I Can Hear The Music: The Life of Gene DiNovi

Chapter Eight

    

A guy named Andy Masters had a band that rehearsed in the basement of a house in Brooklyn not all that far from where I lived. I knew the band must be pretty good because Al Cohn wrote charts for it. I loved Al's writing, "Mr. Melody Maker," I called him when I got to know him.

    One night I went to the band's basement rehearsal just to listen. When I walked in, everybody was sitting around waiting for the guitar player. He had a job as an elevator operator at a building in Times Square, and had trouble getting away on time. The guitarist was Chuck Wayne.

     After Chuck arrived, everybody, including me, continued to sit around, this time to listen while Chuck played. He was way out in front of the people in the room in ideas and skill and speed and everything else. He had a smooth, evenly paced legato technique, something you didn't hear in many other guitarists at the time. Later on, all kinds of people played that way, but as far as I could tell, Chuck might have been the first. 

    He was such a remarkable musician that I knew I had to get to know him. I introduced myself right away, and our friendship began that night in the basement. From then on, lasting for the next few years, Chuck became a mentor to me and a kind of older brother.

Chuck was another jazz guy who changed his name. He was born Charles Jagelka in New York City in 1923. His parents were Czechoslovakian, and as a kid, Chuck took up the old world instruments, the mandolin and the balalaika. When he switched to guitar, the ability to play with swing was apparently intuitive to him from the start. He worked on 52nd Street in the early 1940s before he was drafted into the navy. When he got out a couple of years later, he began to play as if he were the Charlie Parker of the guitar. Chuck heard Bird play at the Three Deuces, and turned himself into a bebopper who swung. He was so good that Dizzy hired him in 1944 for a record session that produced a pair of bop classics, Groovin' High and Blue 'n' Boogie.

   Chuck had one other dimension. He loved Ravel and Debussy, the French impressionist composers. Chuck adapted these people's harmonic ideas to his own playing. He wrote a couple of pieces-In a Chinese Garden was one-that reflected the influence on his music of the impressionist composers.

   

Later, in early 1946, after Chuck played in Woody Herman's band for a few months, he wrote a song called Sonny. It was a tribute to Sonny Berman, one of Woody's trumpet players who blew with tremendous power and imagination. Sonny had a drug problem, and died from an overdose in January 1947 when he was only twenty-one. Everybody loved Chuck's Sonny. Miles Davis loved it so much he stole the song and renamed it Solar, listing himself as the composer. Many people recorded the tune as Solar, everybody from Bill Evans to Pat Matheny and McCoy Tyner. Miles got the royalties.

    In the late 1990s, I visited Duke Ellington's grave in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. Duke was buried in a modest family plot. But ten yards away, I noticed a grave with a monster tombstone. I walked over and took a look. It was Miles's plot. Chiseled into the tombstone were the first four bars of a tune. I recognized them right away. The four bars were from Solar.

    Or, more accurately, they were from Sonny.

From the first year or two after I connected with Chuck at the basement rehearsal, he taught me something about everything in music. Repertoire, technique, harmony-I learned about the whole catalogue of jazz skills from Chuck. He may have looked very cool on the bandstand, Mr. Laid Back, but he was an impassioned musician and teacher.   

    He introduced me to dozens of tunes and melody lines. He knew all the standards and he knew the wrinkles that guys like Bird and Dizzy added when they based a tune of theirs on a standard. And Chuck always emphasized the harmonic sense. He was like a hip version of my original teacher, Frank Izzo, telling me to learn the right harmonies to all the songs. Chuck also had a virtuosity in his playing that made me work on my own technique. In bebop, all of us wanted to play fast. Speed was the big deal for us, something the older jazz guys didn't have. But Chuck had it. Man, he could play fast, and I set out to keep pace with him. Chuck was my model and inspiration from the time I was in my mid-teens.