ANDOVER, Massachusetts — Social justice and musical joy make Louis Scolnik go. They have for most of his 93 years. But music came first.
He has been bringing the swing since he was a teen and still brings it, indulges in hearing it and wants to step up the playing of it for audiences eager to recall its verve, rhythm and soaring sound.
On a recent morning, the former Maine Superior Court and state supreme court justice — affectionately known as the swinging judge — sat at his desktop computer in his and his wife’s apartment at Coachman’s Ridge.
Ivan, a dark short-haired cat who wastes no movement, lay curled in a leather chair before a music stand stacked with sheet music. Behind him, outside the second-floor windows, newly unfurled maple leaves shimmied in the wind.
Scolnik, playing cuts from favorite sax players and from his band performances, leaned back and savored the sounds.
A smile swept across his face. It’s beatific.
“Isn’t that great, it kills me,” he said of a Scott Hamilton jazz cut.
Music has always killed Scolnik, even as a boy. He was hooked at 12, hearing the song “Saxophobia” played at his brother’s high school graduation in Lewiston.
“I just loved it,” he said of music. “I couldn’t live without it. I just loved it.”
He went on to play in high school and college for a Bates College jazz ensemble, playing at schools and dance halls.
This was the golden age of swing music. He traveled an hour south to Old Orchard Beach, to its ballroom where he was transfixed by jazz luminaries such as Count Basie and Duke Ellington.
Scolnik doesn’t remember dancing.
“I would just stand and listen at the Old Orchard pier,” he said.
Soon thereafter, Pearl Harbor came along, the Japanese attack that triggered the United States’ entry into World War II, and Scolnik would become an officer aboard a U.S. Navy landing craft.
He didn’t have far to go to start his training. Lewiston’s Bates College, where he was going to school, was home to a training program.
“I packed a bag, walked blocks to Bates College, and I was in the Navy,” he said.
Scolnik played music when he could in the Navy, scaring up fellow musicians for jam sessions on deck during free time in the Pacific Northwest and then Hawaii.
“I picked up a used clarinet in Portland, Oregon, and we had a pharmacist’s mate who played drums,” he said.
They had another crew member who played guitar. They would play during dinner on the deck of the 158-foot-long, 18-foot-wide boat. In Hawaii they played on the pier next to where the ship was docked.
Scolnik’s music stories underscored his latest musical endeavor, to assemble a trio to play for seniors and conjure good times while they trigger upbeat memories. He already plays in other jazz groups including Trad Jazz sessions regularly at the Lincoln Library.
Scolnik said he and bandmates have been told been told that people who have memory problems or dementia benefit from music.
Eight or nine years ago, when he and the newly formed Golden Years Trio swung through the Merrimack Valley every few weeks playing songbook standards for seniors, songs such as “The Nearness of You,” “Embraceable You” and “I Got it Bad,” they noticed the music was therapeutic for the elderly audiences.
“It seemed to be so, and we enjoyed playing,” he said.
He wants to restore that local swing circuit and is putting out the call for two jazz musicians. He wants to form a trio like the Golden Years, which stopped playing a few years ago after one of its members, stand-up bass player Charlie Schmitt, died.
He had Alzheimer’s, and it had progressed toward the end of the band’s time together, but the music still had a measure of magic, said his daughter, Carol Van Doren.
“My dad had been very sick and unable to walk and had difficulty communicating,” she said in an interview. “When Lou and Jeff showed up to perform, Charlie stood up, got out of his wheelchair, and grabbed his bass. My dad passed away the following month, but the small miracle that day shows the power of music and friendship.”
A home health nurse working at Scolnik’s apartment during the recent morning, Tony Martinelli, has experience working long-term care and said visits from musicians to these senior residences lend a major boost to their lives.
“They love the songs,” Martinelli said. “I have seen people get up and dance. For people in long-term care, it is a big deal.”
Scolnik’s children share their father’s love for music, including his daughter Julie Scolnik, a flutist and artistic director for Mistral Music, originally founded as Andover Chamber Music.
“I do believe that loving life and his love for music has kept his brain astute and his heart pumping for more,” she said.
Some of her fondest memories from youth come from weekends in winter when her father would lug armfuls of wood from the basement and build fires in the family fireplace.
”[He would] then put on Beethoven symphonies really loudly, which would fill our house with happiness and warmth,” she said. “I can safely say that my love of life comes from my dad.”
Louis Scolnik is still building fireplaces of warmth, feeding the fire with music.
Louis Scolnik can be reached at LABE94X@aol.com.
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