I Can Hear The Music: The Life of Gene DiNovi

Chapter Forty-Four

Early one evening toward the end of 1983, the cornet player Ruby Braff dropped by the bar in the King Edward Hotel where I was playing. Ruby was booked into Bourbon Street for a week, but he took the time to come and hear me play. I didn't know Ruby especially well, but I admired his music. He grew up in Boston in the age of bebop, but his musical idols weren't Bird and Dizzy. Ruby was crazy about Louis Armstrong and Bobby Hackett. Like them, Ruby was a brilliantly lyrical player, and it was clear he loved songs and singers. He told me his favourite singer was Bing Crosby. It was Bing and the Great American Songbook and melodic music that Ruby and I talked about. Gradually, in our chatter, we formed a mutual admiration society. Ruby even showed up for one of my concerts at the Art Gallery of Ontario.

    In truth, Ruby was not the easiest guy to get along with for many people. He was very dogmatic in his opinions and self assured to an unbelievable degree. One time some years earlier, Benny Goodman phoned, asking him to play a gig with Benny's group. Ruby said he was busy on the nights Benny suggested.

    "But listen, Benny," Ruby went on, "why don't you come and play with us?"

    I could imagine how Benny, not small in the ego department, reacted to this suggestion from someone he no doubt regarded as a callow young cornet player.

    Ruby was always that way. Very early in his career, he had a tiny role in a 1955 Rodgers and Hammerstein Broadway musical called Pipe Dream. The show was a relative flop by the standards of Rodgers and Hammerstein, but it represented the only appearance by Ruby on the Broadway stage. The show was based on the John Steinbeck novel, Sweet Thursday, and Ruby played a Mexican wetback who walked to centre stage in his big sombrero and blew a few notes that Rodgers had written. As everybody knew, Rodgers went nuts when a musician or singer fooled around with his melodies. But Ruby blew different variations on the songs every night. Though Rodgers kept reprimanding Ruby, none of that fazed our Ruby.

    "I can't play the same stuff every night!" he said.

    It was probably a good thing for Rodgers's sanity that Pipe Dream lasted for a comparatively short Broadway run.

    There's not much doubt that Ruby grew even more cantankerous with the years. Musicians referred to him as being "Mr. Hyde and Mr. Hyde."  But he and I got along just fine, and we decided to record an album of the two of us together, playing piano and cornet duets.

    We went into the studio on January 17 and 23, 1984, and the studio in question was in Don Thompson's basement. Besides being a superb multi-instrumentalist who had worked with people like George Shearing and Paul Desmond, Don was an accomplished composer and arranger and a very good engineer with his own small studio in his mid-town Toronto home.

    Ruby and I recorded enough for two albums. We didn't wander too far from the Great American Songbook, but still included a couple of my tunes. Have a Heart was one of them. Ruby and I also put together medleys that really interested me: My Funny Valentine, My Heart Stood Still and Be Careful It's My Heart worked very nicely. I sang a little, mostly on tunes that weren't much known: Trumpeter Blow Your Horn, Isn't It a Pity, He Loves and She Loves.

    All in all, Ruby and I clicked together, and I issued the product of our two sessions on two LPs on my own Pedi Mega label. But that wasn't the end of the duets. Later I sold the two albums to John Norris of Toronto's Sackville label. John was an all round jazz guy; he founded the Canadian jazz magazine CODA, edited it with another similarly minded guy named Bill Smith, and the two of them had Sackville Records. Sackville combined the duets with a recording John made in 1979 of Ruby and a Toronto rhythm section consisting of Ed Bickert on guitar, Don Thompson on bass and Terry Clarke on drums, and issued it as a double album. This album got off to a solid start when the Winnipeg newspaper tycoon, Izzy Asper, who loved jazz, bought a thousand copies, and it continued to be valued for decades by lovers of good songs well played by musicians who knew what they were doing.