I Can Hear The Music: The Life of Gene DiNovi

Chapter Ten

     But I still have good memories and images from those nights. I'll always remember the sight of Red Mitchell leaving the house at five-thirty in the morning. Red had developed a little wheel gizmo that he attached to the bottom of the bass enabling him to push his instrument along the sidewalk. As the sun started to come up on my street, I watched from the door while Red wheeled his bass alongside my neighbours who were just leaving for work with lunch pails in their hands.

As for the music from the basement sessions, a little of it survives on a tape we made one night. This session was issued on a Japanese CD decades later. The sound is surprisingly good for such primitive recording conditions; it's so clear that at one point Patsy's voice comes through telling everybody the coffee's ready. What's harder to hear is the sound of Patsy playing a little of Billy Exiner's brushes on one track. Patsy's time was perfect.

    The record's personnel varied a little on different tracks, but I was on all the tunes. So was Joe Shulman on bass, and Billy was the drummer on most tracks. Two excellent alto players, Charlie Kennedy and Hal McKusick, took solos. But the number one guy on all nine tracks was Tony Fruscella.

    Tony was a beautiful trumpet player with a lovely tone, and he blew like an angel on the recording. But poor Tony led a tortured life. His parents died when he was a little kid and he grew up in an orphanage. He played in bands led by great people-Lester Young, Charlie Parker, Gerry Mulligan-and he married Morgana King who was an excellent singer and part-time actress (she played Marlon Brando's wife in The Godfather). Still, Tony had his demons. He drank too much, and then he got into heroin.

    Tony and Morgana lived in the Radio Center Hotel on 48th Street in Manhattan. Many jazz musicians made the hotel their home, guys like Gerry Mulligan, Red Kelly, Red Mitchell and Jimmy Chapin, the drummer. Some of the musicians in the place turned into terrible junkies, and I saw enough of syringes and of people shooting up to put me off the thought of drugs for my whole life. Guys like Mulligan and Chapin came through the experience of Radio Center perfectly intact. Chapin's father was the famous artist, James Chapin, who did a number of TIME magazine covers; I still have a framed copy of the older Chapin's portrait of the Russian novelist Boris Pasternak hanging in my office. And one of Jimmy's sons was the very successful folk singer, Harry Chapin. Jimmy himself made a lot of money writing two instructional books for modern drummers, books that people like Art Blakey and Max Roach swore by.

    So Jimmy and lots of other Radio Center residents were okay, but Tony Fruscella inflicted too much punishment on himself. Tony died of cirrhosis of the liver when he was only forty-two. I'm just glad that he left behind a few records, and that the CD from the basement at my house was one of them.

I recognized that a problem of mine as a kid piano player involved my left hand. I couldn't develop one. The bass players wouldn't let me. This wasn't exclusively my problem. Every bebop piano player had the same dilemma with bass players. The minute I, or any of the other pianists, played something rhythmic with the left hand, the bassist would say, "Hey, you're playing my part, man." The bassist would threaten to walk out if I didn't quit with the rhythm stuff. "Man," he'd say, "I'm gone if you keep doing that." And some bass players literally deserted the bandstand, leaving me alone up there.

    In an odd way, that worked to my advantage on one significant occasion. On this night I'm talking about, I was stranded on the bandstand at the Three Deuces all by myself, no bass player to provide the rhythm when the guy I was working with left in a huff. I kept on playing, doing marvelous things with the right hand and carrying the rhythm in at least an adequate way with the left. It happened that the two men who ran the club, Sammy Kay and Irving Alexander, heard me and were impressed. They asked me if I wanted to come in on Monday nights and play solo piano. I knew I'd have to forget about the rehearsal band at my house for the length of time the solo job lasted, but I couldn't turn down the chance at such a valuable experience.