I Can Hear The Music: The Life of Gene DiNovi

Chapter Four

My father could play a little guitar and some violin. He liked old time Italian numbers like Sorrento and Santa Lucia, which every Italian considered the Neapolitan national anthem. But it was opera that seemed to mean the most to my father. He listened faithfully to the Saturday afternoon radio broadcasts from the Metropolitan Opera in New York City. Then, on Sunday afternoons, he took things a giant step further at our house when he sang parts of operas himself. Mostly it was Puccini. He had numbers from Madame Butterfly down cold.

On those Sundays, my father spread the best lace cloth on a table in the living room, made the espresso, put out a bottle of cordial, and invited over friends who could sing. Most of the guest singers were ladies. My mother wasn't part of all this and might have felt torn over the Sunday afternoon sessions. She wasn't keen on the ladies coming to the house, but I think she was proud of my father's popularity and his talent as a singer.

This was background music for me as a kid, the singing in the living room on Sundays. It didn't make me want to run to the Met and hear the Puccini operas on stage. But the sound of Sunday opera sunk in.

It was my brother Victor who introduced me to live music performances in the outside world. He couldn't play a musical instrument himself, but he loved music in every form, and from the time I was a little kid, Victor took me to matinees at theatres around New York City. We went to Loewe's State and the Paramount in Manhattan and to the Brooklyn Loewe's. These were the years, long before television, when vaudeville was still popular, and I saw stage shows with jugglers, magicians, musicians, ventriloquists and comedians. The comics always cracked me up, people like Smith and Dale who did the same routines for years, fast, funny and non-stop with the jokes.

But the performers who most registered with me were the big bands. Lucky Millander's band, for instance. It mixed swing with rhythm and blues, and a few great jazz players passed through the band, guys like Harry Edison, Lockjaw Davis and even Dizzy. As far as I remember, I didn't see any of those particular guys playing with Lucky Millander. The one person I definitely recall was Millander's singer, Rosetta Tharp. She had a lot of gospel to her, and I was amazed that anyone could generate as much power as she did.

The band that left an even bigger impression was Chick Webb's. Chick made a sight I never forgot, this partly hunchbacked little guy bent over his drums playing the hell out of them. He really swung his band, and for contrast, he featured a fresh young girl singer who had a sweet high voice and a lot of jazz spirit. She was the teenaged Ella Fitzgerald.

Best of all was the great Benny Goodman band. I saw it with brother Victor at the Paramount Theatre in 1941 when I'd reached the advanced age of fourteen. I'd started thinking about taking piano lessons by then, and that made me especially alert to what Benny's pianist was up to. The pianist was Mel Powell, a guy from the Bronx who was only six years older than me. He was young, and he was local, and he was really good. I can still hear him in my memory playing String of Pearls. Jerry Gray had written the song that year for the Glenn Miller band, and Miller had a big hit with it. But I thought Benny Goodman's version was better, especially with this terrific young guy, Mel Powell, on piano. In my opinion Mel did everything right.

I was a very little kid when Victor started taking me to the theatres. But even at six or seven years of age, I could separate in my head the people who played music the right way from the people who didn't. At that stage, I made no differentiation between jazz and pop. I loved all the music as long as it was in tune and had the right harmonies. I couldn't explain to myself in technical terms how important it was to play in tune and be harmonically correct. The language and the concepts were still foreign territory to me. But I could sense a difference between the musicians who played in what I thought of as the right way and the musicians who missed the right way by a mile.