When we arrived back home from Europe, Pat and I found the perfect apartment for a couple with a little kid. It was in a development called Parkway Village on thirty-seven acres just off Grand Central Parkway in Queens. Big-shot New York people like Robert Moses and John D. Rockefeller Jr. kicked in to build Parkway Village in 1947 as part of the pitch to bring the United Nations to New York City. The village was intended as the home for the foreign employees and their families who would pour into New York to staff their countries' delegations. And that was the way history unfolded when the UN voted in favour of setting up operations in New York. Architecturally, the village was in the style of post-war garden communities, and people of all races and colours from nations all over the globe soon arrived in Parkway Village.
Somehow, though neither Pat nor I had any UN connections, we managed to score an apartment in the development and later move into a second and larger apartment. All the village's buildings were no more than two or three stories high, set among small parks and open spaces. It was both picturesque and safe for kids. Like most of the apartments, ours were on two levels, and outside, kids ran around having a great time without worries about traffic or other urban menaces. Denise loved it, and so did out second daughter Michelle who was born in New York Hospital on June 11, 1958. Our little family was complete.
At this point, Lena was up to something completely different for her. In early 1957, she signed to do a Broadway musical, which was eventually titled Jamaica. It bugged Lena that she'd never been given a weekly TV show of her own or a starring role in a movie (later, in 1969, she made a not bad western with Richard Widmark titled Death of a Gunfighter in which she played a saloonkeeper and the madam in a brothel). Since TV and movie opportunities never opened for her, Lena leaped at the chance to do a musical, even if it turned out not to be the best musical ever conceived.
On paper, Jamaica looked promising. The famous Broadway impresario, David Merrick, was producing the show, and the songs were by two immortals of songwriting, Harold Arlen (music) and Yip Harburg (lyrics). These were the two guys who wrote all the songs in The Wizard of Oz. Harburg put together the words for hundreds of other songs by heavyweight composers like Vernon Duke, Julie Styne and Burton Lane. Arlen conceived so many unforgettable melodies that it sometimes seemed as if he wrote half the Great American Songbook. Blues in the Night, That Old Black Magic, Let's Fall in Love-they were all his. Not to mention the song Arlen wrote with Ted Koehler in 1933, which became identified with Lena after she sang it in the 1943 movie of the same title, Stormy Weather.
The idea behind Jamaica was to capitalize on the craze at the time for calypso music. Harry Belafonte, Mr. Calypso himself, was supposed to play the lead. But after a lot of stalling around, Harry backed out. Merrick and the rest of the people involved in Jamaica approached Lena, promising to reshape the show's lead into a female character. Lena, who eagerly agreed to the offer, played a woman on a Caribbean Island who wanted to make a future for herself in New York City. That wasn't much of a plot, but everybody counted on the combination of Lena and the songs from Arlen and Harburg to make the show a hit. The expectation turned out to be half right.
I figured into Jamaica as a member of the show's pit band. Lena's regular trio had changed by one-third, Johnny Cresci being replaced on drums by Jimmy Crawford. Jimmy was a veteran guy who had played for fifteen years in the Jimmy Lunceford band and had accompanied everybody from Dizzy to Bing Crosby. Normally Jimmy, George Duvivier and I weren't the type of musicians who played in Broadway pit bands, but Lena wanted the reassurance of backup musicians she already felt comfortable with to give her support among the strangers of the show's regular pit band. The three of us accepted the job, and I stuck it out on Broadway for seven months.
First came the rehearsals. I was just one of three rehearsal pianists, the one known as Lena's guy. I played for her when she worked on her songs from the show. Then there were the other two rehearsal piano players, Peter Matz and Mario di Bonaventura, each of them a fascinating personality.
Peter knew musical theatre and knew how to accompany theatrical singers like Marlene Dietrich and Noel Coward. He had worked on House of Flowers, the 1954 musical by Harold Arlen and Truman Capote, and Arlen brought him on board for Jamaica. Besides playing at rehearsals, Peter arranged some of the songs and worked with Jack Cole, the show's choreographer. Since Peter had such a specific talent, one suited to a dramatic style of singer, it was no surprise to me that he later went on to a long musical relationship with Barbra Streisand.
The other pianist was a man on an entirely different musical level. In all round terms, this pianist, Mario di Bonaventura, was the most brilliant musician I ever came across in my life. I wasn't sure how Mario got into the Jamaica picture, but I knew he came to us from nine years in Paris studying two subjects, music with the renowned teacher Nadia Boulanger and conducting with the equally renowned conductor Igor Markevitch.
Much later, the years long after Jamaica, Mario had a varied career. He became Director of Music at Dartmouth College's Hopkins Center, and also played an intregal role at the music publisher, G. Shirmer Music, through his vast musical knowledge. Mario could move as easily in the academic world as he could in the symphonic field. He was simply a fabulous man of music.
For the brief period when Mario came into my orbit as the third rehearsal pianist on Jamaica, he blew us all away with the things he could do at the piano. He was the only pianist I ever met who could take a score and play it immediately in another key no matter how difficult the tranposition. By contrast, even if you held a gun to Harold Arlen's head, he couldn't play Over the Rainbow in any key except the one he wrote it in. Other pianists, including me, could play a song in another key if we had time to work it out. Mario didn't have to work anything out. With him, it was just a case of, "Oh, you want this song which is written in B flat to be played in E? Okay." And, without pause, he would proceed to play the entire song in the new key perfectly. The rest of us fell over in awe at the man. To him, reading and transposing a piece of music was as simple and relaxed as sitting down to read the day's New York Times. Mario's musiciality, his fresh intelligence and his kindness made all of us who were around him forever greateful.
One of the overall troubles with Jamaica was that the songs didn't get anybody excited. It wasn't that Arlen and Harburg were over the hill. Harold was fifty-two at the time of the show, and Yip was sixty-one. Neither had reached his dotage, but their songs for Jamaica seemed to have lost the zip you expected of Arlen and Harburg. When the show opened on Broadway, I played the whole score eight times a week in the pit band, but today, I'd have trouble finding my way around the keyboard for any of the songs. The melodies just weren't memorable.
The song situation got so desperate during the time Harold and Yip were putting the show together that they reached back to material they'd written for a past show and for a long gone movie in order to fill out Jamaica's score. Ain't It De Truth was a song the pair intended for the 1943 movie, Cabin in the Sky, but it got cut from the movie, only to be resurrected to fill out Jamaica. Napoleon originally belonged to the 1937 Arlen-Harburg Broadway show Hooray For What?, but like Ain't It De Truth, it was axed before the show opened, finally ending up in Jamaica. The thing about Napoleon was that it actually had kind of a catchy melody and clever lyrics:
Napoleon is a pastry
Bismarck is a herring
Alexander is a crème de cocoa mixed with rum
And Herbie Hoover is a va-cu-um.
Duke Ellington and Gene DiNovi circa 1968.
Jamaica, mostly forgettable songs though it had, opened in Broadway's Imperial Theatre on October 31, 1957. Lena's first appearance on stage drew a two-minute ovation. And that was before she spoke a line or sang a note. People were just excited to see Lena Horne on a stage, and the opening night reception set the pattern for Jamaica's entire run; the audiences were so thrilled with Lena that they mostly overlooked the show's failings.
The critics saw it that way, too. When the opening night reviews appeared in the next day's newspapers, Jamaica's book and songs were panned and Lena won all the raves. Only two songs drew praise: Ain't It De Truth and Napoleon. But it was almost entirely on the strength of Lena's presence and her voice that Jamaica didn't close until April 11, 1959, after running for 555 performances.
I played for about half of the run, then threw in the towel. Working in Jamaica's pit band was the only time in my life that I got tired of playing the same thing over and over. To be more accurate, it was probably the only time in my life that I had to play the same thing over and over. Jazz musicians never play a tune the identical way as the time before. The idea in jazz is to mix it up, to change ideas, to tinker with harmonies and melodies. It's a contradiction in terms for a jazz musician to keep repeating the same phrases and ideas. A couple of things about working in Jamaica were somewhat enlightening; watching from up close how tough Lena was on conductors struck me as a different if painful experience (especially painful for the poor conductors who got fired). But even with diversions like that, the repetition involved in Jamaica finally wore me down.
Not that there weren't crazy moments during my months with Jamaica that gave me a laugh or a memory. One of those-both a laugh and a memory-involved Duke Ellington.
On this particular night, after the show started, I was heading up a flight of stairs back stage. Coming down was Duke. He had been backstage visiting Adelaide Hall, the wonderful singer who had a role in Jamaica and had once worked with Duke (she did the wordless vocal on the famous Elliington recording of Creole Love Call). I'd never been introduced to Duke, but I was so familiar with his music that I felt like he was a close friend. I'd listened to his music practically all my life, and working with Billy Strayhorn during my time with Lena gave me an even closer insight into Duke and his compositions.
On those backstage stairs, Duke looked a little like he'd been ill. He was thin, and his clothes hung loosely on him. As we approached one another, him descending, me ascending, he slipped. I reached for him, and he fell into my arms.
"Father!" I said spontaneously.
He gave me a funny look. He seemed nonplussed. Or maybe he was thinking, "Oh no, not another!" Not another guy who thought Duke was his biological father.
What I meant when I said, "Father!" was that I subconsciously looked on Duke as one of my musical ancestors, a player and composer who had influenced the way I played and wrote. I'd been absorbing Duke's elegance and distinction for decades, and now here he was, in my arms.
Duke and I managed to straighten ourselves around on the backstage stairs. Duke got out of my arms and on to his feet. I brushed off his jacket. He checked his shirt and tie. I introduced myself, and he explained he'd been visiting Adelaide Hall, a singer with a supporting role in the show and a vocalist with Duke's band in the 1930s. We said we must get together some day under different circumstances, and both of us went on our way.
I felt both privileged and embarrassed at our meeting, but the best thing about it was that, later on, we really did get together, and Duke became an even more positive influence on my music that he had already been.