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DICK HYMAN
what can I do about it’ And he said, ‘That’s why you practice. So that
even if you are at a low point at what you think you ought to be doing,
it’s still acceptable.’ I take that as the greatest pragmatic advice anybody
ever gave me.”
Around that time, Hyman was playing in New York clubs, including
opening week at Birdland in December 1949. But an early career high
occurred when he became a sideman for Wilson’s former
employer, Benny Goodman, the following year. “It
was an immense acceptance into the biggest of the big
time,” Hyman recalled. “I still feel that way about Benny
Goodman.” He also worked with Max Kaminsky’s
Dixieland group, but even with this re-emergence of earlier
forms of jazz, Hyman knew that a revolution was
polarizing the music, and he didn’t see the changes as
a threat.
“I had played with Charlie Parker a couple times
before, at Birdland when Bud Powell was late,” Hyman
said. “He came to Cafe Society, where I was playing
with Tony Scott, late hours when nobody was there and
he would jam with us. Long before I met Parker, we
got the message that bebop was it. I never expected it
would go back to an older kind of stuff, that I would
become well known for: Scott Joplin, James P. Johnson. I thought bebop
was here forever.”
Hyman wound up accompanying Parker on one of his most historic
gigs: the saxophonist’s only known television appearance, on the program
“Stage Entrance” on Feb. 24, 1952, when the pianist backed him
and Dizzy Gillespie on “Hot House.” For Hyman, this performance
exemplified how his worlds collided. Along with bridging the splintering
jazz scenes in New York clubs, he had become a constant presence in
television sessions, recording dates for singers like Tony Bennett, commercial
jingles and the occasional film score.
“The miscellaneousness was really what we session players liked,”
Hyman said. “We would go from date to date on a totally freelance phonecall
basis. So if you were hot and it was a busy week for some reason,
you could do as many as a dozen dates of recording sessions that were
three hours long, and it was expected that you would do four tunes. Things
weren’t as agonized as they were later to get a track right.
And the recordings got exceedingly busy because, as
“If you were we old men say, hi-fi came in. Not only were all sorts of
hot and it was a innovative ideas in arranging encouraged, but all of the
busy week, you old catalogs from many companies had to be redone. I
learned a great deal from accompanying singers, not just
could do a dozen
in jazz, but in general. How to learn the songs, transpose
recording sessions them immediately, how to change the style.”
that were three But Hyman began looking at different kinds of
technologies in the ’50s, recording a hit version of Kurt
hours long, and
Weill’s “Moritat–A Theme From ‘The Threepenny
it was expected Opera’” on what he calls “a funny grand piano kind of
that you would instrument with special hammers that gave it a sound
do four tunes.” like a harpsichord.” After becoming adept at using
Lowrey’s new glide pedal for organ, he worked on early
synthesizers alongside engineer Walter Sear.
“Since I knew nothing about his equipment, it was natural to proceed
with a strategy where Walter would select a sound, or I would
describe a sound, and he would say, ‘How about this’” Hyman said.
“It’s only a monophonic instrument, so we got credit for a great deal of
complexity which wasn’t ever there.”
Still, Hyman found a way to add complex layers, sometimes tonguein-cheek,
to such compositions as “The Minotaur,” which was on his
1969 album Moog: The Electric Eclectics Of Dick Hyman (Command).
This summer, he arranged that piece for violin, piano and chamber
38 DOWNBEAT SEPTEMBER 2011