Born in 1980 in Warren, MI, just a few minutes outside Detroit, Young grew up in a musical household. His father, Jim Young, led a band called Kaleidoscope and would often rehearse the group in the family room.

“I was seeing and hearing drummers and keyboardists and vocalists, and hearing how all the sounds meshed together. It was always in the back of my mind,” Young said in an interview at his home in Edmond, Okla. “It was in the blood, and plus Detroit was so eclectic at the time, you know, everything from R&B to pop and Top 40 and Motown – just a melting pot of different sounds, and I was absorbing it all.”

That fertile environment, both at home and all around him in Detroit, gave Young a world-class musical education. He picked up drums in elementary school and started hearing the music that would inform his life and work: saxophonists Maceo Parker, Lenny Pickett and Gerald Albright, along with superstar pop, funk and jazz acts like Earth, Wind and Fire, Boney James, The Gap Band, Herbie Hancock, t