Deno Taglioli
Deno Taglioli is a first-generation American whose family came from Italy around the time of World War II. His father was born in northern Italy, and his mother came from Sulmona, roughly an hour and a half from Rome. As was common for immigrant families, his grandfather came first, working and saving money while living in a basement, and eventually brought the family over by boat through Ellis Island. Settling in Detroit, where Henry Ford was building automobiles, the family sought work and a new life. Deno remembers his mother's stories about arriving with little and being encouraged to find jobs rather than simply receiving handouts. Music ran through the family, with his mother singing and his grandfather playing the mandolin.
Born and raised in Detroit, Deno grew up surrounded by many cultures and loved hearing his family and their friends speak their native language. Named Dean by a mother who wanted to help him avoid the handicaps immigrants faced, he later embraced the name Dino, his father's name, for its ethnicity and soul. When he wanted to pursue music, his mother connected him with mentor Ray Makowski of the Detroit Symphony. He studied classical music, attended Wayne State for two years, then earned a music scholarship to the University of Texas at Arlington, where he learned jazz and performed at festivals alongside artists such as Dizzy Gillespie, Max Roach, and Al Jarreau. He went on to work on a master's degree at North Texas.
Deno founded the Emerald City Band in Dallas in 1983 and made the city his home. Having played Jewish and Italian weddings in Detroit since age fourteen, he brought that experience to Dallas, where his warmth and skill earned him a strong connection with the Jewish community through word of mouth and hundreds of weddings and celebrations. He and his band regularly support fundraisers and galas for causes including the Jewish Community Center, cancer research, and shelters for underprivileged families and children. He credits his mother, father, and many educators and mentors for shaping who he became. Above all, he finds his deepest satisfaction in seeing music bring joy and comfort to people who need it most.
Full Transcript
yes you're rolling okay we are rolling i'm joe reingold and i'm interviewing dino taglioni and today is wednesday september 11th an infamous day 2019 and we're happy to have you here today welcome tell us a little bit about your family what you know of them your roots well my family is from italy europe um i'm first generation uh my mom and dad my father was born in northern italy and my mom was born about an hour half out of rome which would be kind of a mid-southern part of the country in a place called sumona and and their roots go back generations i had an
opportunity to go back to italy a few years back and literally traced my last name back to the town where my father and his father and their father it came from which is very unique and and interesting um so they came here right about the time of world war ii and uh first my grandfather came and and generally speaking that's that's the course of action that the families took the the father my mom's father came here and it was on the boat it was through ellis island he'd come here and everybody and i'm from detroit so everybody at that point where's the where's their work
where can we get a job and that's when henry ford was building cars and automobiles and everybody kind of made their way to detroit and my grandfather came and back then you had to have a sponsor they still have today but you had to have a sponsor somebody that would actually take responsibility for you to come to this country and to to to basically you had have a place to live someone that would support you and for about three years four years so my grandfather came here he knew some people lived in the basement and saved his money and then brought his family over and
they came over on the boat and uh through ellis island and uh and at that time it was my grandmother uh my mom her siblings and so there was quite a few of them there was about five total and uh some of the stories my mom tells me about like you know when the country or the government up in detroit when they came to help the people they didn't hand out checks then they came and said how many people are here and she said well there are five of us okay so you need five pairs of shoes and you need a warm winter coat because
they encourage those folks then to go out and find work find jobs so i thought that was really interesting you know right instead of a hand out a hand up kind of yeah yeah so my roots i'm from detroit i'm first generation i was born in detroit music was always a big part of my family my mom could sing her father could play the mandolin but of course you know they would never think about getting into the music business because that was kind of a luxury back in 1930 and the 40s you know you had to try to make a living and it was all
about making money and we came over and they couldn't speak the language and they had a dialect which back then was a handicap to have a dialect you know could keep you from getting a better job back then if you had a dialect back then you might be someone well we need you to do custodial work we need you to help lay concrete whatever so there now things have changed so much where if you have dialects it makes no difference if you speak two languages that's great yeah yeah you're right mm-hmm okay so my mom wanted to americanize me so i wouldn't have those handicaps
perhaps so my my real name is dean my father's name was dino and she wanted she gave me the name dean because dean martin dean was american but it's funny because my friend just started calling me dino which i think which i like because my father's name and i think it has a little more soul you know more ethnicity more ethnicity i think so right right and that's the thing that i loved about growing up in detroit it was the jewish community it was the polish community it was the greeks the italians where i come from it's all cultures and that's what i loved about
it i loved to listen to my grandmother and my mom and all the friends speak their native language to speak in town yeah i love that you know and i miss that being here away from home so to speak so when did you leave detroit so i grew up in detroit my family's very musical um loved music didn't do it professionally and when i said to my mom and say you know i want to i want to play music oh you want to play music first person you called was meyer shapiro marsha para was the first violist in the detroit symphony meyer who should he
study with oh ray makowski ray makowsky was my mentor and uh uh he just passed away recently and uh good good man um stunning music for the detroit symphony and i got a scholarship to come down to texas and that's what brought me to texas i had a scholarship musical scholarship i came here finished school worked on my master's degree where were you um i i i studied in wayne state detroit for two years then i got the scholarship to come to university of texas in arlington in arlington because at that time there was a new band director there and he was focusing on jazz
so i had studied classical music my whole life and but i love to play jazz but i never had the opportunity so when i had some friends coming here on scholarship i was able to get a scholarship and i learned how to play jazz i played the montrose jazz festival i played the brazilian jazz festival with dizzy gillespie and max roach and al jarreau so i had those opportunities in college graduated from college and then i went to work on my master's at north texas university great music school it was it was after that that i started my band emerald city in 1983. so you just dated me i remember when you first got started remember i do we have over three decades of beautiful relationships you know incredible opportunities for people yeah all right so you stayed here so i made dallas my home made dallas my home started the band and and then the journey started with my music yeah so what were some of the early earlier gigs that you had well early on we played a lot of clubs back then a lot of clubs i can remember a time when in the 80s that bar mitzvah's weddings they didn't use bands they use djs i don't know if
you remember this where i come from i was playing jewish weddings italian weddings when i was 14 years old every wedding had a band they didn't have a dj up in detroit in michigan in the north but coming here in dallas you know we had djs so there was a point where that changed and then i started i started being asked to do weddings and to do these private events special events fundraisers but at first we were just not even playing clubs in the 80s through 80 83 84 85 and 86 or so it started changing how did you get the rest of your band
members well you know finding good musicians and coming up band members is kind of like looking for a good doctor right you ask your friend who did that surgery on your on your back you know it sounds like it's like you know you go oh you need to check out this drummer or this bass player this musician and we were you know we're in a community of musicians so so we um made our way to the good good players but you guys remember back then we didn't have a lot of work so it was tough to keep good musicians with you because if there's another
opportunity that pays more they're going to be gone so you know we developed a a really good ban so a lot of musicians would stay with us even though we weren't making we're talking 24 25 a night that's nothing that's nothing that's called paying dues right right okay yeah so then as you built up your notoriety and people were hearing about you guys more and more how did you get a really strong connection with people in the jewish community well i think intrinsically and i've been told this before being italian there's a lot of similarities i've been told that i'm probably more jewish than i'm
attacking okay i've been told that and i i look at it as a compliment okay i i started i remember being you sit on your hands can you still talk if you don't use your hands yeah yeah you know i remember once being in uh i was i did a wedding for uh barbara sale i remember lovely lady and doing a wedding for her family and talking her and being at her house music and she said i reminded her of her son and i i always loved that connection but i think what happens is that we played being from detroit and having played jewish weddings
and being part of the community there that it wasn't like i was it was all foreign to me coming here i had a lot of lot of friends in the community in detroit and i learned about the horrors and i learned i knew about all this so come here and then i played at a few and word of mouth you need to hire this band great band leader take good care of you and i just it evolved and it just it just evolved more and more and more and i've done hundreds of jewish weddings yeah hundreds some of my best friends are jewish you mr
moskowitz is a great friend of mine evan bates uh rabbi weinberg he's from southfield michigan right right all very good friends same accent as you have exactly exactly so there's a beautiful connection very good what kind of things besides music have you gotten involved in in dallas if anything well we tend to you know when we take on fundraisers and galas no matter what it is if for the jewish community center or if it's for cancer research or the heart institute or whatever we do a ton of those events and we always give back on those events and we always participate and we become long-standing
supporters of all those so i spend a lot of my time when it comes to giving back or being part of organization part of the relationship i have with those and not only personally but professionally what we bring to the table with our band and we you know they hire a band to do that we help raise money you know we take our money and give it back to those organizations so yeah that's a big part of my life any of those stand out as your absolute favorite as far as charities or that kind of work you know um when we do jobs like when
we're participating with the samaritan inn or the hope gala where it's really about raising money for underprivileged kids under previous families um the abuse the shelters that seem to touch me quite a bit you know yeah they tend to stand out let me ask you how have you seen dallas change since you first got here until now well physically i can remember playing in in the 80s on beltline roads you know in addison i can remember too lame it might even be dirt you know and so physically i've see i've seen the city change where now belt lines are you know four four lanes going
each way i can remember that north dallas went to willowban that was as far as it went where they were playing polo up there and now goes all the way past like past den you know i've seen it change that way i've seen it change through the communities are growing and uh and they're just more relationships that we have you know clydebourne park you know the family i've had the opportunity with them and and uh and lucy billing billingsley um who has helped develop dallas so travel girl and i've worked with these families and craig hall all these people so i've had a lot of
um i've seen it go you know when you're in the middle of it too you don't see it it's like seeing a relative and you haven't seen a little niece and you see him go oh my god last time i saw you were here now you're you're grown all grown up we're in the middle of it so we don't see it but uh like this summer i was gone and just in my own neighborhood in plano i came back this summer and there was a whole nother other development that had started been built and done while i was gone so the city is growing constantly
you mentioned some of the musicians who were your role models early on can you think of anybody in later years maybe here in this area who's been a role model to you well all my all my educators you know in school were role models to me and i was very fortunate larry radcliffe was one band director i had he was my percussion instructor at the university of texas in arlington who's gone on to conduct symphonies in europe and and he's a professor i believe at rice right now and he also he also taught at interlock it which is a school i studied at in upper
michigan so all my all my drum instructors that i've had steve houghton who now teaches at uh out in a university in california um you know all those people played a big role in my life uh musically um of course along the way there was there's always been the marshall ivories there's been the jazz players that have been you know mainstays here in that i would go to and listen to because in our in our field of business it's a lot of listening a lot of watching that's how we get mentored you know and so there's always been uh a ton of people that have
helped me along the way in that regard you know very good can you think of something in your life that you are perhaps the most proud of well i think the biggest uh sense of satisfaction i get um is i love performing for people and it's not uh it's not just because this because of the music it's because of the reaction the music brings to the people it's how i can take people who have haven't been out of the house a long time haven't danced in a long time uh maybe lost a loved one you know and haven't been you know have gone out just
to see their reaction to see them come up to me at the end of the jobs i haven't smiled like this i haven't danced like this i haven't had such a good time like this and i feel that that's why i'm here you know yeah the music is a conduit of all the studying i did so when people think of me as emerald c they give singer they don't know i study classical they don't my study with the best they don't know that i write they don't know that i do all these sorts of things they just see an entertainer and but maybe all those
things prepared me to be the entertainer to help touch people so that's the key but i i get the most satisfaction on it i'm welling up um last but not least it's been a pleasure talking with you is there anything else you can think of that you'd like to add let everybody know um no i think we've i i think in a short time i think we've we've highlighted you know the important parts of of my journey you know my mom and dad my mom played a big role in my life you my dad my dad worked from the time he woke up tonight my
mom's a stay-at-home mom and you know you want to put you want to play the drums well we're going to get you ray makowsky he was from the detroit symphony and you know if i didn't practice she'd say get over here and practice i want to go you're not going anywhere do you practice you know if you want to take lessons you're going to practice you know my teacher you know nowadays you go to private lessons they charge you what is it like 100 an hour it's it's incredible when i was taking to take you back six dollars half hour ray mccoskey would take me
in the basement and we would we would study and not come up for two hours three hours he never looked at his watch that's the kind of teacher i had fabulous so it's really the mentors my mom my dad these educators that maybe who i am today it's wonderful thank you so much yeah very good great job