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Bud Young maintains a steady and knowledgeable part-time presence at the Pioneer Square record store he opened 26 years ago. “It’s fun talking jazz,” he says.
Photo by Mark Sullo |
Ask Bud Young a question about jazz. See his face light up.
He points a finger behind him at the CD player. He’ll name the best 10 musicians of jazz history. Or did he name the best eight? Or 12? We lost track somewhere after Mingus and Monk, but before Eldridge and Armstrong, amid a paean to Duke Ellington’s band at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1956.
Listen, now, to Young, because he won’t be in his den much longer.
“It was the last day of the Newport Jazz Festival, around midnight. Everyone was tired and satiated by great music.” Ellington started up “Crescendo and Diminuendo in Blue.” The tenor sax comes in, and it keeps on blowing through 27 choruses. As the solo progresses “the audience gets louder and louder; at the crescendo, they’re screeching. It was sheer chaos.”
Ellington at Newport “is the greatest and most exciting recording ever made in the history of mankind.”
After April 30, you might find an endorsement like that in some online forum about jazz. But it won’t be uttered in the bowels of a Pioneer Square building fronted with the neighborhood’s characteristic rosy-gray stone, a place that for 26 years has been a retail base for the city’s scattered community of jazz fans. And it won’t be delivered, live as Ellington at Newport, with the exuberance of Young, 85, who still works behind the counter at Bud’s Jazz Records on First Ave. and Jackson St.
Bud’s has been a touchstone for the genre’s acolytes through its 26 years, opening back when Parnell’s Jazz Club operated just around the corner.
Pioneer Square had “a nice ambience for what I had in mind for the store,” he says. Disembarking on an Elliott Bay dock from an Alaska ferry in 1979, “I just got good vibes” about the square, he says.
And he knew a good spot for retail when he saw it. Young spent his midlife in Chicago, strategizing new store locations for Montgomery Ward. He also lingered at the Chicago Jazz Mart, a place just for jazz where, he says, the owners kept out the riffraff by sticking to the genre. Young did the same, building up a vast array of albums and CDs by refraining from sending back unsold work to the record companies.
“My thought is, somebody out there will want this CD,” he says. “Someday, they’ll walk in. I built up a tremendous variety dealing in the fringe items.”
New owner James Rasmussen, who bought the store from Young in 2001, continued the habit, and Young continued to mind the counter two days a week. He’s there now, Fridays and Sundays, happy to do an in-person primer for the shopper just off the street.
“I’m happy to spend two hours and be prepared for him to walk out not buying anything,” he says.
One of the compelling aspects of educating novices is Young’s query: “What do they mean by jazz? Could it be early Louis Armstrong, or big band swing, or traditional? Or bebop? It’s all valid.” How people develop their tastes provides some insight into how we learn.
“It’s human nature: We all like the familiar.” He turns and nods at the CD player perched on a black stack of stereo equipment behind the counter. “Here’s ‘Stardust,’” he says, a 1937 tune recorded this year, a new twist on an old familiar. It’s catchy, yet the muscisians have room to improvise. “Jazz is a great work of art created in the moment,” he says. “The key word is innovation.”
Local publications have noted the hole Bud’s will leave in the local jazz scene; owner James Rasmussen said the online music revolution has frozen them out of a business already made chilly by big distributors’ hostility to smaller stores. But the scene will go on, says Young.
“There’s no question we have world-class musicians here,” he says, leading the high school jazz bands, or playing in Seattle Repertory Jazz, or down at the New Orleans on weeknights. He hopes to get out and see more of them.
Down the street, baseball is played before thousands in a $517 million stadium. Meanwhile, Young and Rasmussen sit behind the counter, selling another great American invention at progressively greater discounts as the month gets old. Across from them sits a sign scrawled with the words “Jazz: 139 people can’t be wrong.”
One hundred and thirty-nine people may be right, but their patronage can no longer keep Bud’s going.
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