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