raised on. He is opening for his own source material.
Three more albums are queued behind the current run: a collaboration with the Brazilian vocalist Joyce, a record he has described as Astral Lover drawing on Lonnie Liston Smith, Roy Ayers and Parliament-Funkadelic, and new material from The Midnight Hour, his project with Ali Shaheed Muhammad.
The show, now
Younge is not headlining this autumn: he is the live special guest on Cortex's Le Jazz Est Mort North American tour, which opened at the Hollywood Palladium on 9 September 2026 and runs to 22 October, with J Rocc — a founder of the Beat Junkies in 1992 — DJing and Cortex closing. His own set draws on the 2026 EP Afro-Disco Makossa and on Something About April from 2011, and he has been candid about the job it has to do: speaking before the Albany date at The Egg on 2 October, he said he could not come on weak ahead of Cortex, that his role was to set the stage up for them. The rooms are mid-sized and the format is conventional support-then-headliner rather than a one-off staging: First Avenue's Mainroom in Minneapolis on 24 September had doors at 7pm and an 8pm start, 18-plus; the Knockdown Center in Queens on 12 October runs 6pm to 11pm, 18-plus, ticketed through Dice; The Egg sold at $48 to $77. Cortex, led by the pianist Alain Mion, play career-spanning selections, which puts Younge on stage immediately before one of the sample sources his own records are built out of. No press reviews of the autumn dates had been published at the time of writing.
Researched from en.wikipedia.org · kzsc.org · hyfin.org · linearlabs.bandcamp.com · linearlabs.bandcamp.com · thelineofbestfit.com · yahoo.com · jambase.com
Pictures
Photographs from Wikimedia Commons, credited
Marie-Lan Nguyen · Public domain
