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orchestra at the Soundwave Music Festival in Gleneden Beach, Ore.,
but back in the ’60s, it was far from acoustic.
“Cocktail lounge people at that time had a drum machine that would
play various kinds of rhythms in any tempo you want, and I switched on
the buttons for bossa nova and waltz and somehow it didn’t burst into
flames,” Hyman said. “So we used the 3/4 bossa nova as a basis for that.
We did ‘The Minotaur’ with that, and I added a drone in the manner of
Indian music. Ravi Shankar was becoming prominent then. The main
melody took advantage of the scoops and sweeps from low to high at different
tempos depending on what keys were struck. Whenever I see the
show ‘Law & Order,’ the theme has a striking upward swoop toward the
end, and I suspect he must have heard my record.”
In a stylistic about-face, Hyman was on the ground floor when jazz
took a serious turn toward re-examining its origins and presenting
those beginnings in concert during the 1970s. George Wein recruited
him for the New York Jazz Repertory Company, which included bringing
the music of Louis Armstrong to the Soviet Union in 1975. Back
home, Hyman became a mentor to a coterie of younger players who were
immersed in jazz history yet could shift into contemporary techniques
at will. Along with Charlap, clarinetist/saxophonist Ken Peplowski and
trumpeter Randy Sandke have remained part of this group.
“When you’re around Dick, you find yourself doing these amazingly
impossible things,” Peplowski said. “We just did duos at Kitano’s [in
New York] and did old Jelly Roll Morton tunes, but one can turn to the
other and say, ‘Let’s do a free improvisation,’ and bam, you’re off. And
in the middle of the song, he might stop everything, change keys, change
mood or change tempo.”
During the 1980s and ’90s, Hyman balanced his work as a jazz organizer
with an increasingly busy schedule working on film scores. He ran
the Jazz In July program at the 92nd St. Y from 1985 until he handed the
reins over to Charlap 20 years later. Meanwhile, Hyman worked on the
music for a dozen Woody Allen movies, as well as Moonstruck.
“The rewarding thing for me was it was done live,” Hyman said. “If
it was a movie with a chorus, you had a chorus of 16 singers in the studio.
Or a big symphonic orchestra. It wasn’t the slightly phony technological
processes that have become familiar since. Sometimes there were
scenes where I would be conducting an orchestra to a projection on the
screen. You had to get to a certain point and pause for maybe a half second
before you went on to the next point. And those things were marked
on the screen. All this was fun.”
Since Hyman has put aside organizing the Jazz In July series and
doubts he’ll work in film again, he’s refocused on his own music, though
he’s also collaborating with his daughter, Judy Hyman, on Appalachian
waltzes for piano and fiddle. He’s been transcribing and selling his
scores and plans to publish a notated version of Century Of Jazz Piano.
He’s also released a series of moving collaborations on Arbors this
past decade, including a great duo project with Sandke in 2005, Now
& Again. Throughout the disc, Hyman constantly challenges the trumpeter
with tricky turns on standards like “You’d Be So Nice To Come
Home To” while also showing radiant warmth on his Beiderbecke tribute
“Thinking About Bix.”
“You just have to have all your wits about you when you’re playing
with him because he’s liable to go off in any direction,” Sandke said. “A
couple times he’d change keys on me, and I’d try to follow along as best I
could. He’s not an accompanist in the standard sense. He’s a take-charge
kind of guy, but in his quiet, reserved way. And one of the most cool people
under pressure I’ve ever seen.”
Hyman continues to draw younger musicians into his orbit.
Clarinetist Anat Cohen played with him at a 2009 Fats Waller tribute in
Chicago, and also at New York’s Birdland in June.
“We were playing the music of Louis Armstrong last night, and I
found myself smiling so much at the way he will just surprise you,”
Cohen said. “He’ll go where you expect him to go with a line, but then
give a different punch line. He can go in, out, take a trip and put you back
inside a song. And then he paid me one of the best compliments when he
said, ‘You were reading my mind the whole gig.’” DB
SEPTEMBER 2011 DOWNBEAT 39