I Can Hear The Music: The Life of Gene DiNovi

Chapter One

Dizzy Gillespie was crooking his finger at me.

Me? Really? What would a musician as great as Dizzy want from a fifteen-year-old Brooklyn kid like me? I was sitting by myself at a little table in the Spotlite Club on 52nd Street in the middle of Manhattan. It was four o'clock on an early spring afternoon in 1944, and I was drinking Ginger Ale and waiting to hear Dizzy and his band play some bebop. I was crazy about bebop.

So I felt mystified that Dizzy was trying to get my attention.

"You want me?" I said.

"Yeah, who do you think I want?" Diz said in the gruff, kidding around way he had. "You're a piano player, right? A bebop player?"

Wow, Dizzy knew about me? How could that possibly be?

Right then, thinking about it, I could come up with a couple of places where Diz might have heard me play. Maybe in one of the rehearsal spaces in Nola's Studios over on Broadway at 51st. It was a building owned by a retired opera singer named Vincent Nola who renovated the place into several floors of studios. All kinds of musicians rented space at Nola's for an hour or a whole day. Big bands rehearsed there. Famous musicians practiced in some studios, kids nobody had ever heard of in others. I was one of the kids nobody had ever heard of, and I was just barely breaking in. I tagged along with a lot of other guys I knew who went to Nola's all the time. These guys were a few years older than me, and already beginning to make reputations in bebop. Red Mitchell, the wonderful bass player, was a Nola's regular. Chuck Wayne usually played guitar there, and the horn players might be Stan Getz or Brew Moore or any other guys who blew tenor in the style that came from Lester Young. Often enough, I was the pianist among these young stars.

Dizzy could have caught me at Nola's. Or he might have heard me at one of the jazz clubs on 52nd. The Onyx, Three Deuces, the Hickory House. In those years, 52nd was home to the clubs where bebop was starting to be heard. I hadn't nearly reached the level where I worked in any of the clubs on regular gigs, but maybe Dizzy heard me play a tune, or part of one, just grabbing a few minutes on a piano early in the afternoon when management didn't mind.

There were half a dozen young bebop piano players who hung out on 52nd Street, guys like George Wallington and Joe Albany and Al Haig. Al was the best player among the bunch of us at the time. My main distinction was my age; I was the youngest piano player by three or four years and by far the least well known. But I happened to be the only bebop pianist in the Spotlite that spring afternoon in 1944. I was the guy Dizzy Gillespie was pointing his finger at.

"Sure, of course," I said to Diz, "I'm a piano player."

"Then move your ass up here," he said. "My guy hasn't showed up. Man, I can't start without somebody at the piano."

It was time to Dizzy to begin his first set, and he was growing impatient. The club hours were strange in the early 1940s because the Second World War was on in Europe and in the Pacific, and as a result, New York City had a curfew in effect. That meant music started in the clubs when it was still the middle of the afternoon, and it ended early, on the stroke of midnight when the curfew closed the clubs down tight.

"Just play your own way, kid," Dizzy said as he led me on to the bandstand. The Spotlite was a club like all the others on the street, squeezed into the basements and first floors of the old brownstone houses. Everything about the clubs was crowded. The customers sat at their tables cheek by jowl, and it was just as tight on the bandstands.

"Nat Jaffe, I don't know where that cat's at," Dizzy told me. Jaffe was the missing piano player, a guy I'd seen around 52nd, a nice player about ten years older than me. But right then, he was nowhere in sight.