I Can Hear The Music: The Life of Gene DiNovi

Chapter Thirteen

In late October of 1948, I went on the road with Anita O'Day. That was something completely different for me, accompanying a singer on a long gig. But it was a small sign of the future to come when I would spend years of my working life playing accompaniment to great singers like Peggy Lee, Tony Bennett, Lena Horne and Carmen McRae.  

    The idea of me accompanying Anita was hers. Anita's style came out of the swing period, but, in the late 1940s when she was into her thirties, she wanted to work with younger guys who played bebop. When she heard about the weekly band sessions at my house, she came over one Monday. She listened to the guys, and I think what she heard, the bebop, made her a little nervous. Still, she was determined, and she hired a band of beboppers, a group that consisted of Don Fagerquist on trumpet, Dave Schildkraut on alto, Milt Gold on trombone, me on piano, a guy named Gary Miller on bass and my pal Tiny Kahn playing drums and writing most of the arrangements for the group. We packed our bags and hit the road, first for the Rag Doll, a nightclub in Chicago, which was Anita's hometown, then the Flame, a St. Paul, Minnesota, club.

The O'Day gig wasn't my first experience as an accompanist, not quite. Through my friend Billy Exiner, I played with the singer, Sylvia Syms, when she recorded a song by Bart Howard. It was the song that was then called In Other Words but later became far better known and recorded by just about everybody under the title Fly Me to the Moon. Billy, Joe Shulman on bass and I formed the backup trio, and the recording session took place at the plush apartment of a great guy named Ed Fuerst.

    Ed earned big money as an insurance company executive. He wasn't married, and all of his time when he wasn't busy with the insurance business he devoted to jazz. People in the jazz community called him "Mr. First Nighter." He'd show up when guys opened for a week's gig at the one of the jazz clubs, and after the last set of opening night, he usually threw a party at his place strictly for musicians. Ed really wanted to be a jazz insider. He put a lot of his cash into backing a big band led by a guy named Gene Williams, but the band never made it, and Ed lost his investment. He didn't seem to mind. For one long stretch, he went on the road with George Shearing, acting as George's road manager for virtually no salary. It was just a case of Ed loving the whole experience of being associated with jazz musicians.

    So it was no surprise to make a record in Ed's living room. He had a nice Steinway piano except that it was missing the top three notes, the B flat, B and C. When Art Tatum sat at the piano for the first time and played a run to the top of the keyboard, he hit nothing but wood. "Oh," he said, "this is one of those pianos."

    As for Sylvia Syms, Frank Sinatra called her "the world's greatest saloon singer," and that was a pretty accurate description, a saloon singer rather than a jazz singer. But I found accompanying her to be the most natural thing in the world. I felt at home in the accompanist's role. I played for a few other women saloon-type singers on New York's east side, and I had the same feeling. I loved women singers. I listened to them, and in my accompaniments, I just reacted to what they were doing. They realized I was paying close attention, and they appreciated my careful responses. All of this was the beginning of an evolution for me.

    It wasn't just the women singers I loved. It was just as much the songs they sang. I gradually understood I was as much in love with songs as I was with improvising. There were plenty of influences around me for that kind of thinking. They went all the way back to Louis Armstrong when he said he always thought about the words to the songs he played, not just the melodies. To put it another way, music and words were equally important if you were interested, as I was, in understanding the whole song. That was Louis's message. Closer to home, among my influences, Billy Exiner, when he went on the road, invariably took a stack of records with him, all of them featuring singers. And my own Patsy consistently chose vocal records to listen to. She knew all the good singers. She'd mastered Sinatra's whole canon of songs before I got at all seriously into him.

    The single record of In Other Words with Sylvia Syms we made at Ed Fuerst's apartment has never gone on sale. It's a very good version of the song, but it still sits in a vault somewhere. For years, record executives have been saying to me, "It's going to come out any day now." 

    I'm still waiting.

Anita O'Day, when I played with her, turned out to be naturally musical in an older style. She had great ears, and she knew what she was doing every minute she was singing. She could swing like crazy in a 1930s form of jazz, which was fine with the guys in the band. As I suspected from the first, bop intimidated Anita, and we all figured the best way to take care of things was just to go along with what she could handle. It was her gig after all.

    Still, for all our good intentions, there were some volatile episodes. Anita especially didn't hit it off with Tiny, and in a general sense, she seemed afraid she wasn't going to come across as hip enough for the younger crowd to dig. Even with those complications, things went reasonably okay until we got to St. Paul. That was where the band went off the rails, though none of it was Anita's fault.

Just before we headed for St. Paul, Dave Schildkraut pulled out of the band. He had to go home and look after some family problems with his wife. That meant we needed to find an alto player in St. Paul. Within a couple of hours of checking into the St. Paul hotel, we discovered that we were also going to need another trombone player and another bassist. What happened was that the St. Paul drug cops busted Milt Gold and Gary Miller. Both guys were junkies, and the cops seemed to know who they were, what they were, and which room they were staying in. No cop even tapped on Don Fagerquist's door or on the door to the room I was sharing with Tiny. The narcs went straight to the right room. They must have been tailing Milt and Gary, or maybe their heroin dealer in St. Paul was the person with the cop tail on him. Whatever the explanation, the result was that the police arrested the two guys, and all of a sudden, in practically the snap of a finger, we needed to fill out the group with three new people before opening night at the Flame.

    Somehow we got the alto player, the bassist and the trombone player. I don't remember much about the first two guys, but the guy on trombone I'll never forget. He had just come off a gig in Hal McIntyre's dance band. He played with a nice tone and could read anything, but he had no jazz skills whatsoever. He was a lead trombonist, not a soloist

    Every night, before Anita came on, the band played a few tunes on their own, all of them bebop anthems. The first tune on the first set was Dizzy's Groovin' High, which Diz based on the chords of Whispering. Don Fagerquist played the first solo-he was a brilliant musician--then the alto saxophonist played his. The trombone player insisted beforehand that he'd take a solo even though that wasn't his talent, but as he listened to the other guys' solos, he got very jumpy. He didn't know what in the world we were playing.

    "What is this song?" he asked Don.

    "Groovin' High," Don told him. "Just think of it as Whispering."

    It came time for the trombone solo. The guy played the melody of Whispering straight through without a hint of variation or improvisation. It was straight melody.

    For his second chorus, the trombonist played the same thing. Straight melody all the way.

    Third chorus, same thing again. Plain, unadorned melody.

    The trombonist finished. Tiny leaned across his drums, and he said to me, "What ideas!"

    I broke up, and from then on, that was my favourite memory of the Anita O'Day tour.

    "What ideas!"