INDIAN RIVER COUNTY — The atmosphere of Havana Nights, one of the island’s swankiest nightspots, owes a lot to Antonio York, the man B.B. King once nicknamed “Fingers.”
Playing on an unobtrusive keyboard in the corner, he rolls through jazz standards New Orleans-style, occasionally overlaying the melody with a respectable imitation of Louis Armstrong’s throaty baritone.
Judging by the crowd that goes quiet when he sings, it is a much-appreciated touch.
Nonetheless, the cozy bar is a far cry from Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center and Independence Hall, where York played in his youth.
Now 61, York’s life has settled down into this steady weekend routine, home from decades playing on New Orleans’ Bourbon Street and the famous Blue Room at the Roosevelt Hotel.
But for a boy growing up in Gifford, York had an upbringing that was about as worldly as one could get.
His father, tenor saxophonist Tiny York, had a band that toured the state. The York household routinely had jazz musicians stopping by late into the night, with his four children attuned to it all.
Ray Charles and B.B. King were the stuff of Antonio’s bedtime stories – all of them associates of his father.
In the middle years of the last century, the Jacksonville native was one of the hottest musicians on the Florida jazz scene.
“Anybody that played on the ‘chitlin’ circuit’ came through our house,” Antonio recalls.
Once, when he and his brother Vincent were still in high school, his father woke them up to come meet a guest.
“It was 3 a.m. and we came downstairs, and there was James Brown sitting on the couch,” he recalls.
A father himself now, York smiles at his own father’s good times.
“He made it clear it was going to be an adult meeting,” he says. “So we went on back to bed.”
Talk went on for years afterwards that Brown played a game of pickup basketball on the courts at Gifford High.
As years passed and their fame grew, musicians still remembered Tiny.
Among them was Ray Charles, who got his start in music when Tiny York used to pick him up at the School for the Blind in St. Augustine and drive him to gigs in Orlando.
Once, Antonio mentioned to B.B. King that his dad knew him way back when.
“B.B. said, ‘Oh, Tiny York! I remember when he used to pick me up on the side of the road in Mississippi!’ We always just thought that was one of his nighttime stories.”
In Gifford, York’s band played at the Club Bali on Old Dixie and the Step-In, Antonio’s grandparents’ restaurant on 41st Street.
“The black Dodgers would come there to eat,” Antonio recalls.
In the era of segregation, Gifford had a “colored” movie theater, bus line and taxi company.
For his day job, Tiny York was a landscaper for some of the earliest John’s Island homes.
Through that work, he came to know a number of families who went on to hire him to play at parties.
Among them was Dr. Hugh McCrystal.
“Oh, Tiny was a character,” says McCrystal, who with his wife, Ann, hired Tiny York’s band to play at their home every New Year’s Eve for 20 years.
York was also the weekly gardener.
“I know just how the doc wants it,” he would say.
When Tiny York’s liver began to fail, Antonio says his family called Ray Charles for help funding a transplant.
“He said no,” says Antonio.
When Tiny York died at 61, there was a big funeral at Mt. Sinai Baptist Church. The McCrystals and several other clients of York from the island went, paying their respects to York, whose body was propped up in the casket as if listening to the music.
Antonio played the organ, and a jazz band joined in.
They started softly with “Just a Closer Walk with Thee” and ended several hours later with “When the Saints Go Marching In.”
“He had a jazz send-off,” says Antonio.
It was Antonio’s mother, Lillie York, who led her children to church at Mt. Sinai. A beautician, she sang in the church choir. Antonio repeats an old joke. “We were drug babies – we were drug to church.”
In junior high school, Antonio’s brother Vincent in particular wasn’t happy after the church said he couldn’t play his saxophone during services.
As Gifford churches went, Mt. Sinai was the most somber.
“There are holy roller and sanctified and straight Baptist churches. In that church, they concentrated on singing hymns out of the book,” says York. “The thing that put my brother off at church was that they wouldn’t let him play the saxophone.”
Mt. Sinai has broadened its musical tastes since then; Antonio’s sister Joan still plays organ and sings in the Mt. Sinai choir.
“She sings like a bird,” Antonio says.
His mother still lives on Old Dixie Highway, near the York family compound – six houses plus the restaurant, on two acres on 41st Street.
Antonio York still lives there, in a house his grandfather built – though it is listing to one side, he says with a laugh.
Only a second sister, Millicent Vannette Chancellor, “had the good sense” as Antonio puts it to find a career outside of music; she is an accountant with a Houston-based oil company.
Antonio began piano lessons at the age of 5, going to the home of his teacher one evening a week for lessons.
When he was 12, he played piano in church, and remembers vividly the paper bag handed to him after the collection, heavy with change and one heart-stopping dollar bill.
“My dad pulled me aside and told me, ‘Son, you’re a professional now.’”
That year, he took up trumpet in the school band, and to this day, remains inspired by his sixth grade band teacher, Lawrence Trapp.
In the late 1960s, after two black students officially integrated Vero Beach High School, York became one of 10 Gifford students to make the transfer the following year.
Within two years, the all-black school in Gifford that had once educated children from first through twelfth grade was closed.
At Vero High, only once did Antonio have to use the advice of a cousin: “If anybody calls you the ‘n’ word, just say it back – ‘n-, n-, n-, n-,’ then ask them, ‘Now is there something intelligent you’d like to talk about?”
“I only had to say that to one guy,” York recalls.
At Vero High, Antonio soon teamed up with a white drummer, Charlie Cowles, now a local legend for his genius guitar playing.
With their band, they drove to gigs as far away as Pahokee and Lake Wales with a U-Haul pulled by a cherry-red and white ’57 Pontiac York’s grandmother gave him.
As for playing in the marching band, the way was paved for Antonio by a stern warning to others from the band director, Ray Lunceford, another mentor York has never forgotten.
“I was the only black person in the marching band and I’ll never forget Mr. Lunceford saying, ‘This young man is going to be joining the band and if you don’t like it, you can leave. I’ll do it with 65 that are here, or the 30-something that want to stay, but that’s the only choice.’”
No one left.
The next year, there was another black band member: Antonio’s elder brother Vincent.
Both graduated in consecutive years with the John Philip Sousa award.
Lunceford urged York on to the excellent jazz program at Brevard Community College in Cocoa.
From there, he was admitted to the world-renowned jazz academy at Southern University, where his brother Vincent was studying under the famed avant-garde jazz clarinetist Alvin Batiste.
“When I found out you could get a jazz degree under Alvin Batiste, I said, ‘I’m tired of doing the chitlin’ circuit with the local band. Guys, I gotta go.’”
At Southern, his program got a grant to do a good-will tour of 12 West African countries, playing in eight of them, including Ivory Coast, Togo and Guinea.
“It was wonderful,” he recalls. “It was very enlightening. The whole experience was one I’ll never forget.”
They also competed in the Mobile Jazz Festival and won three years in a row. Antonio York was named Best Jazz Organist in 1973.
Vincent York went on to tour with the Duke Ellington Orchestra under Duke’s son, Mercer, backing up the likes of Sarah Vaughn, Ella Fitzgerald and Rosemary Clooney.
Eventually Vincent earned a master’s degree in classical saxophone performance from the University of Michigan.
He now teaches music at a community college in Ann Arbor, and runs a foundation to further music education for budding career musicians.
In between Ellington’s orchestra and the University of Michigan, Vincent joined his brother Antonio in New Orleans, playing with the Dick Saville Orchestra.
Antonio had graduated from Southern University with a major in trumpet and a minor in piano.
He soon got a job with Saville’s 12-piece orchestra in the Blue Room at the Fairmont Hotel, now the Fairmont Roosevelt, and eventually became resident conductor.
He taught himself to sing after being told he’d be “more valuable,” and he picked up the vibraphone and trap instruments, and ended up playing percussion or piano behind major stars including Ben Vareen, B.B. King, Tina Turner and Gladys Knight.
But while the stars were huge, the hours were long.
In his 17 years in New Orleans, York sometimes worked gigs nearly around the clock, taking breaks of an hour or two before plunging back into the scene.
“New Orleans is a 24-hour drinking town and I fell right in with the nightlife,” he says.
After a two-month run of no sleep, he developed pneumonia and came home to Vero to recover.
For the next 17 years, he played gigs in clubs and restaurants in Palm Beach County, including seven years at Jack Nicklaus’ club in Golden Bear Plaza.
When he moved back to Vero, he played at Polo Grill and eventually Havana Nights, where he has been for the past five years.
“I’ve always been able to make my living playing music. I feel very pleased about that,” he says. “I never leave God out of the equation. He blessed me well enough to make a living at what I love.”
York plays Friday and Saturday nights from 6:30 p.m. to 10:30 p.m. and Sunday and alternating Monday nights from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m.
Havana Nights is above Maison Martinique restaurant at the Caribbean Court Hotel, 1605 Ocean Drive, Vero.
