While I was still with Jamaica, Lennie Hayton came up with an idea that liberated me from some of the boredom of playing the same music night after night at the theatre. The story of how he happened to conceive the idea owed its origins to Lennie's drinking habits.
He was a guy who really enjoyed drinking alcoholic beverages. He usually began his daily imbibing with martinis at five in the afternoon. No matter where we were, the five o'clock martinis were a ritual in which he'd usually be joined by some of his pals. In New York, that usually meant Arthur Laurents, the playwright, director and screenwriter (West Side Story was his), and other people at that high level. Neither George Duvivier nor I drank. In fact, both of us were pretty clueless about the nature of alcoholic beverages. But we learned somehow that a martini was made with gin and vermouth, and late one afternoon, as a surprise for our boss, we bought the ingredients and mixed Lennie a martini. He was surprised and pleased, and gave us a big thank you. Then he took his first sip.
"Arghh!" he said, his face getting red and twisted as if he'd bitten into a lemon. "What's in this thing?"
"You make a martini with vermouth and gin, right?" I said. "Seven parts vermouth to one part gin?"
Lennie could hardly talk, he was laughing so hard at George and me.
"No, you idiots," he said, "it's the other way around!"
George and I looked at one another and shrugged.
"Thanks you for the gesture, gentlemen," Lennie said "but leave the martinis to me."
Lennie, the drinker, was pretty much left on his own during the nights of Lena's run in Jamaica. Since she arrived at the theatre three hours before the curtain went up and headed straight home when the curtain dropped, Lennie passed the evenings hanging out in high end bars, shooting the breeze with like-minded barflies. He became drinking buddies with a guy named Morris Levy who owned Birdland and managed a bunch of bebop players. Nobody could help noticing that Levy made a ton more money out of his deals than anyone else. He was like a character from The Sopranos, except ahead of his time.
Among Levy's enterprises, he started a record company in 1956 named Roulette Records with financing from the New York mafia. A couple of years later, Levy and Lennie made a deal in a bar one night calling for Lennie to record three Roulette albums a year. For his first album, Lennie recorded his own arrangements of the songs from Jamaica. On one of the tunes, Cocoanut Sweet, Lennie wrote a gorgeous ending that featured a New York violinist named Gene Orloff.
Orloff was a guy I'd seen at least once on jobs around the city. That came on the day in September 1948 when I played with the Benny Goodman group at the opening of radio station WMGM. Harry Horlick's orchestra performed at the opening, a group that specialized in gypsy folk music. During the Goodman part of the show, playing Stealin' Apples, I noticed one of the young Harry Horlick violinists tapping his foot. What I couldn't help registering was that the guy was tapping in the correct time. That was rare with people who weren't jazz musicians. They usually mess up the beat, but not this guy. Harry Horlick's foot-tapping violinist, clearly a lover of jazz, was Gene Orloff.
"Oh, man," I said to Lennie, when he played me his arrangement of Cocoanut Sweet with Orloff, "I'd love to write something for that violinist."
"Then why don't you?" Lennie said right back.
In a flash, he had an idea all worked out. He said I should write a suite of pieces that evoked Sweden. "You loved the country," Lennie said. "The way you reacted over there, Sweden cast some kind of spell over you. So why not write about it? Why not put it in music? Build it around Orloff ? You can record it for Roulette with me conducting."
I knew that Lennie's proposal wasn't entirely altruistic. My music about Sweden would get him off the hook for one of that year's quota of three albums he owed Roulette.
But beyond the self-interest, it happened that Lennie was a very observant guy. If he'd noticed my love affair with Sweden and if he thought I could make music out of my feelings, then who was I to question him? Besides, Lennie's idea dovetailed with the feelings about Sweden I took away with me when I left the country. The notion of a suite of pieces about Sweden was right up my alley. I knew that composing something like that would be a tremendously demanding job for a guy of my limited writing experience. But why not take on the challenge?
For the next several months, my life fell into a routine. Every night, I played in the Jamaica pit band, and every day, I sat at the piano in our apartment in Parkway Village and wrote the pieces that came to be known as The Scandinavian Suite. The second part of the routine, the day time part, was so exciting that the first part, the nights at the theatre, didn't bug me half as much as they had been.
I wouldn't say the pieces came easily. But I felt encouraged that visual images of Sweden, of Stockholm in particular, seemed to be percolating inside my head and that they emerged in the form of notes and chords on my music paper. I was writing the pieces principally to be played by the violinist Gene Orloff with woodwinds and a rhythm section. They were the instruments that I thought would work best in evoking my memories of Stockholm's buildings, its neighbourhoods, its extremes in weather. These were the pictures and feelings that were hanging around in my imagination, just waiting for me to find a way to express them.
Part of my composing routine during those weeks was to drop by Lena and Lennie's apartment on West End Avenue a couple of times a month and play whatever part of the Suite I'd just finished writing. The visits were always late in the afternoon, just before Lena left for the theatre. I enjoyed all those afternoons in the apartment, but the day I played the piece I called The Quiet Snow was the one that became stamped forever in my memory.
The sun was shining into the apartment from over the Hudson River. Lennie stood behind me following the music on the sheet as I played, Lena sat in a wing chair facing us, looking more beautiful than a painter could ever convey. I finished The Quiet Snow, and for a long moment, there was a pause in the room.
Then Lena, breaking the silence, said to me, "I don't know if I can express how proud I am of you."
Lennie knew pacing. So did Lena. That was an important reason why I played my pieces for them. Lennie had a great sense of theatre in music. Just working with him as Lena's pianist taught me by a kind of osmosis how to place things where they should go. That was what I called pacing. I'd already soaked up a lot of it, and then, writing my own Suite, Lennie got more specific with his advice. He said I needed a different ending to the whole thing. I rewrote the last passages. Lennie approved of the changed finale. He told me to alter a few other short sections, change a couple of bars here and there, and fairly quickly, following Lennie's tips, I finished my Scandinavian Suite.
The piece in the suite that I called Stockholm evoked the city in an overall sense. It spoke of the parks in the summer with their carpets of flowers, people sitting at tables under brightly coloured umbrellas sipping glasses of aquavit through the long nights of daylight. The Waterways explained in music why Scandinavians called Stockholm the Venice of the north. The city's bays and inlets spilled with sailboats, motorboats and cruisers. I wrote passages for a flute and Gene Orloff's violin to play duets dashing around one another the way Stockholm's small craft darted across the city's countless pieces of water. Very Far North of Uptown was the piece with the most jazz content since it presented a portrait of Stockholm's neighbourhood of jazz clubs. It was an area that reminded me of 52nd Street when I was a kid.
And so it went through my collection of musical evocations. A Midsummer Night's Romp celebrated the amazing June 21 when the dawn of one day was separated from the dusk of the preceding day by no more than a sliver of time.
Then there came my seasonal pieces. Among them were The Long Winter Wait, The Quiet Snow, And Finally Spring. I never experienced a Stockholm winter, but I'd endured enough cold and snow in New York to understand what the winter months in Stockholm were all about. I found that I had the imagination to express in music my emotions as winter at last gave way to spring.
On three appropriately snowy nights in the early spring of 1959, I brought together the musicians I hired to record The Scandinavian Suite. We worked in a small studio at Bell Sound not far from the Imperial Theatre where Jamaica was being performed. Each of those three nights, I took a short cab ride to the studio after the curtain came down on the show, and got to work with the musicians and with Lennie, our conductor.
Danny Bank, a reeds player, was a key guy. Though Danny was five years older than me, I knew him from earlier times when we were neighbourhood kids in Brooklyn. When he was a very little kid, Danny was one of the children struck by the epidemic of polio that went around at the time. For the rest of his life, he had to wear a big cumbersome brace on one leg. That's didn't stop Danny from playing a lot of baritone sax-he seemed to have deliberately chosen the biggest and most cumbersome of instruments-and doubling on clarinet, flute and all the other saxes. He worked and recorded with many topnotch big bands, Charlie Barnet's in particular, and later, beginning in 1959, Gil Evans picked Danny to play on all his albums featuring Miles Davis. Every leader picked Danny, and he worked so many studio jobs over the years that he must have cut close to ten thousand records.
For The Scandinavian Suite, I asked Danny to play alto flute and clarinet, and I gave him the job as my contractor, the guy who hired all the other woodwinds for the date. From his studio work, Danny knew which guys could handle which kinds of music.
"I got the best flute player in the world for you," Danny told me.
"Yeah!?" I said. "Who?"
"Julius Baker."
I'd never played with Julius, but I knew he had a fantastic reputation. When he arrived on the first night of our recording, Julius came across as a no nonsense kind of guy, very confident, someone who didn't suffer fools gladly. He took his first look at the music, then turned to me with a surprised expression on his face.
"This is a Gene DiNovi gig," Julius said. "So I thought it was gonna be a jazz date. It isn't."
I laughed, and took Julius's remark as a compliment.
The other guys in the band included Harold Salad on clarinet, Ernest Bright on bass clarinet, Gene Orloff of course on violin, and a rhythm section of me, Russ Savakus on bass, Teddie Sommer on drums, and Lennie conducting.
In the booth, our recording engineer, was a guy named Rudy Traylor who had the distinction of being a rare black engineer in those years. Rudy knew his stuff. He'd been a drummer for a long stretch, working most frequently in the Earl Hines band, before he switched careers. In the studio, he seemed really alert to everything, but it wasn't until more than thirty-five years later that I understood exactly how outstanding Rudy's talents were as a recording technician on the nights we made The Scandinavian Suite.
Over the three studio sessions, I experienced another of the exhilarating moments that don't come often to a musician. I had a feeling on those nights just like the one I had as a kid playing with Dizzy and Bird at the Spotlight Club on 52nd Street. There was magic in the studio in the same way as there had been on the Spotlight's band stand. These great musicians, Gene Orloff and Julius Baker and the others, were bringing my music to life. They had so much experience that they didn't make mistakes. In fact, in the case of some other guys in the studio, they might have been playing a little over their heads, inspired maybe by my music or maybe by the example set by Orloff and Baker or maybe by their desire to please Lennie Hayton whom everybody respected so much.
The overall thing was that, in music, it didn't get any better than the New York studio musicians of the late 1950s. Their love of music was so strong, so dedicated, so thoughtful. These guys were the cream of the cream, and especially when you're speaking of Baker and Orloff, the guys playing my music were unrivalled anywhere.
Orloff was the only musician in the group I talked to at length beforehand, making sure he understood what I was asking from him since he was the musician who inspired me to write the Suite in the first place. The rest of the guys just pretty much sight-read their parts. That was especially demanding in Baker's case, and he pulled it off like a genius. He sight-read forty-six minutes of music and didn't miss a single note. With Gene Orloff, when he got to the parts where a sense of jazz was called for, especially in Very Far North of Uptown, he grasped exactly what the music needed from him. He nailed those passages. But then he was magnificent all the way through all the sessions.
As for my own playing, the piano virtually took care of everything. The instrument was one of those incredible Steinways where every note was true from the first note at the bottom of the keyboard to the last note at the top. The piano came as close as it could get to playing itself. Or, at the very least, it motivated me to play things I wouldn't have otherwise dreamed of playing.
That seemed to be the case with all the people in the studio. I couldn't remember a situation to equal the Suite sessions where the concentrated feel flowed from musician to musician so completely. This was the ultimate in group playing, and I got so pumped up by what was happening in the studio that I felt like I might burst out of my skin.
When we finished recording, I turned the completed tapes over to the Roulette people, and that was where the grief set in. My music confused the heck out of Roulette. What was this Suite? Was it classical? Was it jazz? Or was it something else altogether? In historical terms, all of this was happening long before the term "cross over" came into general usage. At a later period, my music might have been confortably labeled cross over, but at the time, it was just plain confusing to Roulette and the record stores
Roulette didn't have a clue how to market my music. The sales department was at a loss when the record stores asked which bin to put the records in. Jazz? Classical? Where? It was the same puzzle they faced over and over, and nobody had an answer.
The result was predictable: my Suite didn't exactly go flying off the shelves. Over the years, friends who owned the record told me the same kind of story. Oh yeah, they'd say, I love the LP, I found it in a Walmart store somewhere outside Chicago or I came across it in a little shop in Austin, Texas, wherever. And it came at an incredible bargain, they'd say, no matter where they found it. Everybody seemed to have bought the record for a dollar ninety-nine.
On the positive side, I discovered that my peers in the business, my fellow composers and arrangers, knew and dug the record. The first time I was introduced to the great Bob Farnon, he said to me right off the bat, "Gene DiNovi? Oh, wow, you wrote The Scandinavian Suite! I bought two copies!" It was the same thing when I ran into Quincy Jones in Charlie's Tavern in New York. "Gene, your Suite! I own it and it's magnificent!"
In that sense, the record became my calling card, a composition that showed people what kind of music I was capable of writing and playing. It won me respect in the business, and probably earned me jobs in ways I wasn't aware of.
That was heartening. But for years, the recording itself was literally lost to me. Roulette went out of business, and I had no idea where the tapes from the recording sessions had gone. They vanished, and they remained beyond my reach until a day in 1994 when The Scandinavian Suite began to wind its way back to me.