I Can Hear The Music: The Life of Gene DiNovi

Chapter Seven

    Al Haig was more intellectual than the other bebop pianists. He had a couple of years of seniority on everybody, born in 1922 in Newark, New Jersey. He had passed his twentieth birthday when he started playing with Bird and Diz. The older age gave him a touch of maturity, and he made himself a thinking man's bebop piano player. He liked to put things into boxes, an organized quality that made him appealing to the bebop leaders. For a long time, Al was first call on piano for Bird and Diz (unless, of course, Bud Powell was available, but Bud's own troubles with drugs and mental illness made him more often unavailable than available).

Pretty soon, I was having a coffee with the piano guys, most often with Haig and Wallington. We would walk over to the Nedicks at the corner of 52nd and Sixth. Nedick's was a chain specializing in hot dogs, waffle fries and orange juice. Wallington always ordered a tomato, just one tomato, which he would slice up very precisely before he ate it. The guy loved tomatoes.

    I tended to be a gregarious kid, and to me, there wasn't anything unique about me hanging out with friends. But with Al and George, my purpose other than socializing was to learn. I asked questions and listened to their ideas about bebop, about chords and harmonies and tunes. I might have been a little pushy, but I was driven by ambition. I knew there were all kinds of Italian kids my age in Brooklyn who had terrific piano talent. Some might have even been better than me at that stage. A kid named Tony Rubato was a wonderful pianist, but the point was he didn't go anywhere, not in jazz. Maybe he was discouraged by his family who told him music was no place for a young Italian boy to make his living. He needed to get a "real job." Maybe that was what happened to Tony Rubato.

    So far, nobody in my own family had warned me away from music. I kept on hanging out on 52nd Street.

Meanwhile, I was still at Fort Hamilton High, and I was playing the piano in every place where there was a piano. I played boogie woogie at school and in the social clubs for teenagers. I played boogie woogie because it brought the girls out to listen. Duke Ellington said there was always a beautiful girl at the end of the piano. In my experience as a kid, Duke didn't have it quite right. There were always beautiful girls at the end of the piano when I played boogie woogie. But when I played bebop, the beautiful girls drifted away.

   

I was getting a few paying jobs by then, mostly on weekends. The work came in neighbourhood halls and clubs, and it was almost always with a small group, just me, a saxophonist and a bass player. A drummer was added if the people behind the gig were really flush. The occasion was usually a dance, sometimes a small floor show, and the group played stock arrangements of whatever songs happened to be popular. Sometimes the pay was spectacular in terms of what a teenaged kid could expect to take home, as much as forty bucks for a weekend's work. Occasionally I worked a wedding. Musicians, especially guys who played saxophone, loved weddings. It wasn't necessarily the pay, which could be pretty good. It was more the food. When nobody was looking, the saxophone guys would fill their music cases with enough salami sandwiches to cover their lunches for the next week.

    Most of the people I played with at these weddings and dances and clubs had very little talent for jazz and zero interest in bebop. They weren't at all like me in their musical ambitions. But I began to hear about people who felt the way I felt, especially about bebop. These were guys from New York's five boroughs and from New Jersey, people like Red Mitchell, the Jersey bass player; Clyde Lombardi from the Bronx, another bassist; Chuck Wayne, the guitarist from Staten Island; Davey Schildkraut, a Brooklyn alto saxophonist. Most of them tended to be two or three years older than me, and further along the path toward making a living in bebop, but the path they were on was the same one I was on. I heard stories about Chuck and Davey and all the other guys, and though I hadn't yet met them, I was certain the day we would get together wasn't far off. I turned out to be right about that.