music by Trevor Carolan The East-West Soul of Henry Young Young's upbringing. After two-and-ahalf years in the Big Apple, he returned to the West Coast to raise a family. Fortunately. Young's headline artist experience secures him periodic one-nighter tours leading back-up bands lor visiting U . S . stars, or dates in the studio arranging charts for theatrical productions and commercial work. A n d there was always the obligatory day job. "Nothing wrong with an artist taking a day job." Young shrugs. "People put it down, but sometimes you've got to, especially if you're raising a family. There's a freedom it gives you: what musicians call cherrypicking--you can afford to go after the best music jobs and maybe pass along the other gigs to different players who need 'em. I told myself that's what I'd do until I passed the big 5-0." Young's kids are now grown and like Young worked six nights a week year round. L was the late '70s when 1 first heard jazzman Henry Young spark up the downtown night with his giant, old hollow-body Gibson guitar. M y wife and I were in Gastown on a midsummer stroll. The Classical Joint on Carrall Street was in its heyday and you could tell two blocks away the Joint was jumping. The wom brick street outside was packed with looky-loos copping a listen, and people hustled just to get through the door. The poster read: Tonight Only. Appearing Live: The Incredible Henry Young!" Yow. where'd he been all these years'? Somehow we made it in. Already the band was burning and Young's guitar sorties tore off the roof. It was jazz: it was blues, but like nothing you'd ever heard. Two Asian-looking s; ·3 £j < '8 cats on guitar and keyboards led a homicidal rhythm section, and their music surged on metabolic scales clear out to interstellar space. Tune after tune. Young worked a honeydripper dynagroove. driving higher and higher, ripping up the Joint while and Vancouver's still-mourned columnist Jack Wasserman wrote one time that Nina Simone. tempestuous High Priestess of Jazz, had noticed Henry Young and liked what she heard. A s a result. Wasserman wrote, the city would be losing one of its premier talents. "I was working the houseband. what happened is that Nina was singing 'I Put a Spell On You'." Young remembers. "I liked that tune, and asked to sit in. It was a bluesy piece and that's always been my forte, so it was a natural we'd find a groove." Three weeks later. Young was on a plane to New York. His association with Simone would last 15 years, seeing them through lengthy State Department tours of Africa, four tours of Europe, and virtually every major "I've found that the trick is all in the listening. It's like sex; to get itrightyou gotta try it more than once...." --Henry Young he can concentrate exclusively on the music. That's what led him back to the studio, to Cooking On Sunday. "People have said to me for years that I should record my own work," he explains, fingering the new disc. "Finally the moment's come. M y whole life story's in this; it's like the last piece of a puzzle. A n d it's my music, sure, but it's also a tribute to my role models, to the artists who the crowd went wild. Henry Young's guitar waxed transcendent, and I knew then why Nina Simone had signed Young up for her magnificent band back in the '60s. Call it the power of the Muse: four days later I quit my dead-end job and took to writing for a living. Time passes. A week ago. a tiny golden dragon caught my eye. A blue C D . red lettering: Henry- Young, Cooking On Sunday. Picking it up out of old regard, I checked out the sounds. Raised in Chinatown's downhome Main and Cordova district. Young came up as an artist in Vancouver's cabaret days of the '60s. Starting out with the city's first interracial band-- what became Sy Risby and The Mischiefs--he fronted housebands for years in period bottle clubs like The Torch. New Delhi, and the showed me the way--Miles. Kenny festival and concert stage in the business. E n route. Young found himself playing and appearing alongside a staggering compendium of musical genius: Ray Charles. Thelonius Monk, Miles Davis. Bill Evans--and always, inescapably, soulful R & B originators like Little Richard. The Ronettes, The Supremes. Mary Wells and many others. "It was the good life," Young reflects at his home above Burrard Inlet, "The gigs were good, the bread was good: Nina got us recording work on the side--our friends got to hear us on soundtracks." But even Ultimately-Cool has its limitations, even for hungry artists. Young's parents were mixed. Chinese and Ukrainian, yet it was his father's Burrell. B . B . King, Joe Pass. A n d I always loved Bill Evans, Charlie Byrd, Art Pepper." Cooking offers vintage Young, a little older, more mellow, still an original. The tunes are definitive Rhythm V Blues, fluid Wes Montgomery- flavoured jazz stylings. straight ahead blues and warm, woody ballads. Guest vocalist Bobby Taylor, another Vancouver original who went on to stardom internationally, brings admixtures of Motown soul. The disc's unexpected high-point though is an East-West breakthrough-- "Seong Loong." an eight-minute melding of the diverse cross-cultural influences that have shaped Young's career. Opening with refrains of the traditional Chinese opera he heard growing up among the clan association halls of Elegant Parlour. They were halcyon days for hometown musicians: the clubs were rough-legged but mostly they paid on time, and Brylcrecmed up-and-comers traditional Chinese roots that shaped