I Can Hear The Music: The Life of Gene DiNovi

Chapter Ten

Back in New York after a couple of months with Buddy's big band, I did two things on more or less my own initiative. I organized a rehearsal band, and I played solo piano at the Three Deuces. Both gave me steps forward in my playing and writing, though neither was exactly a major money-maker.   

   

The rehearsal band met at my house on Monday nights. Monday was off night for musicians, and everybody who wasn't on the road came to 76th Street in Brooklyn. My mother-and later Patsy-made coffee and served crumb cake from Newman's Bakery. The crumb cake, if you didn't eat it fast, turned into something with the consistency of concrete. With time out only for the coffee and cake breaks, we played music in the basement where I had an upright piano (not my precious Weber, which was on the first floor).

    The musicians were almost one hundred percent young New York guys who were into bebop. Warne Marsh and Allen Eager, the tenor saxophonists, often turned up, Jimmy Chapin or Billy Exiner played drums, Tony Fruscella and John Carisi were the trumpet players, Chauncy Welsh was on trombone (he was later the guy playing the beautiful trombone on the Linda Ronstadt recordings with Nelson Riddle), Red Mitchell or Joe Shulman on bass, Danny Bank on different reeds. These guys were regulars, and so were several others. Not the same guys showed up every Monday, but we always had pretty good attendance, and the charts we played were from top guys. John Carisi wrote arrangements for us. So did Johnny Mandel. And so did I. It was a great chance for me to listen to what I otherwise heard only in my own head. It was humbling and thrilling to hear good musicians play my ideas.

   

My mother found the experience baffling, all these musicians in her basement till the sun came up. She knew the guys talked in jazz slang, and she tried to get a grip on it. She understood that musicians had a name for their instruments, but she didn't have it quite right.

    "Oh," she'd say to a guy arriving with his horn under his arm, "I see you brought your saw."

    Axe, ma. A musical instrument is an axe.

    One time Danny Bank came through the door wearing a gorgeous new topcoat.

    My mother complimented him on it.

    "Thanks," Danny said. "It is pretty cool, isn't it."

    "Oh, I'm surprised at that," my mother said. "It looks very warm"

   

Sometimes people dropped by just to listen. George Shearing was one of them, the guy who would later borrow the guitar-piano phrasing Chuck Wayne and I developed. Joe Guastafesta came over a couple of times, the bass player who never changed his name. He liked listening to Red Mitchell, and it wasn't long after his visits that he left for New Orleans to begin his great career as a symphonic bassist. Another time, a neighbour walked in, and stood there the whole night just taking in the music. What made his appearance a little odd was the neighbour's occupation. He worked as a narc, a drug cop. Maybe he felt disappointed that none of the guys were smoking dope. Or maybe he was just a music lover, not thinking about drugs at all that night.

The Monday night sessions lasted for four or five years off and on. Sometimes I was out of town or sometimes we all took a holiday with the result in both cases that there were Monday nights when silence reigned at my house. But the sessions were always great occasions, something I remember with tremendous affection. It wasn't just the music; the general camaraderie among all the guys counted for a lot too. Between tunes, we used to talk about which people we'd heard who could really play and which people who couldn't play a lick. We were very opinionated. You might say we could still be snot-nosed little kids at times.