I Can Hear The Music: The Life of Gene DiNovi

Chapter Forty-Seven

I made many more trips to Japan, nine in total, and I recorded many more albums for Marshmallow. More than once, Neil Swainson went overseas with me. Toronto boasts a surprising number of world class bass players, and Neil is one of them. He rates with Don Thompson and Dave Young in that category. It's interesting to me that both Don and Neil spent several years working with George Shearing. George was one of those pianists who settled for nothing except the best. He got Neil and Don. And so did I.

    On one Marshmallow recording, Neil and I worked with a Japanese drummer named Kazvaki Yakoyama. He turned out to be the finest drummer I encountered in Japan. On another recording, with a quartet, my fellow musicians were all Japanese. The excellent Yakoyama was once again the drummer, the bassist was okay, and the clarinetist owed his style to Buddy DeFranco. It was a mixed bag of musicians that I found myself playing with on all the different recording sessions for my friend Johfu. On a 2009 recording, I had two Toronto guys, Neil on bass and Ernesto Cervini on drums, plus a Japanese alto saxophonist named Hirami Masuda. Masuda was not bad, and she was a she, a young lady alto player. It seemed to me, on my Japanese excursions. I played with everybody except the person I was supposed to have been partners with at the very beginning of my Japanese experience. I never did make the trip with Jim Campbell.

The Japanese connection took on a home component for me back in Toronto when the Japanese Cultural Centre entered my life. The Centre, in North York a couple of miles northeast of my house, was a large sprawling one-story building, which offered plenty of room for art exhibitions, music performances and everything else that touched on the arts. A generous man named Makato Matsumato, who had retired from the upper echelons of a big Canadian company, became a dedicated follower of mine. He collected every record I ever made, and it was Makato who promoted me at the Cultural Centre. The man I actually dealt with in arranging the concerts was the Centre's director, Jim Heron. Jim was probably the most amiable and reasonable concert orgnizer I've ever done business with. As his name indicates, Jim wasn't Japanese, though he spoke the language, and his wife, Masayo, was Japanese. She was as sweet as Jim was amiable, and I wrote a song for one of her birthdays. I didn't mind doing anything for Mr. and Mrs. Heron.

    "How is Jim's Japanese?" I once asked Johfu.

    "Better than mine," he answered.

    I played many concerts at the Cultural Centre, some solo and some with accompaniment. One of them, with Dave Young and the Toronto guitarist Andrew Scott, was released on an album I titled Brand New Morning. No matter who I played with at the Centre, with a trio, duo or solo, I could always count on an attentive and encouraging atmosphere. It felt as if everybody in the audience was a friend. And, in fact, most people who found their way to the Centre became friends sooner or later. It was that kind of venue.

    The trio on Brand New Morning made up the group I called Generations. That was because each guy came from a different generation chronologically speaking. I was the senior guy, Dave was the middle-aged representative, and Andy Scott was the guy from the youth movement. Andy was a guitarist I had an interesting relationship with. I first knew him when he was just out of diapers--or maybe still in diapers. His parents were none other than the pianist Marilyn Scott and the financial guy Bill Scott who became friends when I first arrived in Toronto. At one time, they lived on McPherson Avenue in the city's mid-town, on the north side with the busy railroad tracks at the end of the garden. I used to go over to the house, and play piano with Marilyn while baby Andy lay listening in his crib.

    Of the three of us in the room way back then, Marilyn, me and Andy, it was Andy who became the most schooled in music. He graduated from the Humber College jazz program. Then he earned a Master's degree in Historical Musicology at the New England Conservatory of Music where he studied with my old friend George Russell, and in 2006, he graduated from York University with a PhD in Musicology and Ethnomusicology. Properly speaking, this young guy I knew as a baby became Dr. Andy Scott. He also became a husband and father, married to Mindy who's a lawyer, and together they're the parents of three young kids. One other thing he became was a wonderful guitarist, and over the years I've worked many gigs with him, usually in the Generations group and often at the Old Mill, a nice jazz room in the city's west end.