I Can Hear The Music: The Life of Gene DiNovi

Chapter Six

(From left to right: Stan Hasselgard, Max Roach, Gene DiNovi, Clyde Lombardi, Chuck Wayne at the Three Deuces on 52nd Street)

Back in 1940, my sister Tess saw how keen I was about my piano lessons, how hard I worked at them, and as a reward, she bought a new piano for the house. It was a Weber, a very fine grand piano and a big improvement over the standup player piano I started with. What I didn't know at the time was that the Weber was a Canadian product from a company in Kingston, Ontario. That's about 150 miles east of Toronto, the city where I made my home beginning in 1972. The Weber stayed with me through all my lifetime of moves and relocations, and when I settled in Toronto, it came along. First I kept it in the different houses and apartments where we lived in the city, but since about 1990, it's been a big part of my life at our country place in the Hockley Valley just outside the city.

From the start, playing the Weber as a kid, I recognized it had a hard action. It needed effort and concentration to play. The Weber was like the heavy bat in baseball. When hitters warm up before they come to the plate, they swing a weighted bat. That makes the bat they actually hit with in a game feel much lighter, and they can swing with more bat speed. The Weber had a lot of similarities to the weighted bat, both physical and psychological.

I felt very proud of the Weber. With it and the upright piano, I had the beginnings of my own mini-studio. Two pianos in one house, but it was the Weber that excited me.

"My sister paid four hundred dollars for this piano," I used to tell my teenaged pals about the Weber. To us, four hundred might as well have been a million bucks. It was money beyond our dreams.

Then came the day when Tess overheard me bragging about the price she paid.

"Oh no, Gene," she said, "I didn't pay four hundred dollars for it."

"You didn't?" I was mystified.

"No," Tess said. "I paid eight hundred dollars for it."

"Eight hundred?" I said. To me and my friends, that was the equivalent of two million bucks.

Whatever the price, I was crazy about my Weber. I practiced on it regularly and constantly. My mother used to say that, right after I had my last lesson from Frank Izzo, I practiced the entire day. Practice was no problem for me. Nobody had to persuade me to do it. The music itself was a big enough motivation. I wanted to learn songs and become the best player I could be. I loved the music. I loved the Weber.

All the practice on the new piano helped prepare me for the second band I played in after the Young Catholic Lay Missionary outfit. This second band came when I was still at Fort Hamilton High, but it had many differences from the first band. For one thing, we had a financial backer in the person of my brother-in-law Louie Coppola, my sister Marianne's husband. The outlay in money wasn't huge, but Louie was generous enough to pay for the band's stock arrangements, which were an essential part of the whole popular music culture in those days.

Stock arrangements, written by arrangers who were hired by music publishers, covered all the standard songs and all the popular tunes of the day. They were designed for both big bands and small groups to play, and they were sold by the hundreds of thousands in music stores. The entire music business wouldn't have operated as efficiently as it did without stocks because they supplied most of the material that both professional bands and amateurs like us played for dances.

Our kids' band, the one that Louis bought the stocks for, played at the Thursday night dances in the Midvale Social Club on 86th Street in Brooklyn. The personnel consisted mostly of Italian boys from the neighbourhood. Even the leader was Italian, though he changed his name to something that sounded totally English: Don Murray. I can't recall his real Italian name, or even recall if I ever knew the name, but it was as the Don Murray Band that we played at the dances.