I Can Hear The Music: The Life of Gene DiNovi

Chapter Eleven

The year I played solo at the Deuces, 1947, I got busier as the months went by. In December, I was the busiest I'd ever been. I began the month by going on the road to Washington, D.C., with Chubby Jackson's little band for a date at a place called Club Bengasi. Chubby was a perpetually upbeat guy, a bassist, a bop singer and an all-round enthusiast. The band had two horns, Conte Candoli on trumpet and Frank Socolow on tenor, plus Terry Gibbs playing vibes, and a rhythm section of me, Chubby and Denzil Best on drums. We just ripped the place up with that band, and afterwards, Chubby took the guys on a tour to Scandinavia. I didn't go on the trip because I'd already agreed to play for a couple of weeks at the Hickory House with Joe Marsala's band. That turned out to be lucky choice for me in at least one way because it made me available when an incredible chance came along to record with one of the great figures in jazz history.

I often saw Lester Young out on the street on 52nd. That's the point, I saw him, but I never talked to him or hung out with him or ever felt I was in his company. All of us younger guys were shy about approaching Lester Young. He was an eccentric and elusive figure, and at the same time, he was the president of the tenor saxophone, the great influence on all the young tenor players I knew. He was Prez. He was odd, and he was different.

    I heard a lot of Prez's music, even when he wasn't playing it. The months I was in Henry Jerome's band, I sat next to Al Cohn. Al was one of the best of the Prez style tenors, and there were tenors like Al, though not necessarily as good as him, all over New York. A guy named John Andrews who came to Manhattan from one of the southern states played exactly like the lighter-toned 1930s Prez of Twelfth Street Rag and Taxi War Dance. One day, Andrews was working with a piano and drums trio in a dime-a-dance joint on Broadway. A speaker carried the music out to the street. Prez happened to walk by on this day. His ears pricked up, and he stood outside the dance joint listening for a whole set. In effect, he was hearing himself as he played when he was a young man. Prez was just staggered. After that, he couldn't miss the scads of tenor players who played like him, either 1930s Prez the way John Andrews did it or the deeper toned, more melancholy 1940s Prez the way Al Cohn did it. Everybody sounded like Prez

    "I'm going down to Birdland tonight," he used to say, "and hear what I'm playing this week."

Probably it was Chuck Wayne who phoned me with the news right around Christmas of '47. We were going to record with Lester Young. The record was for Prez's label of the period, Aladdin Records. Aladdin loved Prez's playing, but they had a low opinion of the group he led over the previous couple of years. I thought they were right on both counts; Prez was in a good place in his music, but his band was made up mostly of second tier guys. Aladdin hired Leonard Feather, the jazz critic, record producer and all-round man of jazz, to record Prez with a lineup of young guys who could really play. The group Leonard put together was made up of Chuck, me, Tiny Kahn, and Curley Russell, the bass player who worked a lot with Bird and Dizzy.

    The session was set for the WOR studios on December 29, and when I arrived, Tiny was setting up his drums. He looked at me, and he said in his lovely warm way, "We're gonna play with Prez." He sounded so awed. We all felt that way. Prez certainly wasn't a bebopper, but his music was essential as a transition to modern jazz, and of course, he influenced all the young tenor players. So Tiny and I and the other guys were a little apprehensive, but mostly we were just plain excited.

    Prez didn't reciprocate the excitement. He arrived with his current lady friend, someone I remember clearly because later she dated Junior Collins, the French horn player with Claude Thornhill and Gil Evans. When Leonard Feather introduced the great Lester Young to us young guys in the studio, Prez had a miffed expression on his face. Looking back, I can see his problem. He no doubt felt insulted that his own band was excluded, and, worse, they were replaced by four guys who were strangers to him. Even worse, three of us were white. Prez suffered terrible racist treatment during his service in the army, and he became well known for his ability, as he put it, "to feel a draft" or, in non-Prez English, to detect the possibility for racial prejudice. Prejudice was the last thing he was going to get from Chuck, Tiny and me, but Prez had his understandable fears.

In the studio, Prez mumbled the name of a tune and started playing it without a pause. The rest of us struggled for a couple of bars until everything slid to a messy stop.

    "Well," I said to Prez after a moment of awkward silence, "it might help if everybody knew what we're supposed to be doing."

    I was speaking in a way that was respectful and a little bit apologetic, but Prez didn't take it that way.

    He looked at the wall just over my head, and he said, "If Prez's kiddies were here, they'd know what to do."

    Prez had taken to speaking of himself in the third person, and by "kiddies," he meant his own band.

    I felt embarrassed, and so did the other guys, but we pressed on, and what soon followed was a moment of panic mixed with comedy. We decided to do East of the Sun. It was a tune where Chuck and I did our introduction in the way we'd worked out, both of us playing in thirds. The idea was for us to do it that way for the first sixteen bars, then Prez would come in on the seventeenth bar. So we started, playing our thirds thing in D flat, and it was working very well. But all this time, Prez was standing on the other side of the studio, as far from the microphones as he could get, about twelve or fifteen feet away, and he wasn't moving. We got up to the tenth bar, the twelfth bar. Prez hadn't budged. Was the guy never going to get himself in front of the mics? Was he going to play his horn at all? We reached bar fourteen. Prez was still anchored in place. And then, at the last possible instant, as we played bar fifteen, he flew across the studio like a gazelle. He landed at bar seventeen, playing a low A flat. The solo that followed was, I think, probably his best of the recording.

   

As time went along in the studio, Prez seemed to relax a little. I had the feeling he might have been warming up to the young upstarts he was playing with. He never said anything to us. Most of his conversation was directed to himself. When we listened to playbacks, he'd say, "Roll it, roll it, roll the ball." I don't know what he meant by that or by the other odd things he said. But we recorded three other tunes-The Sheik of Araby, Something to Remember You By and Tea for Two. And that finished the session.

   

Leonard Feather, writing about the recording some time later, said "it was a less than comfortable afternoon." Personally, at the time, I thought the four tunes were okay but maybe not outstanding. Much later, when I listened to the records from the perspective of more experience, I changed my mind.

    Our afternoon with Prez might have seemed uncomfortable, but the music was not bad at all. We upstarts gave Prez much better backing than he got from his own kiddies, and Prez's playing didn't do his standing as a great tenor saxophonist any harm at all.