Snooky
Young at 82
Got
your horn?
Snooky Young said that to me one night
in Donte's in North Hollywood. He knew I
had one because we had talked once before
about my new Benge cornet and how it
seemed to find the notes for me if I
would just get close to them. He assured
me he knew just what I was talking about.
Tonight had my horn all right, and I
went outside to the car and got it out of
the trunk. The next thing there I was, up
on the rickety bandstand with Mr. Lead
Trumpet from the Count Basie band, the
Thad Jones-Mel Lewis band, the
"Tonight Show" band, the Gerald
Wilson band and a bunch of other name
bands all the way back to the Jimmy
Lunceford band.
It was the greatest thing that
happened to me since I was a cub reporter
and I asked JFK a question once on the
sidewalk in front of his house in
Georgetown. The thing that I noticed
about JFK was that he had on a green
suit.
The
thing that I noticed about
Young was that he looked worried and he
kept watching the other guys, snapping
his fingers and urging them on with his
brow all wrinkled. They -- we -- were
playing "Moten Swing," me and
Ed Shaughnessey, Monte Budwig, Ross
Tompkins and Bob Cooper. Big dogs, all
right.
When I finished playing my cornet solo
Snooky gave me a thumbs up sign and I
felt like I had been elected president.
Twenty years passed.
In the spring of 2001, Snooky Young's
admirers put on a tribute for him at
Ventura Club in the Valley, filling
dozens of big tables in a large ballroom.
He dined on poached salmon at one of them
with his wife, Dorothy. Now he was 82
years old.
He
did a lot of smiling as
the friends he had made over the years
recounted the story of his life as Mr.
Lead Trumpet in speeches and slides, but
in between the speeches, he still looked
worried.
A half dozen of the best trumpet
players in town played a couple of
numbers each for him. Maybe it was
because they were in awe of him -- he
never plays a clinker -- but they all
committed little botches.
Conte Candoli, who sat next to him in
the "Tonight Show" band for
twenty years, blatted a couple of notes
as he and his brother Pete started off
with "Walkin'." Oscar Brashear,
who sat next to him in the Clayton
Hamilton Jazz Orchestra, bobbled a couple
in the lower register as he played a
passionate slow piece he wrote in Young's
honor. Chuck Findley cracked several high
notes, Bobby Shew forgot his mouthpiece
and had to borrow one.
Neal Hefti, the trumpet man who wrote
so many great charts for Woody Herman and
Count Basie, didn't play but he gave a
little speech. He remembered his first
sight of Snooky, playing in the trumpet
section of the Jimmy Lunceford band. That
was in Omaha, Neb., in 1940, which is a
long time ago. The trumpet section sat in
the front row on the bandstand, he
remembered, where the saxes sit now, in
front of the trombone section. Snooky’s
big number was "Uptown Blues,"
and it knocked Hefti out; tonight the
record was played and it still sounded
hip.
Findley remembered the first time he
saw Snooky, standing with the rest of the
Count Basie band on the single file
bandstand behind the bar at the Metropole
Cafe in New York. "There was love in
every note," he said.
Shew, who sat next to Snooky in Louis
Bellson's band, said the experience
teaches you everything you need to know
about trumpet playing. He said Young
gives the lie to people who say you can't
play lead and jazz. He does both. Shew
tells his students, get a copy of
"Atomic Basie" : "Check it
out, it's all there."
Oscar Brashear told the story about
the night they were in the studio, taping
a commercial for a drink called Wink. The
script called for Snooky to hold a bottle
of Wink in one hand and his trumpet in
the other, knock off a high A, and wink.
He did this over and over for six hours,
and he never missed that high A, Brashear
said. Afterwards, all the cats went out
and bought Wink.
The
great trumpet teacher Uan
Rasey had rigged up the sound system so
it could amplify telephone calls, and
with MC John Clayton at the buttons, they
came in from New York and all over: Tommy
Newsome, the saxophonist who knew Snook
from the "Tonight Show" band
called and betrayed Young's nickname,
which is Sack. Clark Terry called and
they reminisced about the blue plunger
Terry gave him when he joined the
"Tonight Show" band in New
York, Frank Wess from the Basie band
called, Maurice Hines, Bob Cranshaw,
Jerome Richardson, remembering the big
time days hanging at the Sands or at the
Fountainbleu with Sweets Edison and the
rest.
"He's one of the most precious
human beings I have ever known,"
said Quincy Jones.
Gerald Wilson took the stand last,
saying "I have probably known him
longer than anybody here," which
meant that they went back to before
Lunceford, to the days they were both in
the trumpet section of an Ohio territory
band led by Clarence "Chic"
Carter.
"Snooky left Basie to join my
band," Wilson said with pride.
As
to what went on before that,
I had gotten the lowdown from Snooky
himself in an interview that ran in the
L.A. Herald.
"A man named Ed Saunders taught
me how to play when I was just a little
kid in Dayton, Ohio, about 6 or 7,"
Young recalled while I taped him at his
tree-shaded home in the Valley. "He
had been with McKinney's Cotton Pickers,
and he taught me and my older brother
Granville. My brother, we used to call
him Catfish, was better than me. I was
always playing catch-up to him.
"I don't know where I got the
name Snooky. I've had it ever since I
could remember. I think one of my aunts
must have given it to me.
"We had a family band for a
while, the Young Snappy Six. My father
played banjo and guitar, and he taught my
mother how to play the banjo and guitar,
and my sister played good piano.
"We went on the road with a show
called the Brown Skin Models, toured all
through the South. It was famous on the
burlesque circuit, you may have heard of
it.
"Gerald Wilson got me on
Lunceford's band. He was from Michigan,
and we worked in Clarence
"Chic" Carter's band and got to
be good buddies. About six months after
he went with Lunceford, they needed a
trumpet player, so Gerald said, `I know a
little trumpet player from down in Dayton
named Snooky.'
"Lunceford
was as big as Duke or
Basie or any of 'em. The tune that gave
me my reputation was the first one I
recorded with Lunceford, called `Uptown
Blues.' I was 19.
"We came to Hollywood and made a
movie ('Blues in the Night,’ a 1941
melodrama featuring Elia Kazan as a band
member and Jack Carson as a trumpet
player). "I thought I was going to
be shown in the movie, but I wasn't: Jack
Carson jumps up and plays the solo, but
it was me playing.
"Lunceford's big hits were Trummy
Young's `Margie'. -- he had a great
trombone solo on that -- and 'Ain't She
Sweet,' 'Cheating on Me,' 'Annie Laurie,'
'T'Ain't What You Do It's the Way How You
Do It,' 'Rhythm Is Our Business,'
'Charmaine' -- oh, that was a great band!
Sorry you missed that."
After that interview I hardly ever
spoke to Snooky Young again as those
twenty years went by. Oh, I would try to
say hello after hearing him with the
Clayton-Hamilton Jazz Orchestra or the
Bill Berry L.A. Band, or the Steve Allen
Big Band, or Gerald Wilson's band.
Young
would be sitting there
in the lead trumpet chair long after the
other musicians had left, talking to the
admirers young and old who had come out
just like me to speak to him. Usually I
had to go home and write something, so I
couldn't wait.
Until tonight at the Sportsmans Lodge.
I waited while a dozen people surrounded
him after the program ended. He welcomed
them all with that slightly anxious look,
as if to say "are you sure you're
OK?"
When it was my turn to talk, he looked
at me like that, too. Then he smiled.
"Still playing your horn?"
he said.
