I Can Hear The Music: The Life of Gene DiNovi

Chapter Seven

For a kid like me with not much cash in the pocket, the good news about the clubs on West 52nd Street was that the music came free as long as I wasn't fussy about standing on the sidewalk. Especially in warm weather, none of the clubs shut their doors. All I had to do was hang out on the sidewalk and let my ears do the rest of the work. It was a bonus later on when the doormen and the guys selling the admission tickets recognized me as a regular and invited me into their clubs for free, no ticket or cover charge required.

    The part of 52nd that really counted lay between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. That was the block with the jazz clubs on both the north and south sides. It was where I went door to door and cocked my ear. I heard Ben Webster at the Three Deuces on the south side and Red Norvo directly across the street at the Onyx. Billie Holiday sang at Kelly's Stable a few doors further west. At different clubs on the street, I heard older swing-based guys like Coleman Hawkins and Roy Eldridge. I heard Thelonious Monk and I heard a great young singer named Sarah Vaughan. I heard the older masters like Lester Young and Art Tatum. And I heard the younger guys like the trumpeter Howard McGhee and the tenor saxophonist Budd Johnson who were just finding their audiences. I heard practically everybody who was on the New York jazz scene. 

  

One club, the Onyx, was historically at a bunch of different addresses on 52nd, always featuring jazz, but the Onyx was at number 57 on the street when I went in one night in 1944 and heard a very early bebop band. Dizzy was in it-when it came to early bop, Diz was involved in everything-plus Don Byas on tenor; Oscar Pettiford playing really powerful bass; and Max Roach on drums. The pianist was an Italian-American guy not much older than me named George Wallington.

    A couple of months later, when I was listening to a group led by an older clarinetist named Joe Marsala whose band played regularly at the Hickory House on the south side of 52nd, I couldn't help noticing someone familiar at the piano. It was George Wallington.

George was born Giacinto Figlia in Palermo, Sicily, on October 27, 1924. His parents immigrated to Atlantic City, New Jersey, when George was a little kid. He picked up the piano in roughly the same semi-accidental way I did, though he started much earlier in his life than I did. Before he was out of his teens, he was playing on 52nd Street with people like Dizzy and Bird. He wrote a couple of tunes that became modern jazz classics, Lemon Drop and Godchild. And he changed his name.

    Almost immediately in my days and nights hanging out on the street, I connected with George and some other pianists. It was only natural since so many of them reminded me of myself. They were white pianists from the New York area, and they played bebop like it was the great love of their lives. They were just like me. But soon I began to notice that, beboppers though they all were, each guy's approach to his playing and improvising differed from the others. 

    Wallington was a very elegant guy in his looks, his clothes and his playing. He gave his piano lines a touch of flamboyance, which I thought of as an Italian characteristic. I compare him now with someone from the movies like Vittorio De Sica, a dark, handsome, charming guy who played the way he looked.

    Joe Albany wasn't like that, even though he played the same kind of basic bebop piano with the same bands as George played with. Joe came out of the Atlantic City Italian community too, born there as Joe Albani in 1924 a few months before George. By Joe's teen years, he was in New York playing with Bird and Miles. He had a wonderful lyric sense at the piano as if he was reflecting an inner Puccini. I thought the lyricism made him more suited to playing with Lester Young than with Bird. But the sad story was that Joe's career pretty much stalled for years. It was booze and drugs that got to him, as they did to so many bebop musicians. Joe probably never achieved the things he might have been reaching for.