Gene Di Novi played piano for the greats of the 20th Century: Lena Horne, Peggy Lee, Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker.
This is his biography spoken to the fine writer Jack Batten.
"I played piano with Bird and Diz...
Along with a concert career I was so happy to be working at the CBC. Percy Faith and Robert Farnon had started there in the 1930s, two musicians who had been good to me. Percy did a few of my songs first. The orchestrations of Robert Farnon to this day move me emotionally more than any other music I've encountered.
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Robert Farnon.
It wasn't just CBC radio that invited me to perform. I worked for CBC-TV as well. The television producers heard me on the radio or at La Scala or some place else, and they decided I would fit into their shows too. CBC-TV had a lot of imaginative producers behind the scenes, guys whose names weren't well known to the public-Bob Gibbons. Ross McLean, George Robertson, Don Cummings-but they set the tone for entertainment programming on the network, in a sense creating a musical tone for the whole country.
The first show I appeared on was called The Gene and Jodie Show. It broadcast from June 1974 to June 1975, every Saturday night at seven, thirty minutes of jazz and vocals led by me and Jodie Drake, a Toronto blues and jazz singer. I worked with a pair of my favourite rhythm guys, the bassist Michel Donato and the drummer Jerry Fuller, and we had guest performers every week, many of them from the United States. The great trumpet player and great person Clark Terry came on for a show, and so did the violinist Joe Venuti. Venuti once worked with Lennie Hayton and all the other early jazz musicians in the Paul Whiteman Orchestra, and I'd heard so many stories from Lennie about how wild Joe had been that I felt terrified of the guy. But he turned out to be really sweet. Maybe age had mellowed him.
Gene and Jodie's producer was Bob Gibbons. He was in effect the person who turned me loose in front of the camera. I had no real experience with that kind of entertainment, but Bob thought I had the personality to act as a host to the TV audience and to project whatever it was-warmth? a welcoming feeling?-I was supposed to project. I went along with what Bob asked for and everything seemed to fall into place.
The show lasted for a year, but when it came to its end, Bob Gibbons scooped me up for another CBC-TV show he produced called In Good Company. It combined entertainment and current events, all of it hosted by the attractive Hana Gartner. The show ran for a year, from June 1975 to June 1976, thirty minutes at seven p.m., three evenings a week at first, then one evening a week. I played piano and did some ad lib chatting with Hana. Though I had no real experience with this specific kind of show, I adjusted to it, generally went along with the ride, and enjoyed myself tremendously.
Paddy Sampson was the guy who guided me and my talks on songwriters to the next level. Paddy freelanced for the CBC and other networks as a television producer and director who had a particular love for jazz and the Great American Songbook. Over the years, Paddy did a TV special featuring Duke Ellington, another on Lena Horne and one about American blues singers. Paddy knew his stuff, and he proposed that he and I cooperate on a show about the songwriters I'd been discussing on the radio for so many years. We would interview each songwriter in a comfortable atmosphere, me handling the interviews, playing the tunes and maybe singing some of them. Each songwriter would sing one or two of his own tunes if he felt up to a little vocalizing (just about all of them, as it turned out, felt very much like singing).
