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.

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": We are living the era of the glorification of mediocrity.

When a scarcely-literate hillbilly with dubious talent may become a star with a million dollar income, or when an "All American Boy" type can spin records to which teenagers dance and become a major television personality.

The great novel by Irwin Shaw, The Young Lions, delivers several messages; among them, the parallel of conformity emanating from separate sources.

The other young man is an unenthusiastic patriot in military service, who adheres to the "Great American Ideal," which is itself conformity.