I Can Hear The Music: The Life of Gene DiNovi

Chapter Forty-Six

Johfu called his label Marshmallow Records, a name whose significance didn't immediately register with me. The clue was that Johfu loved Lennie Tristano's music, and he was crazy about Tristano's longtime tenor saxophonist, Warne Marsh. Hence, Marshmallow Records.

Warne came from Los Angeles where his father was a prominent cinematographer, which meant that the family lived a well-to-do life. But Warne followed his jazz muse to New York City and to Lennie Tristano. He played his tenor in long, pure lines, which was just right for Lennie. Warne was a member of the quintet for many years, and later, post-Tristano, he had a big success with Supersax, the all-saxophone jazz group.

By the time I met Johfu, Warne had passed on in dramatic fashion. He died in 1987 on-stage at Donte's, a Los Angeles jazz club, in the middle of playing Out of Nowhere. Warne was gone, but his reputation as a first rate tenor player endured, and so did his name in Marshmallow Records.

On the phone, Johfu asked me to record an album before I left Japan. I rearranged my plane flights and traveled to Johfu's home in Yokohama. He had lined up two good Japanese guys for the rhythm section, Kohji Tohyama on bass and Yukio Kimura on drums. We recorded on July 10 in a studio in a strange location under the stands at a sports arena. Our engineer was "Mr. Stream." That was what his Japanese name translated to in English. Mr. Stream knew his business, so did the two rhythm guys, and we got right to it.

We cut eleven tunes in one day (though only seven of them made it to the record). Most were standards, Tea For Two, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and so on. But we also tossed in a couple of originals by me. One of them was the tune I'd written after pausing to look at the gorgeous flower on the landing in the train station. And it was the name of this tune that Johfu put on the cover of the CD. The album, the first ever trio recording in all my years in music, was called Precious Moment.

As things unfolded, the album served a larger purpose for me. It was the album, Precious Moment, that launched me on my second career as a purely jazz musician playing jazz. The first happened when I was a bebop kid playing around New York City with Dizzy and the Chubby Jackson Band, recording with Lester Young and leading the life of an itinerant jazzman. Now I was doing it all again-except that now I was a lot more than a bebopper, and the guys I was playing with were usually much younger than I was. Back in the day, I was the kid. Now I was the senior guy and eminence grise. In both cases, in both incarnations, I made a lot of music. The difference was that, in the later period, my playing was more mature and adventurous. And another thing different was that the second time around, I ended up cutting many more records than I ever had before, and always on the new records, I was the leader.

In large part, much of the volume of recording was owed to my new friend Johfu. As a typical example of how Johfu's ambitions and my career intersected to my benefit, it was a long-time dream of Johfu's to get Don Thompson on the Marshmallow label. So in March 1991, Johfu flew from Japan to Toronto, and we went into a commercial studio in downtown Toronto to record two albums with Don on bass and an interesting guy named Memo Acevedo on drums. Memo grew up in Colombia. That made him naturally gifted with Latin rhythms, but he was also a solid swinging jazz player. He spent a few years in Toronto, playing with everybody and teaching at Humber College's music school, before he moved on to a long career in New York City.

Both of the albums with Don and Memo mixed familiar standards with songs that weren't well known. On the first album, for instance, we did a tune called Maybe September that Tony Bennett used to sing. Percy Faith wrote the melody and the team of Jay Livingston and Ray Evans did the lyrics. And Deep Night was a tune that Frank Sinatra sang, but it went back further than him, back to Rudy Vallee who composed it.