I Can Hear The Music: The Life of Gene DiNovi

Chapter Eighteen

(Billy Exiner with the Claude Thornhill Band)

Drummers always fascinated me.

    It was obvious that drummers were at the heart of the music I played. But more than that, I liked it that they dealt in feel. And I appreciated that, physically, in the way drummers were placed in a band, they had a vantage point slightly above and removed from everybody else in the band. This meant they could see and hear the other musicians more clearly than the rest of us in the band. And since they didn't have as much to read as we did, they could take the time to make judgments about how we measured up. As if all of this wasn't enough in their favour, drummers were usually the guys with the best senses of humour.

    Among all drummers, it was Billy Exiner who fascinated me the most. He was as subtle as any drummer I've ever heard. He played with length. And he was unique in his refusal to take solos; just supplying the rhythm satisfied him. All of that defined Billy, and then he had something more. He was the most Christ-like man I ever met. And like Christ, he taught without writing anything down. You either caught what Billy was saying, usually in his one-liners, or you didn't.

Billy was quite a bit older then me. He was born in Brooklyn on November 22, 1910, a Jew of Russian descent who got adopted by an Irish-Catholic family in Boston. Billy grew up understanding both cultures, Jewish and Catholic, and that must have given him a start on the breadth of knowledge I loved in him. He was also a guy who looked for the good in everybody. And he usually found it.

    In music, Billy was a late starter. He served in the merchant marines in the mid- 1930s, and one night when he was on leave, he went to a dance hall where a pal of his was playing drums in the band. The friend had to get off the bandstand to take an important phone call, and he told Billy, who'd never played drums in his life, to sit at the drum kit and keep time with the brushes for a few minutes. That was the magic moment for Billy. He was twenty-four, and he became instantly hooked on the drums. It turned into his life's work.                                         

In the late 1930s, he played with a lot of bands: Hudson-Delange, the Sunset Royal Serenaders, Jan Savitt. On a gig at the Onyx Club on 52nd Street with a lady tenor saxophonist named Lana Webster, the other band on the bill was the Spirits of Rhythm, a group with John Kirby on bass, Teddy Bunn on guitar and Billy Kyle on piano. These three went for length in the beat, the first small group that got the Basie approach in the rhythm section. Billy Exiner never forgot the lesson he took from the Spirits of Rhythm.

When the Second War broke out, the army drafted Billy. Stationed at a military camp in Florida, he was assigned to a marching band. He happened to hear that Kenny Clarke, the great bebop drummer who'd also been drafted and stationed in the Florida camp, was busted by army MPs for possession of a marijuana roach. They locked Kenny in a cage where he could neither stand nor sit. Billy did some manipulating that somehow rescued Kenny from the terrible cage. But when word got around among the racist officers that Billy was tight with a black guy, he was kicked out of the marching band and sent to combat in Europe.

    Billy had a bad war, coming out of the fighting with a back full of shrapnel. It was too painful for him ever again to lie down. The best he could manage at night was a few restless hours sitting in a chair or a bathtub. Billy lived in a near constant state of exhaustion, and as a matter of regular habit, he fell asleep at work on the bandstand. The most amazing part of his story was that, fast asleep, he still played impeccably. He kept great time. Guys in the bands he worked with laughed at Billy's predicament. But they soon learned that the worst thing they could do was wake Billy in the middle of a tune because then he'd drop the time for a few bars. It was better to wait until the end of a number before stirring the sound-asleep drummer.