jazz trumpeter jones

Jazz Trumpeter Snooky Young Dies

Eugene “Snooky” Young, a trumpeter who was a mainstay in many prominent jazz big bands and orchestras, died on May 11. He was 92 years old. Young was the quintessential lead trumpeter, expert in hitting high notes as well as using the plunger to great effect.

Young was born on Feb. 3, 1919, in Dayton, Ohio. In a 2006 profile in JT , Young told writer Don Heckman that he grew up surrounded by music in his large family and was playing an instrument by the time he was 5. The family even had a band called the Snappy Six.

“I’m the third oldest of seven kids,” he recalled to Heckman. “They all played instruments. My oldest brother, Granville—we called him Catfish—played trumpet, and he was much better than I was. He went out with a band once, came back home and never went out again. Got turned off by the whole thing. My youngest brother played drums, and I had a sister that sang. My father played saxophone, guitar and banjo, and he taught my mother to play guitar and banjo. Bands like Don Redman tried to get him to go out on the road with them, but he wouldn’t leave his family.”

The trumpet was not Young's original instrument of choice. “At first I said I wanted to play trombone,” he told Heckman in 2006, “and then my younger brother up and said he wanted to play trombone. And I said, ‘Well I don’t want to play trombone if he wants to play trombone.' A junk man we knew gave me my first horn—a beat-up old cornet. And once I got it, I never went back to wanting to play trombone.”

Young was only a teenager when he started working with Ohio bandleader Chic Carter. Also in that band was Gerald Wilson, with whom he would share a life-long friendship. Young followed Wilson into Jimmie Lunceford’s group and later decamped for the first of several stints with the Count Basie Orchestra.

Young told Heckman that the transition between Lunceford and Basie took some adjustment on his part. “It was like night and day, those two bands,” he said. “In fact, I had to learn how to play again when I went to the Basie band. Lunceford’s was a two-beat band. Basie’s was the band that started to swing. The bass would be going, and Jo Jones would just kick his bass drum every now and then, and the guitar and bass would keep on walking. Well, I had to get used to that, since I was coming from a band where the rhythm played every beat.

HARD BOP COMFORT ZONE - I DIG JAZZ

Ean Jones’s followers pretty much know what to expect from a Sean Jones album, a straight-up swing affair mixed with some warm and fuzzy ballads. Jones has become an established force and the top jazz trumpeter of his generation. That’s huge, considering Jones’s peers are trumpeters Marcus Printup, Jeremy Pelt, Terrell Stafford, Dwight Adams, Russell Gunn and Nicholas Payton. Like his hero trumpeter Clifford Brown, Jones likes to dwell in the upper register of the horn. And Jones blows forcefully enough to topple a garbage truck. My only pet peeve with Jones is some of his albums sound the same. So far, Jones’s third album, Roots  showed his complete game. Jones is an if-it-ain’t-broke-don’t-fix-it bandleader, so he uses the same rhythm section from some of his previous albums. Tomorrow, Mack Avenue Records offers to the public Jones’s new album No Need for Words . Jones is faithful to his hard swinging formula with some ballads strategically placed, giving the listeners a breather from the high premium swing that is No Need for Words main thrust. The Ballads Momma,   Touch and Go and Forgiveness (Release) —are Jones’s most endearing yet.

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