I Can Hear The Music: The Life of Gene DiNovi

Chapter Forty-Three

One of the great benefits of working in the music business in Toronto was that musicians didn't get typecast the way they did in Los Angeles. Back in L.A., once a guy stepped to the podium, it was almost a sure bet he would be from then on strictly a conductor. He couldn't jump back and forth from that role to other roles in the business. But in Toronto, I found that a musician was free to switch around. I could conduct at a recording session in the morning, work on writing a composition in the afternoon, and play at La Scala at night. Nobody considered that to be out of the ordinary.

    In the matter of work, in my early days, I kept on the move at a nice variety of assignments. One evening, Oscar Peterson and Phil Nimmons, the clarinetist, composer and big band leader, came to my El Pueblo apartment in the Beach. Phil had written something for Oscar to play in a short film for which Oscar and a group of other musicians were providing the sound track music. Phil didn't want to conduct the band at the recording session, and the two guys were wondering if I'd handle the conducting. They showed me the music, and I said, of course. I was thrilled to be asked.

    In the same general period, I got in a handful of gigs at Bourbon Street, the premier jazz club on Queen Street where Paul Grosney handled the booking. I played a week there as Al HIbbler's accompanist. I worked one night backing the great Zoot Sims. And on another night, I sat in with Bud Freeman, the swing era tenor saxophonist. The thing with Freeman wasn't exactly a formal gig. It was more that I was pushed into it by a man named Maury Kessler, a Toronto stockbroker who became a friend of mine. Maury loved jazz, and he befriended every jazz musician who lived in Toronto or was just passing through. Sometimes Maury's friendships led to unexpected events like me sitting in with Bud Freeman, a guy I was otherwise very unlikely to encounter musically.

Not every Toronto musician made me feel totally welcome during my early years in the city. Some-a miniscule few-tended to freeze me out at first. That kind of thing happens in any big music centre. I remembered when Urbie Green, the incredibly gifted trombone player, decided to come off the road after many years of touring with Woody Herman and a couple of other top bands. He wanted to get into studio work in LA. I would have expected a musician like him who could read anything put in front of him and had a lovely sound and great technique on his instrument would be welcomed with open arms. But that wasn't the case. Urbie had to fight for his acceptance as if he were a kid just starting out.     

    My situation in Toronto was nothing like that, but I felt as if I had to prove myself, not so much in my playing as in my writing. It was in the latter where I seemed to have run into a roadblock. Fortunately for me, I happened to get a writing job that allowed me to show whatever inventiveness I possessed.

    A man named Len Casey hired me for this job. Casey ran Ontario Place, the entertainment facility on Toronto's waterfront near the Canadian National Exhibition grounds. For showing on a big screen at Ontario Place, Len had commissioned a 45-minute film all about Toronto. The film, which ended up with the title of Toronto The Good, was directed by Chris Chapman who had a reputation for working in multi-image cinematography. Chris first emerged as the guy who shot A Place to Stand, a much celebrated multi-image movie shown at the 1967 Expo in Montreal. All of this was a kind of lead-in to the process called IMAX, which has since become famous for its spectacular multi-image effects.

    My role was to write the music accompanying Toronto the Good, and I had an idea that was sort of the secret to success for my part of the project. Since the sound, in keeping with the multi-image approach, was two-sided, I used two bass players to anchor the music. The two bassists I hired were Don Thompson and Michel Donato. These were absolutely top guys, and the rest of the band was just as wonderful. I had Guido Basso on trumpet, Bernie Piltch on alto saxophone, Kathy Moses on flute, and a string section with the great Alfred Pratt as my concertmaster. I loved writing for such gifted musicians, and the results were very pleasing to me, particularly because it settled once and for all the doubts anybody in the Toronto music community might have had about my ability to handle complex writing jobs.

    What I think was actually happening for me as a composer was that the ideas about writing that I picked up during my years in Los Angeles began to jell in Toronto. I learned a lot from writers like Neal Hefti and Marty Paich, but the lessons from people of that caliber didn't sink in overnight. It took time for me to grab hold of them, and the process really came to fruition for me when I settled down in my new country. There was less confusion to life in Canada than in the United States, and for me, Toronto was the right place, and I was at the right age, for things I might have overlooked as a younger guy to really take hold.

I didn't record anything in Toronto until 1977, and even then, the recording wasn't entirely my idea. It happened that three guys who came often to La Scala loved electronics, a category that included the intricacies involved in making a record. Two of the three guys were also devoted to coffee and knew all about growing the right beans and so on. But my conversations with the three focused on recording me live at La Scala. The guys were named Bill Hutchison, James Stewart and Peter Caunter, and they handled all the engineering in getting my playing on record for the first time in years.

    The music I chose for the recording reflected the approach I was taking to the Great American Songbook. I played my New York medley, my London medley and the short tribute to Ray Noble's compositions, The Very Thought of You and The Touch of Your Lips. The selection of songs pretty accurately reflected what and how I was playing at that time. The recording quality was great, and so was the whole package. The photographs of me on the LP were taken by John Reeves, Ralph Tibbles designed the album cover, and Charles Oberdorf wrote the liner notes. All three were top Toronto guys in their respective fields, and all three knew my music. I couldn't have asked for more. 

    I issued it on my own new label, which I called Pedi Mega. That was my little joke, pedi for feet and mega for one thousand. Okay, a modest joke, I admit, but I felt pleased with the record. As it happened, I didn't make another recording until the mid-1980s.