I Can Hear The Music: The Life of Gene DiNovi

Chapter Twenty-Seven

On the 1994 day I'm talking about, I had dropped by Paul Hoeffler's house in Toronto. By then, I'd been living in the city for more than twenty years. Paul, a great photographer, had followed a path similar to mine; from his base in New York City, he moved to Toronto about the same time I did, and continued his career as one of the world's premier photographers of jazz musicians. On the day of my visit, I was browsing through the LPs where he had shot the cover photographs. A bunch of the LPs were on the EMI label. It was a British company.

"EMI?" I said. "I think they're the guys that bought what was left of Roulette."

"Yeah, that's right," Paul said. "I shot a lot of the old Roulette covers and a lot of the new EMI covers."

"So EMI," I said, "must be where the tapes of my Scandinavian Suite are now."

Paul told me if I wanted to investigate, I should contact a guy named Michael Cuscuna. He was an experienced record producer and broadcaster who had produced records for Atlantic Records and founded Mosaic Records. Michael, whom I tracked by phone, turned out to be a nice, helpful guy. He told me the person I should speak to in London was a woman named Wendy Furness. Among other activities in the record business, Wendy had been a coordinator on several Roulette recordings. On the other hand, Michael said, I might be on a hopeless quest. It had been decades since the tapes were made, and they could be lost forever.

That was the possibility Wendy raised when I got in touch with her. She too pointed out that things had been dormant with the tapes for an awfully long time. But she said she would put on a search of EMI's files. During this period, I happened to be briefly in London on a gig, and on the day before I was scheduled to return home, Wendy phoned me with the news that, according to EMI's files, the tapes of The Scandinavian Suite were stored in London's Abbey Road Studios.

That fantastic news put me hot on the trail. Before I left London, I managed to get in touch with an EMI executive who had enough seniority to authorize a sale of the Suite's tapes to me. The price was ridiculously high. Not high in absolute terms-the sum was about twelve hundred dollars-but in terms that EMI didn't know the tapes even existed until I phoned to inquire about them. For all they knew, the tapes might have rotted away. EMI might be charging me twelve hundred dollars for a pile of dust. Still, we had agreed on the price.

Before I handed over the dough, I needed to make sure the tapes were intact inside their containers and actually had music on them. EMI wasn't interested in devoting its employees' time to checking the quality of the tapes, making sure the music was listenable. By then, I was at home in Toronto, and I needed someone in London to handle the job right away. Who could look after it for me?

The answer happened to be a guy namd Nat Peck. Nat was a Brooklyn trombone player, a pal of mine from the old days. He had a good career in the U.S. until he took his trombone to Europe and found plenty of work in Paris and London. At the time I managed to locate Nat, he was living in London, and when I got him on the phone, he said, "Abbey Road Studios? Man, they're just down the street from my house." My luck was holding good. Nat walked over to Abbey Road, and after enduring heaven knows what procedural bureaucracy, he sat in a room with the tapes and listened to the music. I waited back in Toronto, holding my breath. Then Nat phoned.

Well, he reported, there was a hiss at the beginning of the tape, but apart from that, the sound quality remained pretty darned good. Excellent, in fact. Nat told me I wasn't going to be disappointed.

In Toronto, I could stop holding my breath. I whipped off the fee to EMI, and Nat airmailed the tapes to me in Toronto.

I took the tapes to a studio called FX in the northern suburbs of Toronto. It was a place that had all sorts of space age technology. The two technicians I dealt with at FX were, comparatively speaking, kids. One of them had been born ten years after the tapes were made. But young as they were, these guys knew what they were doing.

They set the tapes up for listening. My heart pounded with anticipation. I didn't really know for certain what was going to happen in the studio, what we might hear from the tapes. In searching for them, I'd gone from Paul Hoeffler to Michael Cuscuna to Wendy Furness to the EMI guy I purchased the tapes from to Nat Peck and now to the two guys at FX. I'd been nervous the whole time, at every step, and finally, in the studio in Toronto, I was so jumpy I could hardly stand up straight.

Then we played the first tape. We heard the hiss Nat Peck had spoken of.

"We can fix that," one of the technicians said. "No problem."

After the hiss, there were no more blips, technical or otherwise. There was nothing except glorious music, and by five or six minutes into it, everybody in the studio had tears in their eyes. The Suite sounded so beautiful, and the sound was perfection itself. That was when I had fresh respect for the job Rudy Traylor had done on the original recording. The FX technicians felt the same way. They kept saying, speaking of Rudy, "Listen to his micing, man, listen to what he did here, listen to what he did there, this is amazing!"

From every standpoint, the 1958 Suite sounded magnificent to 1994 ears. It was beautiful music recorded with great technical proficiency. I felt ecstatic. The tapes were all I could have asked for. But for the special purpose I had in mind, there still remained a little more work to do with the whole Scandinavian Suite package.

My idea was to re-release the Suite in a modern form. Put it on a CD, and give it a second life. That meant there were a couple of additional hurdles to clear. For one thing, the tapes gave me only forty-six minutes of music whereas CDs customarily ran to more than an hour. I needed at least fifteen minutes more music. And I got the new material from three tunes I wrote for the CD and played as piano solos. I recorded them at another Toronto studio called Sound Interchange with a brilliant technician named Kevin Doyle.

The first tune, titled Rudy, paid tribute to Rudy Traylor, by then deceased, the man who worked such miracles of sound on the original recording. Along the same lines, the second tune, titled Lennie, honoured the one and only Lennie Hayton, also deceased. And the third number, which was largely improvisational, I titled Anagram For Everybody as a tip of the hat to all the other people who worked on Scandinavian Suite.

The three new piano pieces left one delicate task for Kevin Doyle, the technician. I recorded the new tunes on 1994 nine-foot Yamaha piano, which was as different as you could get from the 1958 Steinway of the original recording. The job for Kevin was to reconcile the two sounds from the two eras. In the words of one of the other techies in the studio, Kevin needed to match the "ambience" of the two pianos. He treated this as no big deal, but for me, observing on the sidelines, it was quite beautiful to watch this young master of the recording studio produce a piano sound that was incredible and compatible.

When Kevin was done, I held in my hands a CD on my own label of my own music from almost forty years earlier. Once again, The Scandinavian Suite was out there in the market place, the second time in my lifetime when it served as my own unique calling card. Not many composers can say as much.