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...
Herbie Stewart, Gene and Dave Young in Yokohama, Japan.
In early 1990, the Ontario government invited Jim and me to play in the Ontario pavilion at the Flower Expo that summer in the Japanese city of Osaka. I had never been to Japan and was keen to make the trip. So was Jim, but something came up that kept him from going.
"Never mind me," Jim said. "Go over by yourself. You'll have a great time."
Though I was disappointed not to be working with Jim, he was right in his remark about the great time I'd have.
When I arrived in Osaka in July, I found that I was being put up, not in a hotel, but in a much more comfortable apartment which I shared with a Canadian couple who made and presented jewelry. My job at the fair was to play solo piano at the Ontario pavilion just before and just after lunch. The whole deal was very pleasant, and apart from the intense July heat, I enjoyed the pavilion, which was built, paradoxically for an Ontario structure, of British Columbia cedar.
One day, a Japanese gentleman came up to me, sniffed the disctinctive odour of the B.C. cedar, smiled and said, "Good smell. Good jazz."
To travel from the apartment to the pavilion each day, I rode two trains. One train operated at street level, and the other was elevated. Getting from the first train to the second, I needed to walk up a short flight of stairs to a landing, then turn on the landing for another short flight up to the next train. On the landing, there was a large display case holding a beautiful flower. I saw this lovely flower on display each day, and I was surprised at how many hurrying commuters paused to absorb the sight of the flower. I couldn't imagine the same thing happening on the New York subway, and I decided that, for the Japanese commuters, this was a special moment when they absorbed the flower's loveliness. It was a different moment for them in their commuting, a precious moment. This so impressed me that I wrote a song about the experience. I titled the song Precious Moment.
While I was in Osaka, I got a phone call from a complete stranger. The man introduced himself as Mitsuo Johfu of Yokohama. Johfu owned a prosperous men's clothing business in his home city, but more to the point, he also owned a jazz record label. He started recording albums in 1978, and among the musicians he featured were guys like the pianists Duke Jordan and Sir Charles Thompson (it was Lester Young who put the "Sir" on Sir Charles's name), the trumpet player Chet Baker, many other contemporary American jazz guys and a ton of European musicians whose work I didn't necessarily know. Johfu was a huge jazz fan, and he wanted to record me before I went home to Canada.
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Johfu in Canada.
How did Johfu know I was in Osaka at that particular time?
The answer was that Mark Gardner had tipped him off. Mark is a jazz writer in England. I met him during one of the many gigs I worked in London-I can't remember with whom--and we stayed in touch by mail. Mark's address was one I never forgot for its distinctive Englishness: The Hawthorne, 14 Partridge Lane, Faversham, Kent. Mark made his living as a local newspaperman, but his passion was for jazz, and he had written the liner notes on many of Johfu's records. Mark liked my playing, and he told Johfu that I made the kind of jazz that fit right into his label's recording philosophy.
