I Can Hear The Music: The Life of Gene DiNovi

Chapter Fifteen

    So I decided against joining Artie's band, though I hung around with Artie later on, long enough to record two sides. Both of them were standards, The Man I Love and I Concentrate On You, but they had odd personnel. Instead of a big bebop band, Artie organized a band, exclusively for that recording session, made up of him, me, a rhythm section including the excellent Irv Kluger on drums, a large string section plus woodwinds and french horns.

    An experienced and versatile arranger and conductor named Hershy Kay wrote the scores for this unorthodox group. Hershy had already done interesting things in his career; he arranged the music for Leonard Bernstein's On the Town and wrote the scores for some Balanchine ballets. So he knew what he was doing. But for me, it was a surreal experience. I'd never been in the middle of such a large group of different instruments. It was a long way from Chubby Jackson's band, but I concentrated on my own job in the orchestra, and benefitted from the whole deal. 

    Those two sides were the limit of my work with Artie, and in later years, I wished I'd stuck around with him long enough to have the experience of playing in his Gramercy Five. That was Artie's small group within the big band, and it included, besides Artie, trumpet, piano, guitar, bass and drums. The personnel made for an intriguing sound, and gave everybody a great shot at soloing and at different kinds of effects in combining with the other instruments. It was an opportunity missed for me, but at the time, I was more interested in sticking as close to home as possible.

Also out-of-the-ordinary was a recording session I did in the spring of 1949 with a big band led by Buddy DeFranco. As a clarinet player, Buddy was the opposite of Benny Goodman. He was another of the great Philadelphia modern jazz musicians, and he loved bebop.

    The DeFranco recording took place in the same studio where I played earlier with Benny at the WMGM opening. But there was one major difference: the rows of seats had been packed with an audience for Benny, but at the DeFranco recording session, the seats were empty except for the one Gerry Mulligan sat in. He was there because he was late finishing something he was supposed to write for Buddy.

    The most memorable side that came out of session was a George Russell composition called A Bird in Igor's Yard. As the title indicated, it was a simultaneous tribute to Charlie Parker and Igor Stravinsky. A lot of other musicians were doubtful of George Russell's talent. They complained he wrote things that didn't swing. I disagreed. I thought George was a good guy with really interesting things to say in his music. He had already written a nice tune for Dizzy's big band called Cubano Be, Cubano Bop, which featured the Cuban drummer Chano Pozo who was in the Gillespie band at the time.

    Playing A Bird in Igor's Yard was difficult work, and I had to concentrate like crazy to get the piano part right. Even then, George wanted the band to do one more take. But studio time was running out, and no more takes were done. The final product must have worked out fine for George because his career went well just sticking to the experimental path he liked.

    After the recording session, George and I stayed friends for a few years. He came over to my house a bunch of times to talk about music and fool around with ideas. Then, many years on, he bought a Volkswagen from me, and left in it to tour with a band led by David Baker, a composer who wrote music much like George's. I didn't see much of George after that. But I figured the Volkswagen had suited him okay.

By my own choice, I worked semi-regularly in Bob Chester's big band for a couple of years. I chose it because it wasn't a touring band. It kept me at home in Brooklyn, just as I wanted, and, to my surprise it gave me some wonderful musical moments. There was nothing remotely far out about the band. We played Roseland, the Arcadia and other dance halls, and we did live radio dates with singers as different as Billie Holiday and Una Mae Carlisle.