I Can Hear The Music: The Life of Gene DiNovi

Chapter Sixteen

The route to Peggy in 1951 had its faint beginnings long before that on a day in early 1948 when I dropped by the Nola Studios looking for someone to play with. I found exactly the right guys in a studio on one of the upper floors where four people were sitting, just playing time. Exquisite time, as it happened. Barry Galbraith was on guitar, Joe Shulman on bass, Billy Exiner at the drums, and Gil Evans playing piano. The first three guys were the rhythm section for the Claude Thornhill Band, and Gil was the band's principal arranger.

    Every modern jazz musician loved Claude's band. Besides the usual big band instrumentation, Claude used two French horns, a tuba and always at least one clarinet in the reed section on every number. The big thing Gil aimed for in his arrangements for the band was lightness, and he filled his writing with sustained chords and tonal colours that were as rich as he could make them. The band's rhythm section played long and clean, and the repertoire included Gil's arrangements of tunes composed by Bird (Anthropology, Yardbird Suite) and Miles (Donna Lee). It was no wonder that guys like Gerry Mulligan, Lee Konitz and John Carisi worked so happily in the band.

    But sometime in early 1948, Claude broke up the band. My own opinion was that Claude might have had a perverse streak and disbanded every time he gathered a group that played at the top of their talents. The 1948 breakup left a bunch of musicians high and dry. That was the fate of the four guys I ran into at Nola's. They were playing that day just to keep loose and stay involved in beautiful music. They were doing nothing except playing time, perfecting their sense of rhythm. Since Gil was such a nice person, he invited me to take his place at the piano and play with the section.

    "Sure," I said, sounding like a basic nervy kid from Brooklyn. "What do you want to play?"

    Somebody suggested All the Things You Are.

    We played it, and we played a bunch more tunes. Eventually it occurred to me that this was the first time I was truly accompanied. The three rhythm guys were listening to me, and they expected me to listen to them. Gil was listening too. He was listening with his ear in the piano. 

    I got in the habit of looking for Gil and the others at Nola's on a regular basis. Often other musicians joined in, young Turks like Miles Davis, Stan Getz, Brew Moore, John Carisi, the cream of the cream. Looking back, I can't believe how lucky I was, a young kid with all those great players.

After many of the Nola sessions, I went with the others to Gil's one-room apartment on 55th just west of Fifth Avenue. The apartment was in the basement of an old brownstone, a few steps down from street level and along a corridor past a Chinese laundry to the far end of a furnace room. Gil's place was fairly big and looked out on a small courtyard. Exposed pipes ran the length of the room's ceiling. The furnishings consisted of a double bed, a record player, a large lamp, a hot plate, a piano and a resident cat named Becky (Miles wrote the first eight bars and I wrote the bridge for a tune inspired by the cat; we called it Becky's Night Out, and it became a tune I played fairly often with different small groups.)

    Gil lived in these spare surroundings from some time in 1947 to early 1949, and during that short period, it's no exaggeration to say that in this simple room, a group of musicians led by Gil worked out a new shape of modern jazz.

Guys used to flock to Gil's place all day and all night. I don't know how he got any sleep. Maybe he didn't. Maybe sleep wasn't important to Gil. Everybody went there at one time or another. Included in the mix of visitors were Mulligan, Konitz, Carisi and the clarinetist Danny Polo and all kinds of other people from the Thornhill band. Charlie Parker turned up frequently. Gil was always so glad to see him that he never objected to Bird shooting up heroin in the bathroom. The great trombonist J. J. Johnson came by, as well as the trumpet player Jimmy Maxwell who was Gil's oldest friend (the haunting trumpet solos on the sound track of The Godfather were Jimmy's). Two composers were regulars, John Benson Brooks and my pal George Russell, and part way into 1948, Miles Davis came often, usually accompanied by Max Roach.