The Palm Beach Post

Sol Eskenazi plays in six big bands — and he’s 94!

- By Jan Tuckwood Palm Beach Post Staff Writer Eskenazi

When you play trombone in six different big bands several times a week, you’re rarely in the mood for “In the Mood.”

That’s a “real oldie,” Sol Eskenazi says.

Sol and hi s bandmates are always asked to play that 1939 Glenn Miller classic, but he prefers more modern arrangemen­ts. Maybe something from 1981, like Count Basie’s “Warm Breeze.”

Of course, “real oldie” is relative at Eskenazi’s age.

He’s 94 with the lung power of a guy 30 years younger. He’s slightly hard of hearing — his only physical limitation.

Thank goodness, his trombone is plenty loud.

Sol credits that trombone, his good genes and his daily swims for giving him stamina.

He credits his late wife, Norma, for giving him an appreciati­on for fine art — she was an internatio­nally known artist — and good nutrition.

“I honestly think I was the luckiest man alive to be able to meet her,” he says.

Norma was one gorgeous gal, a passionate woman with so much talent she was studying at the Corcoran School of Art, when Sol met her at a USO dance shortly after the end of World War II. She was 20. He was 24. He was a Nav y man, f ro m New York’s Lower East Side, and though he says he was always the “extremely rational” one and Norma was the emotional one, Sol did have passion for one other thing besides Norma: his trombone.

“I started playing when I was 12. When my parents saw that I was serious about music and not that it was not a passing fancy, they bought me a beautiful trombone for my birthday,” he says. “That horn was with me through World War II, my stint in college (at George Washington University) and my life in Florida. I still have it! It is the favorite of my three horns, which I now play almost every day.”

Sol worked for the federal government, rising through the ranks in the informatio­n systems department at the National Institutes of Health.

Norma kept drawing, painting and sculpting.

“Wherever we went, from the Prado in Spain to St. Petersburg in Russia, she had a sketchbook in her hand,” Sol says.

And they danced. Oh, how they danced.

They won a jitterbug contest in Las Vegas when they were 60.

“We were the oldest people there, but we were agile enough to impress them,” says Sol, who lives in Boynton Beach.

Sol waited until he was 69 to

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