I Can Hear The Music: The Life of Gene DiNovi

Chapter Forty-Five

James Campbell and Gene DiNovi: Jazz in a classical key.

One day in the winter of 1984, I dropped into the Thompson studio to have a word with Don about a piece of business involving the Ruby Braff recordings. Don happened to be talking other business with another musician in the studio that day. This other guy was Jim Campbell whom I knew about but had never met. Jim was a very good classical clarinetist from Leduc, Alberta. He won the CBC Talent Festival some years earlier and began a steady climb to broad success in the classical world. He played in various symphony orchestras and in many smaller groups. He recorded with practically everyone, including Glenn Gould. And he played under the baton of Aaron Copland in a version of Copland's Clarinet Concerto.

    Jim and I hit it off from the minute Don introduced us. Jim was especially intrigued that I had played with his fellow clarinetist Benny Goodman and had written Divertimento and Blues for Benny. I got together with Jim frequently after that, not just to talk but to play music together. Jim wanted to improve his jazz playing, and I wanted to do the same with my classical work. It was a short step from there to collaborating in concerts.

Gene with Veronica Tennant and James Campbell.

We called our concerts Jazz in a Classical Key. When we started, the idea was to make the concerts half classical and half jazz. But Jim got so enthusiastic about jazz that the concerts became more like a third or even a quarter classical and all the rest jazz. I was the teacher and guide in the jazz material, but Jim had such phenomenal technique that he grasped jazz nuances in just about record time. Jim was convinced that he got better at playing Mozart after he started playing jazz. It certainly worked for me the other way around. My jazz benefitted because I was playing classical composers with Jim. Working with him turned out to be a great trade off: he made me play Satie and I made him play Ellington. Satie was actually a natural composer for me to relate to because he was the Thelonious Monk of the classical world. Like Monk, Satie wrote off-the-wall music.

Not long after we met, Jim took over leadership of the Festival of the Sound. It was an annual series of concerts held over a couple of summer weeks in Parry Sound, Ontario. The festival started in 1979 under the leadership of the pianist Anton Kuerti. It featured musicians and orchestras and small groups, all of them classical in style, from all over the world. The festival grew bigger and more popular with an ever wider audience as the years went on, and it especially increased in every positive way when Jim became the artistic director in 1985. The festival and Jim were pretty much synonymous, and it was Jim who saw a role in Parry Sound for me. Besides inviting me to play at the festival, he commissioned me to write things that fit into the regular programming.

    I became in effect the hipster of the Festival of the Sound. But I had to tread carefully because the audiences were almost exclusively classical people. Jazz was foreign territory to most of them, and the majority didn't understand jazz at all. To break them into my jazz world, I started with songs that just about everybody knew, with standards and Gershwin compositions and Harold Arlen's work. Then I branched out from there.

    As an illustration of what I played, a set I did at the 1990 Festival with a quartet made up of Jim, me, Dave Young on bass and Bob McLaren on drums was pretty typical. I billed the 1990 evening as Sunday Night at the Movies. It included pieces, mostly written for films, by Harry Warren, David Raksin, Henry Mancini, my wonderful old friend Hugo Friedhofer, Toronto's own Hagood Hardy (he arranged the music for television's Anne of Green Gables) and Morton Gould, represented by his composition, Pavanne.      

    Morton Gould was the perfect composer to present to the Parry Sound audiences because he qualified as the first crossover composer, the musician who led the way in combining classical music with the best of the popular styles, a category that included a little jazz. Gould played piano, but in his playing, his composing and his conducting, he wasn't a jazz player. His popular side led him to compose for Broadway musicals, then he moved into the classical field.  In fact, I traveled a longer distance than he did, going from bebop to the classics. But Gould was a remarkable musician, and his Pavanne was actually very beboppy in nature, something I loved to play.  

    Apart from my musical connection to Gould, I had a small personal relationship with the man himself. After my record with Ruby Braff came out, Gould sent me a letter praising the album and my playing. It was a very flattering letter, and in response, I wrote a tune called Festival in Blue, which I dedicated to Morton Gould. I never recorded the piece, but we played it in Parry Sound more than once.

In 1996, I recorded an album with Jim Campbell, which we titled After Hours. It pretty much reflected the kind of thing we played at the Festival of the Sound. The group was made up of Jim and me, plus Dave Young on bass and Terry Clarke on drums, both wonderful musicians. The album covered pieces that ranged over classical music as well as jazz. It had compositions by Duke Ellington and by the French art-song composer Francis Poulenc. It included Gould's Pavanne and Ravel's Habanera. The record was pretty indicative of the way we tried to appeal to both the jazz and classical audiences, and we had a ball playing the music from such a variety of composers.

    Jim and I recorded another album four years later. This one, titled Manhattan Echoes, featured a trio made up of Jim, me and Dave Young, and it was more a straight ahead jazz album. We played Stardust and Last Night When We Were Young and You Must Believe in Spring. But as well as songs by Hoagy Carmichael, Harold Arlen and Michel Legrand, we did a couple of my own tunes. One I called Celia was for Jim and Carol Campbell's daughter, and the other, Sweet Song of the Night, had a simple but very satisfying melody; both tunes came with lyrics written by my pal Bill Comstock, though they don't of course appear on this album. One other tune was written by Jim's son, the excellent guitarist Graham Campbell. He called it Tune For Andy, and it had the distinction of being chosen by the great movie director Robert Altman for the sound track of his 2006 movie, A Prairie Home Companion.

   

Life, especially the musical life, was full of surprises, and in 1990, a huge surprise was in store for me. It was one that grew indirectly out of my connection to Jim Campbell. Or, maybe more accurately in this case, it was my momentarily missed connection with Jim.