I lived in Honolulu in the early 1970s. So did the great trombonist Trummy Young, a name I knew well from his work with many legendary jazz giants. He proved to be friendly and willing to be repeatedly interviewed by an enthused fan. He even told one Maître d at the posh restaurant where he regularly gigged, to give us a good table as I was his nephew.
His interest in music began when he was very young in Savannah, Georgia, sparked by the Jenkins Orphan School marching jazz band from Charleston, South Carolina. It was only when he reached school age that he was able to satisfy his desire to be in a band and learn music. His first trombone cost $18, and came from a pawnshop in Washington, D.C. “Which was to me a fortune. I saved to get it, working in a record store and walking a lady’s dog, things like that.”
He played in a number of bands around Washington, sometimes for pennies, sometimes for nothing, but he didn’t care because he just loved playing. After a few years, he got into the Tommy Miles band with a number of future standouts such as Billy Eckstine, Tyree Glenn, and Jimmy Mundy.
At one gig, they opened for The Earl Hines band. “Hines liked the arrangements so much he eventually hired Jimmy Mundy and later Jimmy recommended myself, Billy Eckstine and Warren Jefferson. Chick Webb also wanted me, but I knew if I went with Earl, I would get lots to play because I was one of Mundy’s favorite jazz players.” So, he went off to Chicago’s legendary Grand Terrace Ballroom.
The Earl Hines band was the backbone of an impressive show. “We had about 40 people: 16 girls, comedians, and tap dancers. We would go in at nine o’clock and leave at five because we’d put on two complete two hour shows a night. A lot good songs came out of there because they had a good writer – Andy Razaf. He wrote a lot of tunes with Fats Waller later on.”
“We didn’t make much. My top salary was $40 a week and we worked six nights a week. We had big shows so we had to do a lot of rehearsing. The show would run three to four months, then back into rehearsal for the next one.”
Often people like Martha Ray, Perry Como, Elmo Tanner, Joe Louis, and various movie stars were in the audiences. And the people who ran the club were the equally famous Capone brothers: Al and Ralph. A good number of their associates also attended. “Machine Gun Kelly, Frank Nitty, and all this bunch were in there practically every night. Sometimes we would see them take a guy out back to work him over if he didn’t want to pay his bill, or something like that. Dillinger used to hang out in the club all the time they were looking for him.”
The mobsters didn’t pal around with the musicians. “They might say ‘Hi’, but we weren’t on a conversational basis with them, unless one would take a liking to you. McGurn used to talk to me because he liked the way I played. He would tell me to tell Earl to play this number, and Earl played it too.”
Once, a minor mobster got too drunk, grabbed Trummy’s trombone and “it was squashed when he got through. Ralph Capone slapped him around and made him cough up about $400. That helped me get the best horn I ever had.”
Young enjoyed being in the band “The guys dug music, liked to work at it, and they were loose. Earl was not a disciplinarian. The show was supposed to go on at nine. It might go on at nine thirty or nine forty-five, but nobody cared. They figured the longer people stayed, the more they drank.”
The radio hookup did run on time. “Earl got very popular when they had the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby. People would be waiting for reports, and we would come on the air, so he had the biggest audiences he ever had.”
Because of that, Young was soon hearing from musicians everywhere. “We would get calls from guys in other big bands usually to say they liked your solo on this or that. Cab’s band use to call us all the time and this was one of the reasons he wanted to have me in his band.” The brash trombonist publicly said, “I could have gone to Cab Calloway and made twice as much, but I couldn’t stand all that hollering.” Reconsidering later he said, “I shouldn’t have said that, but I was young. I wasn’t thinking commercially, I was just thinking about playing the way I liked to play.”
Another offer was from the Jimmy Lunceford band’s Willie Smith. “He asked if I’d be interested in playing with Lunceford. He liked my playing, and Lunceford didn’t have a jazz trombone player.” Young was conflicted, “I didn’t want to leave the Hines band, but it was a step up as Lunceford was very popular then. It sure wasn’t money, because I didn’t make any with Lunceford. I’m pretty sure I made about nine or ten dollars a night.”
Also, Lunceford’s reputation differed from the norm of the times. When his band finished playing, the conservative leader went straight home. “I never saw him take a drink and I never heard him say a bad word.” Young decided to remain with Hines until “Ray Nance talked me into going. Ray was playing trumpet with Earl then. In fact, Ray went to the station with me. We sat there and it was cold. We had some bad liquor from the Grand Terrace that we drank until I got on the train.”
“When Lunceford engaged me, he warned me I was coming into a nice band. They were all educated well-behaved fellows. Some even went to church and Sunday school regularly. I told him I wasn’t well educated, sometimes a little wild, and I didn’t go to church. It shocked him a little, but he wanted me with the band, and I told him I wasn’t going to abuse the job. I respected him as a leader, and he hired me to play in that Sunday school band.”
Young kept his word, and remained with Lunceford for many of the leader’s glory years. It was beneficial to both men. The “sometimes … wild” trombonist contributed to many of the band’s top hits as composer, vocalist or soloist. “I learned quite a bit about discipline in the Lunceford band because he was very precise. It was the best precision band ever. We even practiced bowing together. We spent all our money on about 10 different classy uniforms. It was beautiful to watch, which Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey, and every band did.”
It was also an innovative and influential band. In addition to using derbies on the trombones, “the Miller band picked up the bends by the sections, how the trombones would blend with the reeds, several things. He hung around the band; it probably was his favorite band.”
Perhaps, like Lester Young, this awareness of others profiting from their breakthroughs resulted in an unexpected event at a benefit held in New York in 1940. A great number of bands were each scheduled to do a fifteen-minute set; but the Lunceford band broke it open. The audience simply would not let them off the stage.
Young recalled, “The band felt that they hadn’t received the recognition that they should have, and they had fire in their eyes. We just felt that we were better, and we should prove it. When we went up, that bandstand caught fire and nobody else could get on. We knew we were good, the public recognized us and some musicians did, but many didn’t know how good we were so we wanted to prove it – and we did.
“We were used to playing hard against hard competition, so it was just another night for us. It made the other bands and leaders have much more respect for us. Even Basie said ‘Wow!’ Basie used to pattern his band after Lunceford’s. He got Marshall Royal on alto, and Marshall tried to sound like Willie Smith. He finally hired Snookie Young.”
Recognition, however, did not change the band’s grueling travel schedule. While Ellington had a well-equipped private train car for his band’s comfort and to avoid many Jim Crow indignities, Lunceford’s band endured the road. In one year, they logged at least 40,000 miles on usually bad roads in “the worst buses you ever saw. Once and a while we would do three or even seven nights somewhere, but almost the whole thing was one nighters.” They learned, “to sleep sitting in your seat.”
One of those rare extended stays involved appearing in the movie Blues in the Night. “We were playing at the Cotton Club in Culver City, California. Composer and musical director Ray Heinsdorf from Warner Brothers loved the band and used to come out and hang out with us. He and Art Tatum would be out every night. So, he wanted us in the movie.” Heinsdorf also wanted Young to appear in another film where he would do some acting, but mainly pretend to play the piano. “I didn’t feel that I would have been good in that part. He got Dooley Wilson to do it, but I was offered Casablanca first.”
The reason for the decline of the Lunceford band was plain. “Lunceford didn’t pay well. When they were younger the guys didn’t care. They just were carefree, but later on they had responsibilities. They saw other guys making money and they knew the band was making money. Lunceford wanted to treat the guys like school kids and that scene had gone.”
Key players such as Sy Oliver, Willie Smith, and Jimmy Crawford and eventually Young all left. Around this time, the trombonist also acquired a new lady—Lady Day and composed one of her classic songs. He explained, “The landlady locked us out because we didn’t have the rent money. We had to sneak in through a window to get some clothing and then take off. Billie said, ‘Well it looks like we are trav’lin’ light,’ and I turned that into ‘Trav’lin Light.’” Although song was a hit, they each made only $75 from it.
Regular employment next came from Charlie Barnett. “I had fun in Barnett’s band and there were some good players there: Buddy De Franco, Ralph Burns, Chubby Jackson, Clark Terry, and others. It was a real good band. Barnett was something. He’d stop the band bus some days, buy fishing tackle and go fishing. We’d be late to the job but he didn’t care. As soon as the band got really popular, he’d break it up. It was taking up too much of his time, and he didn’t want that. He just wanted to have fun with the band.”
When the self-styled “Wild Man of the Fish Pond” again disbanded his group, “I headed off to 52nd Street. In those days, there was nothing like 52nd Street. And I was also playing for Mildred Bailey. We had a heck of a band and a lot of fun. It was Jack Jenney, myself, Red Norvo, Stuff Smith, Mary Lou Williams, and Charlie Shavers. We were also on Raymond Scott’s band on CBS. He was an electronics man and was way ahead in that field. We thought he was crazy, but now I have more respect for him.”
Again, the master trombonist soon was snug into another musical legend. “I got to Minton’s real early, because I was with Lester Young and Charlie Christian. Teddy Hill had a real fine band with Roy Eldridge, Dicky Wells, Chu Berry, and he broke it up, went to Minton’s and started putting on shows. All he had was a piano player in the early days, then a rhythm section, finally, he got Kenny Clark. That was a smart move because all the musicians dug Kenny.
“At first, they had a lot of swing things. Ben Webster, Charlie Christian, and Benny Goodman started hanging there and playing. What happened was a lot of musicians used to come in who weren’t good. So, they started changing the cords on the tunes and calling them something else. It didn’t start as a “new movement”; they just wanted to get rid of those bad players. Then the guys caught on that you could invert the chords and use them in different ways, and it got to be fun for them. They got so tired of playing the same old changes.
“Bird and Monk started hanging around. I remember the first time Ben Webster heard Charlie Parker. Ben was drunk and didn’t believe what he heard. He went upstairs, took a shower, came back and said, “Yeah, he is doing that.” Bird was a different breed altogether. A master at what he played; he left a lot to be desired personally. He was intelligent, but what made Bird like he was, was his addiction. He used people because he needed the money for what he was doing. He was the greatest con artist who ever lived. He burned up the management everywhere he played. He never made a lot of money.”
As to Dizzy Gillespie and Parker, Young remembered that, “Dizzy was highly intelligent, and always took care of business. He was never strung out on that heavy stuff. He might have smoked a little, but no, Dizzy was smarter than that.”
“They were friends, but they weren’t close. Time meant nothing to Bird. He couldn’t write, so every time he figured out a tune, he’d come for Dizzy to write it down. He used to come at 4:30, 5:00, or 6:00 in the morning, and Lorraine (Dizzy’s wife) wouldn’t let him in. He had to play it in the hallway while Dizzy would write it down inside.
“Dizzy wouldn’t trust Bird with money or something like that. They were close on the bandstand, but they didn’t run around together. Bird had an altogether different crowd of friends than Dizzy. In fact, Bird’s friends used to put down Dizzy and his friends. They were always trying to have a conflict between Bird and Dizzy, but Bird liked Dizzy, and Dizzy liked Bird.”
A new and lasting marriage, and a growing interest in religion, soon motivated Young to leave the New York scene for a quieter life. He did spend over a decade with Louis Armstrong, but eventually settled in Honolulu with only occasional trips away. When Kid Ory also settled there, Young wanted to help him write his autobiography, but without success. He did arrange and played at the first of the three New Orleans-themed funerals held for that famed trombonist.
He devoted much of his time to church work and family, so I saw him very infrequently, but when I did, he always seemed contented and happy.
