I Can Hear The Music: The Life of Gene DiNovi

Chapter Fifteen

Charlie's Tavern stood on Seventh Avenue in the mid-50s. It had a traditional New York tavern layout, a bar running the length of the room on one side, booths down the other side. What made Charlie's different from other bars was the clientele. Most of the drinkers in the place were jazz musicians, predominantly white guys though a few black musicians frequented Charlie's. Coleman Hawkins drank there, and so, among others, did Charlie Parker. Bird always played country records on the tavern's jukebox. "I like the stories," Bird said about the songs.

    A nice guy named Charlie Jacobs owned the tavern. One week, he hired Bill Crow, the bass player, and Dave Lambert, the singer, to paint the front of the tavern in a deep red colour. The two guys finished the job, and in celebration, Dave did a handstand on the bar, picked up a glass of beer in his teeth, and drank the beer upside down. A photograph of Dave performing his miraculous balancing feat hung for years on Charlie's wall, Bill standing beside Dave and admiring his partner's dexterity. It was a great place, Charlie's, a home away from home for a lot of jazz musicians.

On a very wet night in the spring of 1949, I ducked into the doorway of the dry cleaner's store on Seventh Avenue next door to Charlie's to get out of the rain.  On the other side of the dry cleaner's was the Lasalle Cafeteria where Latin musicians hung out. As I stood in the doorway, waiting for a letup in the rain to make a break for the tavern, two guys came by on their way to the same destination. I knew one of them, Lou Brown who played piano for Jerry Lewis practically forever. The two guys got into the doorway with me, and second guy introduced himself as Lennie Lewis. He was Artie Shaw's band boy.

    Artie was apparently planning to put together a bebop big band, and Lennie's job was to do all the preliminary heavy lifting in hiring the musicians and rehearsing them. Then Artie would get into the act and weed out the guys he didn't need. In my conversation with Lou and Lenny that rainy night, Lenny was saying he still hadn't found the band's piano player.

   "Well, hell," Lou Brown said, pointing at me, "this's your guy right here."

That was how I got invited to a chat with Artie Shaw one afternoon at his place in the very spiffy Beaux Arts Apartments on East 44th near Second Avenue. I sat at the piano in the apartment and tried to show Artie what bebop was all about. He had a curious mind and was far more interested in different ways of making music than Benny Goodman ever was. Benny was cagey, never really admitting he was interested in bebop. That was far from Artie's style.

    "Tell me what you're doing harmonically," he kept saying. Artie wanted to know everything I knew. Coming from a guy as musically intelligent as he was, that was flattering. Artie was the musician whose solo on Stardust I considered to be a masterpiece, and he was asking me, of all people, for information.

    I demonstrated everything I'd learned from Dizzy and Chuck Wayne and all the other guys who had given me instructions over the previous few years. I showed Artie chord patterns in bebop, and whatever else I could think of. He was genuinely absorbed in the things I did on the piano.

A few weeks later, I went to a rehearsal of the band that Shaw and Lennie Lewis had put together. The rehearsal was in a hall in midtown Manhattan, and at it, I found all kinds of guys I'd worked with over the years. Don Fagerquist, Frankie Socolow and Zoot Sims were there. So was Johnny Mandel who had written the charts. This was a tremendous lineup of talented people, but I still found, paradoxically, that I couldn't get excited about the band.

    Partly it was a matter of the general chaos in the room, and partly it was a matter of the bass player whose style I instantly disliked. But really the fundamental reason I didn't get carried away by Artie's gathering of musicians was that the band was going to travel and play one-nighters all over the country. It would be out on the road for long periods, and as a guy who was just married, traveling away from Patsy was the last thing I wanted at that moment.