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...
As my second career as a jazz musician cooked along into the early 1990s, I was really keen to work gigs at the Montreal Bistro. The club was geographically off the beaten path, on Sherbourne Street a couple of blocks south of Queen, which put it in a corner of downtown Toronto that was isolated after dark. But all my local jazz musician friends worked there, and they loved the place.
A married couple named Lothar and Brigitte Lang ran the club, both of them jazz fans who were musician-friendly in the way they presented the groups they booked. People responded to the club and the musicians who played there, and the Montreal Bistro seemed to be a success. The only negative thing as far as I was concerned was that Lother and Brigitte never booked me.
The problem, unknown to me, was that the Langs thought I was a New York piano player, which I guess I was in some interpretations, and that I lived in New York City, which I hadn't for decades. The Montreal Bistro featured American musicians from time to time, but it wasn't a set policy of theirs. Apparently the Lang definition of "American musician" covered me. Then, finally, I was hired for a week's gig with a trio in 1991. But as I discovered when I walked into the club on the first night of my first booking, the Langs were still under a misapprehension about my home. They continued to think I was a New Yorker and had just flown up from the Big Apple.
"When did you get in?" Brigitte asked me.
"Nineteen seventy-two," I said.
That first week, I fell in love with the place. For one thing, it had a warmer feel than most nightclubs. But the best thing of all was that the club set a high standard in appreciation for the music. At the beginning of every set, an announcement was made asking the patrons to "Please respect the musicians and be quiet during the set." That repeated announcement trained the audiences, and everybody actually shut up. In fact, it seemed clear to me that the Montreal Bistro's standard for audience behaviour had a carryover effect. Toronto audiences learned that jazz musicians deserved to be listened to no matter where they played, and other jazz clubs in the city attracted people who kept their chatter to a muted minimum during sets just the way they did at the Montreal Bistro.
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Gene and Dave Young exploring Ellington and Strayhorn.
After my debut week at the bistro, I appeared regularly until the club closed in the summer of 2006. During that stretch, I cut two live records during gigs there. The first, which was released on Candid, took place over a couple of days in October 1993 in a trio with Dave Young and Terry Clarke. On the record, it must have become apparent to listeners, if they hadn't realized it much earlier, that I had a deep affection for the obscure but gorgeous songs of well known composers. All of this was the result not just of my love for the Great American Songbook but of the study of the composers and all their works that I did for CBC radio. That, plus all the interesting musical situations I'd been involved in as an accompanist, gave me a formidable store of songs that I could draw on.
