One night last May, as thunderstorms brought East Coast air traffic to a near standstill, a few dozen bedraggled airline passengers slumped into their chairs at Dulles International Airport.
With prospects of catching a flight home getting slimmer by the minute, practically everyone was scowling, myself included. After nearly 12 hours of trying to get home from Paris, my wife and I despaired of ever reaching Chicago.
But something remarkable happened just before the stroke of 12, when an unusually poised young man, himself marooned in airplane limbo, loosened his tie, picked up his trumpet and began playing a softly whispering version of ” ‘Round Midnight,” its phrases echoing gently through an otherwise dismal place. One by one, passengers began to look up and smile, unable to resist the seductive power of this music, even under these circumstances.
For me, the biggest surprise was yet to come, for this was not some anonymous trumpeter, as I soon discovered; it was a brilliant young musician I had first heard when he was a student at Evanston Township High School.
In the ensuing years, he had developed with remarkable speed, causing many Chicago musicians and educators to wonder just how far he could take his considerable talents. If Wynton Marsalis was the phenom of the 1980s and Nicholas Payton the wunderkind of the ’90s, many listeners — including this one — had come to believe that Chicagoan David Young could be the next ascending star in a trumpet lineage stretching back to the great Satchmo himself.
At the very least, 21-year-old David Young already has become one of the more talked-about jazz musicians in a city crowded with them. Though still a student at Northwestern University’s School of Music in Evanston, he has been practically inescapable on Chicago’s music scene.
Anyone who has attended recent performances by the Chicago Jazz Ensemble, Ensemble Stop-Time or the New Black Music Repertory Ensemble (each covering very different repertoire) will not soon forget the protean sound of Young’s horn.
He can produce a fat and creamy tone one moment, a piercing cry the next. When so inclined, he can seduce an audience with arching melody lines that suggest the work of a seasoned ballad singer, yet he also can nail stratospheric pitches that make lesser trumpeters sweat.
As leader of his own band, Young sounds fully in control yet never monopolizes the spotlight. That much is apparent from his newly released debut recording, a bold and stylistically free-ranging CD titled “Appassionata” (on Big Chicago Records).
But neither Young’s fledgling recording career nor his rapidly lengthening resume explain why audiences typically cheer before he has finished the first 32 bars of any solo. Only in live performance is it possible to fully perceive the young man’s emotional maturity, charismatic manner and technical acuity. In contemporary classical repertoire, his playing often sounds more lyrical and emotionally charged than one might expect to hear; in jazz, he produces a surprisingly vast range of unusual colors, shades and half-shades.
“The first time I heard David, I thought, `Wow — this doesn’t sound like a kid, it sounds like some mature old master,” says Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson, artistic director and principal conductor of the Center for Black Music Research at Columbia College Chicago. “He was playing [Duke Ellington’s] `Concerto for Cootie,’ and you could tell he had a solid knowledge of what the music and jazz history were all about.
“And when he came into the New BMRE, he picked up contemporary repertoire with no problem. Technically, although there’s always room for improvement, I don’t think he really leaves anything to be desired. He’s a young man who has mastery of the instrument.”
Indeed, Young gleefully defies many of the presumed limitations of the trumpet, freely bending pitches and uttering slides and growls and squeals that do not usually issue from many other players’ horns. More important, Young focuses on music first, technique second. Though his music may be a tad romantic for some listeners’ tastes, there’s no question that he plays to communicate with an audience rather than to conquer it.
“A lot of people might think I don’t have lightning chops, like Freddie Hubbard’s, or don’t know how to play long and complicated solos, especially on the recording,” says Young, who will finish his studies at Northwestern this fall.
“But I’m not interested in that kind of playing. I mean, I love brilliant players like Freddie Hubbard, and I’ve incorporated aspects of his playing into mine. But I don’t want to be the next Freddie Hubbard or the next Wynton Marsalis. I want to be David Young and play what I hear.”
That always has been Young’s mantra, according to those who have known him since his childhood. Though he didn’t pick up a trumpet until he was 11, he has made astonishingly fast progress.
From the beginning, he didn’t sound like the other kids playing in the band at Chute Middle School in Evanston.
“A couple weeks after David started playing, I got a call from the elementary school band director saying that I better come see him,” remembers Al Young, the trumpeter’s father. “I thought something was wrong.
“But when I got to school, the director said to me, `Mr. Young, after two weeks playing trumpet, David sounds like he’s been playing a year.'”
That band director, the late Wesley Barrett, proceeded to nurture Young’s gifts. By age 13, Young was instructing his own rehearsal band on the rigors of properly playing Ellington in the basement of his family’s Evanston home, where he lived with his parents and an older sister and brother.
“I first heard about David when he was still in grade school, so I went to check him out,” recalls David Fodor, instrumental music teacher and director of jazz bands at Evanston Township High School.
“Compared to other kids his age, he was pretty advanced, in terms of his ability to improvise, especially in blues material. But the thing that really made him stand out was his confidence level, and his personality.
“He always showed this ability to really grab an audience and keep them listening and keep them involved in the performance.
“By the time he came to high school, you could tell he had real big ears,” adds Fodor, using jazz parlance for a musician who can pick up and anticipate chord changes and details of instrumental voicing. “He would hear a lick that someone played and instantly start incorporating it into his own solos.”
Indeed, anyone fortunate enough to have heard Young as a high school student, including this jazz critic, could not mistake the young man’s potential. This was not your typical high school jazz jock.
“I remember going into the band room at Evanston High School, prior to the rehearsal, and seeing David in action,” remembers Antonio Garcia, associate professor of music at Northwestern. “There he was, leading the other kids in a listening session, checking out some recording by [Charles] Mingus.
“He certainly made an impression as someone who was very serious about jazz.”
So no one who was following Young’s progress was very surprised when he won admission to Northwestern. Still, his audition repertoire was probably more wide-ranging than NU profs typically encounter: Young dispatched excerpts of Mahler’s Third Symphony, Stravinsky’s “Petrouchka” ballet, Haydn’s Trumpet Concerto, various standard jazz tunes plus some original themes.
At Northwestern, he became — in effect — a professional musician, gigging around Evanston and Chicago when he wasn’t studying for exams. But unlike many other gifted young instrumentalists, Young’s world stretched well beyond his horn. During one summer, he won funding from Northwestern’s Summer Research Grant Committee to study connections between hip-hop and jazz music.
The idea, says Young, was to research how he could attract today’s young rap audience to jazz, and how he could incorporate the best elements of hip-hop into his own music. Though the paper he wrote represented just the first step in his research, it showed a musician uninterested in observing traditional stylistic barriers among musical idioms.
To his credit, Young realizes he still has a long way to go. Though off to a sensational start, he understands that he could benefit significantly from additional studies. Thus he’s currently taking guitar lessons (“I think you’re musically challenged if you can only express yourself on one instrument,” Young says) and he plans to study composition with Perkinson (whom he considers “one of my most tremendous influences–God bless Perk”).
“Already David is playing in some of the most important groups in Chicago, such as Ensemble Stop-Time, and he has recorded his first CD project, which are great steps,” Garcia says.
“From an actual playing standpoint, I don’t think it’s any surprise to him that he really needs to couple his great expressiveness with a continually increasing knowledge of how to deal with the chord changes underneath the melody lines.
“But he’s definitely on the right track,” adds Garcia. “I have little doubt that he’ll be a success in the jazz arena.”
Certainly Young makes a significant stride with “Appassionata,” an impressive effort that looks and sounds nothing like a conventional jazz debut recording. If its bathed-in-gold cover art suggests unabashed romanticism, the music inside underscores the point. Young’s penchant for gently phrased melodies, atmospheric instrumental settings and palpable reverb are the work of a musician uninterested in withholding emotional expression. That he includes his original song lyrics in the recording’s liner notes (though the words are not performed) only adds to the explicitness of his message.
Yet he realizes that his directness may earn him some barbs from critics who, these days, tend to prefer cooler, more emotionally veiled forms of music-making.
“The whole point of `Appassionata’ was to put my music out in a way that a conventional listener is not going to expect to encounter from a jazz record,” says Young. “Some jazz traditionalists will say, `He’s a smooth player.’ Others may say, `He doesn’t do enough soloing.’
“But all of these things will force the listener to change his or her expectations of what a jazz album is supposed to be, because `Appassionata’ is not really a jazz album — it’s just an album of my music today.
“Two years from now, my writing will sound completely different than it does now.
“Music is a process, not a destination,” says Young, whose journey could take him far. “This recording happens to be about the beauty of song and the beauty of humanity, because that’s what I feel music is.”
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David Young plays at 8 and 10 p.m. Thursday at the Firehouse Grill, 750 Chicago Ave., Evanston (847-733-1911); and at 8 p.m. Saturday at Byzantium, 232 S. Halsted St. (312-454-1227).
