Feature Interview with Pianist Larry Novak

Feature Interview with Pianist Larry Novak

Date Posted: May 20 2009

Written By: chicago jazz

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Pianist Larry Novak was born in Chicago on May 18, 1933. He learned piano from age five and began playing jazz at fourteen. He studied at Loyola University Chicago and the University of Minnesota, followed by a stint playing in a military band in 1959 and 1960. Novak led a trio ensemble at the London House in Chicago from 1961 to 1963 and then at Mister Kelly’s from 1963 to 1975. During this time, he released the album Larry Novak Plays! on Dot Records, issued in 1964.

Novak played with and arranged for Peggy Lee and worked extensively with Pearl Bailey; he also worked with singers Mel Tormé, Frank Sinatra, Joe Williams, Sarah Vaughan, and Carmen McRae. Among the instrumentalists he played with are Dizzy Gillespie, Al Hirt, Charlie Shavers, Barney Kessel, Scott LaFaro, Sonny Stitt, Louie Bellson, Terry Gibbs, Buddy DeFranco, Phil Woods, and Scott Hamilton.

Novak also taught at DePaul University, and is the father of drummer Gary Novak.

Chicago Jazz Magazine: Is it true that much of your career and personal success can be traced back to your gig at the London House?

Larry Novak: Yes. Not long after I got out of the service, I met my wife, jazz pianist Carol Coleman, a beautiful woman. Carol passed away about sixteen years ago. We had been married for a long time, and had two great kids. My son, Gary, the drummer, and my daughter, Carolyn, who retired from the jingle business with her husband, Bob Rans. Carol was a great pianist. We weren’t married yet, but we were dating, and Carol had already been working at the London House. They needed an off-night piano player, and Carol got the owner, Oscar Marienthal, who obviously liked what she did, to come over to see me working at Dante’s Inferno, a nightclub off Rush Street made famous by Frank D’Rone. Oscar hired me on the spot.

Chicago Jazz Magazine: Didn’t he own both the London House and Mister Kelly’s?

Novak: Yes, and the Happy Medium too. We became friends with the owners, they invited us to parties––it was a really nice relationship. Wonderful people, the Marienthal brothers. It was a lot different back then. Owners weren’t just there to “own” you and tell you what to do. They became your friends. After the London House, I worked at Mister Kelly’s. It had been around for a while, but I had never thought of working there. And then I got a call from a friend of mine, Marty Rubenstein. He was this genius conductor and writer, and I would fill in for him on the sets before the show. Occasionally I would replace him, but mostly he would hire me when there was no act to play.

Chicago Jazz Magazine: He was the musical director at Mister Kelly’s???

Novak: Well, he played five-days a-week, and Dick Marx played the off nights. I happened to be subbing there on Sarah Vaughan’s opening night, and she, of course, had her own trio. I had done the first set––I love this story, this is really the start of my career at Kelly’s. That evening, we had a snowstorm. Sarah’s pianist was stuck on the South Side of Chicago and couldn’t get to the gig. We were sitting upstairs in our room, when the maitre d’ came running up the stairs and said, “Larry, Miss Vaughan would like to talk to you for a minute.” And I thought, What about? [laughs] Sure enough, I was told, You have to play for Sarah. You have to picture this: I’m just there to fill in for Marty, scared as hell, and it’s Sarah Vaughan! She asked, “You know this tune? You know this one? And this one?” They had no music. And I said yes, and then she said, “I do these in the keys of B and F-sharp.”

Chicago Jazz Magazine: Was she was testing you by giving you difficult keys?

Novak: She wasn’t testing me, those were her keys. The rhythm section fell together after the first tune. The show went well. Then, at the end of the night, she came up to me and said, “I’ve got something for you.” And she handed me two hundred bucks. Two hundred bucks in those days was a lot. It was big bucks. I was sort of embarrassed because I thought I was just skating through the evening. It came off well, though. On the strength of that move, Marty Rubenstein called, maybe three or four weeks later. I had been at London House for a year-and-a-half or two years playing. It was a great gig, but it was only two nights a week. And my wife worked the other five days there, so we had it covered. So Marty called me and said, “I’m leaving.” And he gave me his gig. So just that kind of stuff––just luck––being in the right place at the right time, or having your best happen in sequence. Kismet. You never know what’s on your table. What I’m trying to say is, I didn’t apply for the job. After that, I spent all my time there with different rhythm sections––a bunch of great players and great guys.

Chicago Jazz Magazine: What was it like having a wife who played the same instrument as you. Were you competing for the same gigs???

Novak: No, we never competed for the same gigs. But she was better than me. I may have been better at improvising, but she was far better harmonically. Then my kids came along. As I mentioned, my son is a drummer.

Chicago Jazz Magazine: Brag about him a little bit.

Novak: My son is a drummer, Gary Novak, and he’s worked with Chick Corea, Alanis Morissette… Boy, he’s worked with so many people, it would take up too many pages to list them.

Chicago Jazz Magazine: How did he end up a drummer and not a pianist?

Novak: Actually, he can play piano. It was accidental. Carol used to play piano at the grammar school things for the kindergartners and first-graders. She was great at making it a lot of fun and putting them in the right situations. She used a high school bass player and drummer for the shows, and Gary had to wait for her to finish rehearsals after school. One day he came home and said, “Can I get some drums? Can I play the drums?” And so we tolerated it.

We bought him one drum, a tom-tom, with a little cymbal and brushes and sticks. We had an old record player in the corner of the basement, which is where my studio used to be––now it’s a storage room of drums. So we set them up and Gary came home from school, walked down and saw the drums, and went right over to the turntable, put on a Count Basie record, grabbed the stick and hit the cymbal. He didn’t know what the hell he was doing, but he made every hit that the band made. I’m talking six years old––every hit! I got a tear in my eye. I called Carol down and she teared up too and said, Oh my God, not a drummer!

Chicago Jazz Magazine: The rest, as they say, is history.??

Novak:Yeah [laughs]. He had made a decision at that age, and he progressed very quickly from there on. Louis Bellson was over here, Buddy Rich was over here––they’d come over for Sunday brunches sometimes. I told Louis to come over on a Sunday and I wanted him to let me know about something. Gary had already been playing for a year. So, we went downstairs and Louis was impressed, and he spent the next hour with Louis showing him stuff. They hooked up like that, and every time Louis would come in to town, he’d spend some time with Gary. I toured a lot with Louis. He would call Gary sometimes, that’s the kind of guy he was. Those were great days.

Chicago Jazz Magazine: Being at Mister Kelly’s was an opportunity to work with a lot of great musicians.

Novak: Oh my God, yes. Because of that, there was a WTTW jazz show. I played with Sarah on that, Lurlean Hunter, my own trio… They don’t have shows like that anymore. And Ricky Frigo and I did some stuff with Marty Faye. A lot of the stars that came into town would stop there, and we would play for them. We played for Dizzy Gillespie. At the time I was at London House I was working opposite him, so I got to know him a little bit. Those were the heydays, man!

Chicago Jazz Magazine: Is that how you ended up working with Peggy Lee???

Novak: Actually, it was through Sam Distefano, who booked the Playboys clubs. We were great friends. He was even the best man at my wedding. Peggy had just fired her conductor at one of the Playboy Clubs. I think it was at the Lake Geneva Club in Wisconsin. They were looking for a pianist, and Sam said to her, “You should check out Larry Novak.” She actually hired me sight unseen from my reputation. There was a theater on Michigan Avenue back then, called the Drury Lane. So I went, and didn’t really know what to expect.

I hadn’t seen her book or anything. We hit it off, right off the bat. Her charts were just gorgeous, and we had strings too. Every show was like doing a film, because the music was so well written and well played. Guys like Bobby Lewis, Art Hoyle and Cy Touff were in the band. I guess I was with Peggy for a couple of years, and we had a falling out over money––it wasn’t my money. When we went to Toronto, I hired a rhythm section and some horns from Chicago––Chuck Christiansen was on that band. We told her what the guys had to get paid for the week, and they cut the show short one day, which didn’t matter to me, we made this agreement with the guys. I had been with her a while, and everything was great. Her manager came into town the last night, looked at the checks, and he apparently said to her, “You are paying these guys too much money.”

So the checks came up short by almost two days’ pay. Her accountant did it, but it had to be with her okay. And so the guys came up to me with the checks and they gave me the checks back, and I returned them to her. So she got pissed at me for doing that. Somebody’s got to stick up for the musicians. She hired someone else at that point, and didn’t formally fire me. And she actually called me the next time she was in town, and apologized.

Chicago Jazz Magazine:It was your reputation on the line.

Novak: It’s not even that––it was just wrong.

Chicago Jazz Magazine: Was she a good musician?

Novak: Yeah, she knew what she wanted, too. Working with Peggy was just another “kismet situation.”

Chicago Jazz Magazine: What about Pearl Bailey?

Novak: I was with her for many, many years. Well, Louis and I hit it off, and played together at the NAMM show. I knew the guy who ran that show, and he liked what I did.

Chicago Jazz Magazine:NAMM is the trade show where they present the latest and greatest music equipment.

Novak: Exactly right. And so Slingerland drum company wanted to sign my son Gary to an endorsement contract with the company. That’s where I got to play with Louis, because I was signed up to perform with him. Louis and I became friends for life after that. I met Buddy Rich kind of like that. Years and years ago, Irv Kupcinet had a Veteran’s Day cruise on Lake Michigan, and I was hired to do that. So Buddy Rich happened to be in town playing at Mister Kelly’s with his big band. They invited Buddy to play on the boat and we played together, and that’s how I met him. He called me shortly after that and invited me to play with him, with these symphony orchestras. And I said, “Send me the music.”

And he said, “You don’t have to worry about it.” He told me he’d meet me at the theater in Wisconsin. I got there and Buddy’s plane was delayed––he wasn’t there yet. The orchestra was, though, and they started rehearsing. So Tommy Newsom walked in the door with his coat on like a cape. He said, “Oh, Larry, you’re the pianist? Here.” And he hands me this whole book of music from West Side Story that he had just arranged. I had to play with the rhythm section at the start, and the whole piece was black––notes all over the place! Fortunately for me, they were late, so I had about fifteen minutes to look at the first two pages. Thank God!

Chicago Jazz Magazine: There are a lot of stories about Buddy. People tended to either like him or hate him.

Novak: I liked him. He was brash as hell, though. He was always putting his band down, but they were all kids. In a sense he pressured them into being better than they were. I had hired Larry Gray once for Buddy Rich because they needed a bass player. This is an embarrassing thing. Larry could read anything, man. Now, he’s got this chart in front of him, but Buddy forgot to tell him that the chart was going to end at a certain point, and the band stopped playing and Larry kept playing. Poor guy.

So Buddy got into him onstage and embarrassed him. But Larry got him back and quit. They were supposed to do two sets and he left after the first one! [laughs] I love Larry Gray for that. And Buddy was making fun, but at the same time he embarrassed Larry. That’s actually the last time I talked to Buddy too, because I didn’t really like what he did to Larry. He was never really my friend like Louis was.

Chicago Jazz Magazine: Let’s get back to Pearl Bailey.

Novak: Well it was Lou, she needed a piano player and Louis suggested me. It worked out beautifully. I did that for a long time. I got along fine with her, until she got ill of course. We did the Jerry Lewis Telethon. I did it a couple times, once with her and once by myself. I lucked out again––talk about kismet. It was a twenty-four-hour show––you don’t get much rest. I did it two years in a row, and that was enough. They got somebody else, and that was okay with me [laughs].

Chicago Jazz Magazine: Was it by design that you worked with so many singers?

Novak: Well, it’s a good way to make a living, but no, I’m a jazz pianist. Accompanying came very easy to me. Mister Kelly’s gave me a lot of experience playing with various types of different singers and different types and styles of arrangements. But it was just my job––I did what I could. I enjoyed it though.

Chicago Jazz Magazine: What is it that makes you a great accompanist?

Novak: Well, it’s just the music. You know what your function is, you know how to do instant orchestrations and you have to be aware of the lyrics. It’s a matter of priorities when playing with a singer––you aren’t in front, you’re giving them the foundation to go wherever they can, and you stay out of their way in order to enhance them. That’s the way music is.

Chicago Jazz Magazine: It doesn’t always work that way, though.

Novak: It should. I mean, there are levels of talent, and there are levels of attitude and ego, too. But I don’t see any reason to play with the best singers in the world and not making them happy or not be happy about the music. [laughs] That’s what it is with playing a piano or a chordal instrument––I find gratification in orchestrating behind somebody, or finding a way to enhance what they just sang, or setting a stage for the next line, that kind of stuff. There are wonderful advantages to this type of playing––it’s like instant orchestration and arranging. Some things are arranged, but you still have to orchestrate the things in between them. Natalie Cole’s stuff was so damn hard sometimes I couldn’t believe it. She had a great arrangement of “Lush Life.” It was a gorgeous arrangement.

Chicago Jazz Magazine: Is there anybody on that long list of singers that just blew you away?

Novak: All of them. Really. You think of what they did and how they did it. Carmen McCrae was incredible. They all have their own strengths and weaknesses. Carmen could sing in the pocket, she had the groove. And I had a great band at that time. Jim Atlas was the bass player and Ricky Frigo was the last drummer at Mister Kelly’s. And he grew into a hell of a drummer, especially because he knew exactly what to do, when. That was one of my best trios at the end there. We could play for anybody.

Chicago Jazz Magazine: Let’s touch on a few more singers, starting with Sarah Vaughan.

Novak: She is The Natural. Nobody sang so easily as Sarah sang––it’s just a gift. She was a hell of a musician. Don’t play a wrong note for her, or she’ll call you out. You had to be careful what you played, and not play too busy. She would let you know in a minute… and in no uncertain terms! [laughs]

Chicago Jazz Magazine: Frank Sinatra.

Novak: I did two gigs with him. There was no real personal contact with him, except for one time. It was at one of those theaters down on the South Side, and we had rehearsed, but he wasn’t there for the rehearsal. So he came up on stage to sing and somebody had said to me, “Don’t look into his eyes.” And I was thinking, Give me a break. And he came up to the piano after a couple tunes, and I looked in his eyes and they were like lasers. He didn’t do it intentionally; they were just that way. I was so excited to play with Sinatra––the arrangements were amazing.

There was a lot for the piano player to play. The thing I like about that level––and Peggy Lee was like this––in the music there weren’t just chord symbols but there were specific parts you had to play, you had to do some thinking. Once we did a thing with Peggy Lee––and Chuck Christiansen was in this band––and we were with the Basie Band in Detroit for a week. It was the Basie Band and Peggy Lee. I’m listening to the band rehearse, thinking, Oh my God, they sound so amazing.

We were about to rehearse, and I’m trying to get the band’s attention, and nobody is paying attention to me. I try to begin, and couple guys came in. And Basie was sitting behind me. He was really pissed at the band. I found out later that some of those guys were not great readers. They knew their book, but they learned it by ear. They didn’t know what the hell to play. So he rehearsed them through the first eight bars, so they got into the groove of it.

And he turned around and he said, “Okay Larry, here you go.” It worked out. It did take a little time, but once they got it, oh my God. Peggy Lee never swung so hard. That was one of the best weeks of my life.

Chicago Jazz Magazine: You were talking about charts that were specifically written for the show. Isn’t that how Mel Torme worked?

Novak: I worked with Mel maybe ten times. I did a television show with him on WTTW once too. Also, I worked with him about a month before he passed away. But there was an interim of about seven years. Anyway, he had fired his piano player, and somebody told him to call me, so he called me for a gig. He had written a lot of books, and he was a great amateur pilot. He was kind of a unique guy, a really bright guy. He could arrange too. There’s two parts to this story. At the rehearsal he had press come in so he could promote his book. I had already been working with him for seven years and knew him well. He had a new chart. So I’m playing his chart, and I get to this one chord, and it sounded okay to me, but he stopped the band. I didn’t know why he had stopped the band. And he said, “You played the wrong chord in that bar.” I couldn’t remember playing anything incorrectly. He wrote the chart, that’s the point of this story. I asked him to show me what I did wrong, and he said that it was this chord, and I was like, “That’s not what you have written.” And I said it loud because I was a little mad. And then he says, “Okay, well just play this chord.” [laughs] He got the fact that I stood up for myself. Our relationship changed a little bit after that, but it’s okay.

He was good guy for the most part. Then I hadn’t worked for him or heard from him in years, and I got this call out of the blue from Vegas. He had fired his piano player and he called me for this gig. He was into planes, so we did this gig at the airport, where they had biplanes and stuff. It was a good rhythm section. So I looked at the charts, and he was still doing the same charts from ten years earlier, and they were all on parchment paper. And he had gained weight.

So he stopped at one of these twenty-four-hour places; and he gets potato chips, Twinkies, Ding-Dongs, and everyone’s just wondering what he’s doing. This is all he was living on. Then in two weeks he went to the hospital and died of a heart attack. Mel Torme––man, he was this big star one time, and he got into a bad routine. I guess the older he got, the less he gave a damn. But your health… man!

Chicago Jazz Magazine: Would you rank him as one of the greatest jazz singers?

Novak: Absolutely, he was wonderful. For some reason, a lot of people didn’t like his sound that much, or his style. I thought his sound was great. He had the best pitch––it was like a laser when sang a whole note. He was great––I loved working with him.

Chicago Jazz Magazine: In your opinion, what makes your playing what it is?

Novak: I don’t know. I love a lot of great improvisers. Bill Evans has been a big influence on my life, He was a friend of mine and he loved the way my wife, Carol, played. My first influences were George Shearing and Oscar Peterson, I’ve always liked the fact that improvisation was always in the back of my head. Even as a kid. Maybe it’s individuality that you are doing something that you do. I mean, if you study classical music...
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