The audience waits while Red sketches for Will, 1993.
Everybody backstage was shouting at Red Skelton to hurry up. They warned him that the curtain was going to rise any second now. Red told them to hold their horses. He had something important to finish. He was drawing one of his famous caricatures of himself as a clown for a nine-year-old boy. The curtain could wait until he finished. He didn't want to disappoint the nine-year-old. Red was meticulous about the drawing, which he dated and inscribed for "My new old friend."
This was at Toronto's O'Keefe Centre on September 11, 1993, and the nine-year-old was my son William. I had been hired to put together a medium-sized big band, with me on piano, which Red's regular conductor, Frank Leone, led during the week when Red performed his one-man show at the O'Keefe. It wasn't exactly a heavy musical gig, but I enjoyed watching Red at work. He was close to eighty, and he needed a cart to drive him from backstage to the microphone. The cartilege in his knees had been worn away in the rough and tumble of physical comedy during his early days in vaudeville. He wore knee braces now, carried a cane and rode a cart. But once he got in front of the mic, he delivered two straight hours of comedy that had the audiences erupting in constant laughs. He was a consummate comedian, an entertainer whose tremendous talent knocked everybody out.
He also turned out to be a very nice guy. He took the time to make William feel welcome, even if the curtain was on the verge of going up, and he was generous company when I took him to lunch at Griffiths. Griffiths was a deli-type family restaurant on Queen Street in the east end (it later relocated to Main Street and took a new name, Grumbles). Its décor was a busy jumble of clocks, a fish tank and oil paintings of domestic scenes. I thought it looked like the kind of place where Errol Flynn as Robin Hood would stop to dine. I invited many musicians and other entertainers passing through Toronto to come out to Griffiths for lunch. Red in paricular was a natural fit among the usual clientele. He charmed the family who ran the restaurant, Ron and Fran and Denise, and he drew them a clown caricature. Red's artwork-oil paintings, sketches and doodles, almost all featuring clowns-earned him millions of dollars. Which made me think that the little sketch Red did for William was probably quite vauable. It's still featured among the photos and drawings and other décor in our house.
One other thing about Red was that he got me on stage at Carnegie Hall. After the gig at the O'Keefe Centre, Red felt so happy with the way things had gone that he invited me to work his Carnegie Hall show. It made a nice visit back to my old territory in Manhattan.
For various reasons, I was called on to hire bands the way I did for Red. Usually these were on projects where I'd been commissioned to write the scores for documentaries like Women at War and I Married the Klondike. When I did the hiring, one of the first guys I always thought of was the most amazingly versatile musician I ever met, Toronto's own Jack Zaza. Jack could play everything except the brass instruments. He could play all the saxophones. He went to a teacher in Buffalo specifically to learn the oboe. He was the best electric bass player in town. He could play the mandolin, the accordion, the harmonica and, last but not least, the spoons. When my friend the great piano player and composer Dick Hyman came up to Toronto from his home in New York to write and conduct the music for Norman Jewison's 1987 movie, Moonstruck, I tipped him off to Jack Zaza. Dick ended up giving Jack a bunch of different musical roles, meaning one remarkable guy did the jobs of at least a half dozen regular guys. When Jack retired, his pension was extra large because he played so many instruments
I took all kinds of non-jazz jobs when they were offered to me as long as they had some intrinsic interest. Red Skelton qualified as interesting. So, in an entirely different category, did a few short teaching jobs I accepted, though in the end they proved to be not entirely satisfying. I taught at Texas A&M and at Indiana University (Indiana was where Jim Campbell has taught for decades). My preference in teaching procedure was to play an informal concert, then answer questions. I did that at the university in Winnipeg where Dave Young's sister was on the faculty.
But I also taught for a full semester at York University in Toronto, and I may not have left everybody entirely happy. The problem was that I didn't care for the way some kids approached the jazz course. They came to class late, talking and dropping coffee cups on the floor. They thought they were being cool. They were thinking more about what they perceived to be the so-called jazz life than they were about making the music. I told them jazz demanded an adult attitude and a lot of work. They weren't showing me either one. I don't think they cared for what I had to say. They probably considered me to be unhip. Fortunately this situation turned for the better in the following years
Teaching was one non-playing activity that I dabbled in. Movie acting was another, one where I got so many small roles and walkon parts that the work might have pushed me a little bit past the dabbling stage. All of this started one day in the mid-1980s in our apartment at Arcadia, the cultural co-op on Lakeshore Avenue. Deirdre was discussing a piece of movie casting with her assistant Tina Gerussi (daughter of Bruno, the actor and CBC personality). The movie was titled Cement Soul, and the tiny role they were discussing was that of a Catholic priest. Who was right for the part? Who even looked the part?
"I can do that," I said, overhearing Deirdre and Tina from the kitchen. "I've seen enough priests in my life to know what they look like."
I got the role, and in the movie, which wasn't exactly a monster epic, I could be seen conducting another character's confession while, over my shoulder, a guy was getting buried in the church steps.
After that, Deirdre found many roles that I was suited to. I played a priest at least twice more, in And Never Let Her Go with Mark Harmon in 2001 and in Perfectly Normal with Robbie Coltrane in 1991; a bartender in Body Parts with Jeff Fahey in 1991; and in a piece of type casting, a piano player in Trial By Jury with Gabriel Byrne in 1994.
In 1996, I was cast as the guy who has a band at a country club in a movie directed by Richard Benjamin called Mrs. Winterboure. The title character was played by Shirley MacLaine, and one day when we happened to be on the set at the same time, she looked at me in a puzzled way, as if she knew me but couldn't quite remember who I was.
"Bloomer Girl," I said to her. "Nat Goldstone's house."
That's all she needed. Then the light went on. She remembered the occasion when I played piano for a presentation of the score for the musical Bloomer Girl, the occasion that allowed her to keep eight hundred grand for a show that never got within a mile of even the rehearsal stage.
Oddly enough, I was cast in another Shirley MacLaine movie in 2007. This one, Closing the Ring, had a huge cast, directed by Richard Attenborough. I played a weeping veteran. Shirley had the lead role, a war widow. This time I didn't need to remind her who I was and where we met. Memories of the eight hundred grand probably sharpened her recollection.
The movie that, I thought, had the makings of a major hit was one titled Pushing Tin from 1999. It was directed by Mike Newall who had a huge success a few years earlier with Four Weddings and a Funeral. Pushing Tin, which was a comedy-drama about two guys who worked as air traffic controllers, had a dream cast: John Cusack, Billy Bob Thornton, Cate Blanchett and Angeline Jolie. I played a character named Enzo Cipoli, and I had a whole scene in a restaurant called the Sorrento out in the Kingsway. Unfortunately, the movie never touched the success of Four Weddings and a Funeral. But I had good memories of my short time on the set, at least partly because Mike Newall, rare among directors, knew my name and reputation as a pretty fair jazz pianist without anybody needing to tip him off.
One piece of work that I'm proud of, something that took me away from the strictly jazz pianist's life, came in the form of a concert piece titled Alice and the Orchestra. It was something that Izzy Asper, the Winnipeg newspaper tycoon and all-round music fan, called "the Peter and the Wolf of the twenty-first century."
Gary Michael Dault and Gene working on Alice and the Orchestra.
The notion for Alice and the Orchestra came primarily from Gary Michael Dault, the CBC radio director I worked with when I did my pieces on the songwriters. Gary was a guy of many talents-writer, director, lyricist, conceiver of rare ideas-and he came up with the concept of setting an Alice figure loose among all the instruments of the orchestra. This plot device was meant to show the glories of the flute and the clarinet and so on through most of an orchestra's instruments. Gary approached me about his idea, and together we put Alice and the Orchestra together, Gary writing the narration and the speaking lines for the instruments, me composing the music and conducting the orchestra. In the end, we produced two versions of our piece, one in the full symphonic form and the other in a chamber orchestra configuration.
The production called for two voices. Alice was one, and the other was a narrator who would also do the dialogue for all the instruments. We got our Alice in a wonderful young lady named Jennifer Pisana who was so good, who learned her part inside out, that she handled the role in all the performances apart from the Dutch version that was done in Holland. Colin Fox, a fine Canadian actor on TV, film and stage, was our narrator at most performances.
Alice and the Orchestra, which, alas, has never yet received a performance in the full orchestra version, made its debut in Parry Sound at the Festival of the Sound. The audiences loved it, and I was itching to get it in front of more audiences. My wish was partly realized. Certainly it was performed again at Parry Sound. On one occasion, the narrator was none other than my actor pal Wilford Brimley. I had been chatting about Alice and the Orchestra with him, never dreaming that he'd be interested in such a thing. One problem would have been that we couldn't come close to meeting his fee. But Wilford insisted that he'd come up and perform, all on his own dime. He arrived dressed in his pajamas. I'd already warned people that Wilford had an eccentric streak, so the pajamas didn't bother too many people. The main thing was Wilford's performance on stage, and he was incredibly good. The show was a smash with him narrating.
The version we did in Winnipeg did not go so smoothly. The guy who had signed on to do the narration had double-booked himself for the night of the concert, maybe triple-booked himself, and blew us off when one of the other gigs came through for him. So who took the role of narrator at close to the last minute? Me. I did the narration, and to fill in for me as conductor, my friend and former neighbour Howard Cable rushed up from Toronto. Given the circumstances, the Winnipeg presentation of Alice and the Orchestra, done in fragments of the symphonic version, came off in good style. For sure, Izzy Asper liked it.
What became popular in Holland for reasons I don't entirely understand was the smaller version. It was translated and performed over there six times. The narrator was a Dutch opera singer who struck me as very good. It was certain he was working from a good translation because he got the laughs and the tears in all the right places. I got a kick out of listening to Alice in Dutch. The lyrics may have been in another language, but the music was familiar as my very own.