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Dean
Benedetti Los Angeles, 1948. I
can see the scene in my mind’s eye. In a smoke-filled nightclub loaded with
blacks, a young, tall, athletic white kid with a Clark Gable mustache is
elbowing his way through the crowd carrying a bulky wire-recorder up to the
foot of the stage. “Excuse me, sorry, excuse me . . .” The young
man tramples on feet, pushes and shoves, starts looking around for an electrical
outlet, it’s too far away, he asks for an extension cord, pesters the owner
and his customers until he’s ready. The musicians get up on stage. All of
them are black and a little over twenty years old. Their names are Charlie
Parker, Tommy Potter, Miles Davis, Duke Jordan, and Hal Roach. They strike up
the “52nd Street Theme” and our man is there listening in the front row,
microphone in hand, his finger poised to press a button on his primitive
recording-machine, still on off. Once the tune has developed, the musicians
go into their solos, and now it’s Charlie Parker’s turn on alto sax. The
young man with the mustache presses the button and starts recording. Parker
plays solo for 70 seconds, then takes a step backwards and hands off to Miles
Davis. Our man immediately stops recording. The cemetery of Torre
del Lago, Italy, 1992. Before my eyes is the following scene: A good-looking
lady, about sixty years old, energetic, self-assured, with a wide-brimmed hat
on her head, is arranging flowers on a strange-looking, white-marble tomb in the
shape of a grand piano, with the tail-end curling into a thirty-second note
sculpted in relief. On the front of the tomb, also in relief, is the portrait
of a young man with a mustache, beside the inscription DEAN BENEDETTI 1922–1957.
“Giannerini must have put these here yesterday,” the lady says. “He still
comes all the time, and always brings flowers.” She has a strange way of
talking, a slightly comical and by now incorrigible mixture of American and
Livorno accents. She wrinkles her brow, shakes her head. “I don’t remember
what the nickname was that they gave him here. Darn! Hold on a second.” She
takes a few steps and calls to the custodian, a man about her own age. “What
was it they used to call my brother, those friends of his at the café?” the
woman asks. “The Bandolero,” the custodian replies. “That’s it!” the woman
smiles. “That’s what they used to call him. The Tired Bandolero.” In between these two
scenes runs a little-known legend, the story of Dino “Dean” Benedetti and his
collection of Charlie Parker solos. Recorded manually one at a time, night
after night, for months on end, with the passage of time they became mythical,
a veritable treasure that disappeared with the premature death of their
owner, and finally reemerged more than three decades later, when Mosaic
Records of Stamford, Connecticut published the almost complete collection,
discovered by chance and remixed with state-of-the-art digital equipment:
seven compact disks full of Charlie Parker solos, one after another, each one
cut off right where somebody else came in on the session, no matter whether
his name was Miles Davis or Dizzy Gillespie or Charlie Mingus. The Mosaic
release has also thrown some light on the name of Dean Benedetti, who burnt
out in the brief summer of the American post-war period. It has also thrown
some light on his Italian origins, his extravagant life story (worthy of a
John Fante novel), and his premature death in 1957—two years after Charlie
Parker’s and at the same age—in the Italian town his parents had emigrated
from at the beginning of the century and where they finally returned to spend
their old age, the same town where Puccini was born. Of the whole family,
the only one still remaining is Dean’s younger sister, Rina. She lives in
Tirrenia, in a house built by the Forzano Film Studio—in the period when the
“Colossal” Italian production companies were turning out movies there—and
later sold off when the whole kit and caboodle went down the tubes. A very
“American” house, low-built and roomy, surrounded by a lovely, well-tended
garden. The widowed Rina Benedetti lives there with her three grown
daughters. This is the house where the most precious mementos of her brother
Dino’s unfortunate life are kept: his books, his records, his music scores,
his photos and the other vinyl registrations he made, the ones left out of
the Mosaic release. “His destiny was
decided once and for all,” she tells me, “in two days and nights that nobody
will ever know anything about. In high school Dean showed real talent both in
basketball and music: he studied horn, clarinet, and saxophone, and took
lessons four hours away from home by train, seeing as we lived in this little
out-of-the-way town in Nevada. Since he was the first one in the family with
a chance to go to college, it turned out he had two choices: either go to a
school in California that had a good sports program and play basketball, or
go to the University of Nevada in Reno, to study music. And Dino chose
basketball. We all went to San Francisco with him, said our good-byes and for
a few days we didn’t hear anything from him. Then we got a telegram from the
university that more or less asked us if we knew where he’d gone off to,
because the day after his arrival he’d disappeared. Then we found out he’d
run off to Reno, to stay with his brother Rick, who lived there with his
wife, and had enrolled in the other school. That’s the choice that sealed his
fate.” That’s for sure.
Reno, in fact, is the city of divorces, and after two and a half years Dino
met the gorgeous Beverly Knox, who had come there to divorce her first
husband: he fell in love with her, married her and went off with her to Los
Angeles, abandoning the university studies his family had worked so hard to
get him. In Los Angeles the marriage immediately ended up on the rocks, but
the twenty-one-year-old Dino didn’t look back: with an exemption from the
army on account of a hernia, he began to play in the nightclubs and before
long got together with a handful of young musicians just out of their teens
and formed a band, The Barons of
Rhythm. Among his companions, Jimmy Knepper, Joe Albany, and Russ Freeman
would win discreet fame as first-class session men, while the most talented
of them, Dale Snow, would almost immediately drown his ambitions in heroin.
They played traditional swing and dixieland, and Dean was the leader: his
model on the saxophone at the time was Lester Young, and his favorite pieces,
the ones he felt “at home” with, were “Stardust” and “Body and Soul.” But
with the release of the Dizzy Gillespie Guild’s 78 rpm in 1945, the
Parker-bomb exploded, and Dino was blown away by it. It’s not too hazardous
to state that, Gillespie and Bird aside, Dean Benedetti was the first to
realize that the invention of bebop was the start of a new era in the
history of music, and he immediately began to study that incredible technique
(half tone under-half tone over, alternated), with which Parker overturned
the melodic line of the repertory. He was so quick to learn it that one
afternoon, during a rehearsal of the “Barons of Rhythm,” he was able to put
one over on the other members of the band, who still hadn’t come in contact
with the recently-released 78: as best he could he did a solo reprise of
Bird’s secret, and for a half hour left them struck with wonder, thinking he
was the inventor of that revolution of sorts. Then he confessed that the
revolution was actually Charlie Parker’s, and drew them all into the cult of
the twenty-five-year-old black musician who was going in and out of jails and
detoxification clinics. The only thing was, as opposed to the others, the
discovery of Parker’s genius caused him to take the most drastic step of all:
in the face of such greatness there was nothing left for him to do but
dedicate his own life and his own time to it, once and for all, without
regard to himself. “It’s true,” Rina
told me, “the discovery of Charlie Parker had a paralyzing effect on him, and
he practically stopped playing altogether. But you have to remember what his
health was like, it was already getting worse and making it harder and harder
for him to play. In fact, a lot has been written about this by the jazz
historians, and a lot of it is pure make-believe. Ross Russel wrote a biography
on Charlie Parker entitled Bird Lives,
and in it he said Dino threw his saxophone in the ocean because he realized
nobody could play it like Bird. But it’s not true. This is his saxophone
here, I’ve kept it.” And she showed it to me: it’s from the illustrious firm
of C. G. Conn, painted black, with a newspaper clipping of Max Roach
attached. “See? I sent a picture of it to Rusell, so he’d stop making up
stories about Dino.” And she shows me a photo of the same black saxophone
lying on a table with a copy of an Italian newspaper in the background,
carrying the date June 8, 1990. But why is the saxophone painted black?
“Well, I think Dino had a complex about not being black. And it’s pretty
understandable, surrounded by all those jazz greats. They were all black.”
Right, because when his idol arrived in California to play in 1947, and Dino
embarked on his recording-kick, for him it was the start of a period of
friendship and fast-living with all the young geniuses of American jazz. It
was also the start of the tough times of heroin addiction and physical
decline (for him and for Parker, Chet Baker, Jerry Mulligan, and Dale Snow,
too), of the bumming around America in cheap hotels, living on the writing
commissions offered to his idol, and then, when their separate destinies
were achieved—the one lost and the other in his glory—the years of solitude
began. Dino’s illness had already gotten worse when his parents returned to
live in Italy in 1953; by now he had “Myasthenia Gravis,” a disease that no
one knew much about at the time and which attacks the muscles and makes them
incapable of any sort of effort. Sick and addicted to drugs, alone and
without any means of support, Dino had no choice after a few months, but to
rejoin his family in Torre del Lago. “In a little town
like this, away from the life he was leading in America, Dino seemed to get
better,” his sister relates. She has just called a friend of Dino’s, Nello
Bartalini, to have him come over and tell me about those last years in Torre
del Lago. Bartalini arrives a little later, he jumps at the rare occasions
when he can talk about his old friend. “We were just kids, seventeen,
eighteen years old. We were crazy about jazz and we heard that an American
who was a friend of all the big names had arrived in town. And so we just had
to meet him, and we became friends. Some of us took music lessons from him,
horn lessons, clarinet, because even if he couldn’t play music, he could
still write it, and he had a terrific ear. After all, he was only thirty
years old.” In Torre del Lago they would see him shuffling by every day on
his way to the Gran Bar, and that’s where he got the nickname “The Tired
Bandolero.” Checkers became popular at the bar, a game he was a champion at,
and there weren’t any drugs floating around in those parts. But in 1955
Charlie Parker died, and it was Rina who had to break the news to him. “I was
working at Camp Darby, a military base, where a few American newspapers used
to arrive. I brought him the article about Bird’s death, which had taken
place in such a mysterious way (the legend has it that Parker collapsed after
a burst of lightning during a thunderstorm), and it was a terrible blow to
Dean. For him it was just as if he had lost a brother.” With the strength
still spared him by his illness, he threw himself evermore into music:
besides Parker and jazz, he was also interested in classical music now. He
continued to get obsessed with things, and now it was Stravinsky’s turn: he
stuck photograph clippings of him up all over the place and set to work on a
new orchestration for the “Song of the Nightingale.” In the meantime his
presence in Versilia began to attract attention outside the tight circle of
his friends: in the summer of 1956, Riccardo Ronchi, who played alto sax in
Renato Carosone’s orchestra, came to meet him, accompanied by Nello
Bartalini, and Dino wrote a number of arrangements for him that were a big
hit that season at Bernardini’s Bussola, the famous nightclub in Versilia.
Since it was no longer possible for him to play or to share the joy of music
as it exploded live on the stage—that magic that had devoured every minute of
his life in America—and finding himself living so far on the fringes of the
music scene which he had known so intimately in the past, the Tired Bandolero
turned into himself once and for all, in a silent, completely mental, rapport
with the notes, and an even more intimate adoration of Parker than when he
was alive, listening to records and jazz programs on the radio via “The
Voice of America,” giving lessons to his pupils and doing his rewrite of
Stravinsky, which he managed to complete. And it was in these depths that he
passed away during the night of January 20th, 1957, at thirty-four and a half
years of age: officially, he died of a pulmonary complication, but his sister
has her doubts. “I don’t know, there were a lot of people coming and going at
the time, on account of the music. It wasn’t so hard to get a hold of drugs
hereabouts anymore.” But they aren’t tormenting doubts, they’re just doubts,
they exist, that’s all, like Dean Benedetti’s tomb in the shape of a grand
piano in the town cemetery. Like the Charlie Parker recordings that were in a
garage in Reno for 30 years, which Mosaic Records rediscovered and published;
like the score of Stravinsky’s “Nightingale” lying there ignored and unpublished,
while Torre del Lago has already forgotten him, without even naming a little
backstreet after him, the price it pays for having dedicated itself heart and
soul to Puccini, for all time. Like the old record with the Clef label lying
there with the other mementos saved by his sister, “The Magnificent Charlie
Parker,” which Rina now takes out of an envelope and places on the table.
Then she invites me to look inside the jacket, on the inner side of the plain
cardboard, where no one would ever think of looking. “I can’t imagine what
made me look inside,” she says to me, holding open the flaps so I can see
better. And in that hiding-place I see a little phrase written in red pencil,
with a crabbed hand, in Italian, the characters somewhat childish: “Poor C.
P. you too. Where will we meet again?” Rome,
Italy |