LP - This new edition of the album is released as part of the Original Jazz Classics Series on 180-gram vinyl pressed at RTI with all-analog mastering from the original tapes at Cohearent Audio and a Stoughton Tip-On Jacket

The Young Lions was recorded at Bell Sound Studios in NYC in 1960 and released in 1961 on Vee-Jay Records. It includes four songs composed by Wayne Shorter, and one by Lee Morgan. The album title references Irwin Shaw’s popular 1948 novel of the same name.

In the album's liner notes, saxophonist Cannonball Adderley uses Shaw's novel to make an argument about jazz, claiming that there is a tension in modern jazz between tradition and the avant-garde. He suggests that conformity to either traditionalism or the avant-garde is stifling of "true genius."