I Can Hear The Music: The Life of Gene DiNovi

Chapter Forty-One

In the early 1970s during the time I was playing at La Scala, I had a conversation at a party with a senior CBC radio producer named Ann Gibson. We got on to the subject of songs and songwriters. Naturally it was a topic I held forth on at some length. I talked to Ann about the reasons the songs from the Great American Songbook had such a long life. I talked about Gershwin and Berlin and Arlen and all the other songwriters I loved so much. Ann seemed genuinely fascinated, so I kept on giving her my views on the different songwrters.

    "Why don't you come on the radio and talk about this?" Ann said.

    That stopped me for a moment. On the radio? Me? Talking to an audience of Canadian listeners across the country?

    Well, as I thought about it, why not?

    The radio program Ann was talking about was the CBC's premier Canadian morning show, the one that was first hosted, from nine until noon, by Peter Gzowski and now featured Judy LaMarsh as host. Judy LaMarsh was relatively new to radio, but had already enjoyed an amazing career as a Canadian politician. She was a former minister in Lester Pearson's federal Liberal cabinet, an all-round popular, famous and personable woman. Ann Gibson's idea was for me to choose one songwriter from the dozens whom I admired. Then I'd come on the show, talk to Judy about the songwriter and his work, and play some of the songs, or parts of them, on the studio piano.

    It was clear to me that this was a chance made for me. Who else loved these songs the way I did? After all, I shared some history with the songwriters; like them, I was a member of ASCAP, the agency that calculated and distributed royalties for the use of songs on radio, TV and in nightclubs. I had been sponsored for ASCAP in the 1960s by the wonderful songwriter Harry Ruby. I knew many of the songwriters personally. I'd met others. And I'd worked with a few. 

The first songwriter I did on air with Judy was George Gershwin. Judy and I broadcast from the cramped old CBC Radio studios on Jarvis Sreet long before the new CBC building was built downtown. The space may have been a little confined, but Judy was a gracious host, and the piano was quite a nice Yamaha. I'd done a ton of research, and that plus what I already knew gave me more than enough material. I played a little Gershwin, talked a lot and reacted to Judy's genuine interest in the subject.

    When I came off the air, Ann Gibson and the other CBC people seemed really happy. They gave me a regular slot each week, and I kept on appearing on air at the CBC. I grew confident in my new role as an on-air personality, confident enough that on a very stormy winter morning when Judy LaMarsh got stuck in the snow, I carried on my segment of the show all by myself, doing what was in effect a one-person dialogue about the popular song.

    Eventually, working my segment every week, I needed five whole shows just to cover all of George Gershwin's music. The man wrote so many great songs that I couldn't do justice to his gifts without the five shows. It was the same with Jerome Kern and Cole Porter. Each of them got five shows too. I did so much research that I was finding songs that I'd never heard of before. It turned out that the CBC had a fantastic record library and an equally amazing record librarian named Jan Cornish who was a wizard at locating examples of rare songwriting by whatever composer I planned to feature on the radio.

   

Probably the greatest personal revelation that came from the radio shows was of myself as a vocalist. I recognized that I couldn't help the listeners understand the entirety of each song, of each one in both words and music, unless I sang the songs. So I began to sing on the air-and to introduce vocals to my work in the King Eddy and all the other venues where I worked at night.

    Until then, the only times when I did any singing came in rehearsals with people like Lena and Peggy and Tony when I was teaching them new songs at our rehearsals. In the teaching process, it just seemed natural to sing the songs myself. At the same time, accompanying Lena and everybody else, I absorbed a lot of the ideas and techniques involved in singing from these great singers I was working with. Who knew more about singing than Lena and Tony and Peggy? Answer: nobody. By a kind of osmosis, I was learning from the best, even though it never dawned on me that I would be a singer myself one day.