2006 West Texas Jazz Party Featured Artist

Dick Hyman - Piano

Throughout a busy musical career which got underway in the early 50's, Dick Hyman has functioned as pianist, organist, arranger, conductor, and composer.  His versatility in all of these areas has resulted in well over one hundred albums recorded under his own name and many more in support of other artists.  While developing a masterful facility for improvisation in his own piano style, Mr., Hyman has investigated the earliest periods of jazz and ragtime and has researched and recorded the music of Scott Joplin, Jelly Roll Morton, James P. Johnson, Zez Confrey, Eubie Blake, Fats Waller, and other early figures.  He includes this historical material in his frequent solo recitals.  Other solo recordings include the music of Irving Berlin, Harold Arlen, Cole Porter, George Gershwin and Duke Ellington.  New recordings with orchestra are known as From The Age Of Swing, Swing Is Here, and Cheek To Cheek, while his early explorations on the Moog synthesizer have been reissued.

Mr. Hyman's concert compositions include his Piano Concerto, Ragtime Fantasy, and Sonata For Violin And Piano as well as the recent Three Raps for Piano and The Longest Blues in the World.  In his numerous public appearances he has performed solo, with orchestra, with his own quintet, with cornetist Ruby Braff, and in duo-piano appearances with George Shearing, Derek Smith, Roger Kellaway, Ralph Sutton and Dick Wellstood.  Since 1985 he has acted as artistic director of the acclaimed Jazz in July series of concerts ant New York's 92nd Street Y and has recently been named jazz advisor to the Oregon Festival of American Music.  In addition, he frequently appears in the United States and abroad as a soloist.  In 1995 Mr. Hyman was inducted into the Jazz Hall of Fame of the Rutgers Institute of Jazz Studies and the New Jersey Jazz Society, and since then he has received honorary doctorates from Wilkes University and Five Towns College.  His present schedule of concerts includes Three-Piano Crossover with Ruth Laredo and Marian McPartland; and with Doc Severinsen and the Phoenix Symphony Orchestra.

In addition to his activities in the jazz and concert worlds, Mr. Hyman has had a prolific career in New York as a studio musician and has won seven Most Valuable Player Awards from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences.  He acted as music director for such television programs as Benny Goodman's final appearance and for In Performance at the White House.  He received an Emmy for his original score for Sunshine's on the Way, a daytime drama, and another for musical direction of a PBS special on Eubie Blake.  Other services for PBS include original scores for the six Tales From the Hollywood Hills and for Ask Me Again, as well as conducting and orchestrating the more recent program, Bubbe Meises.  He has been a guest performer on Garrison Keillor's radio broadcasts, and is frequently heard with Jim Cullum's Jazz Band on Live From Riverwalk.  Other recent public radio broadcasts have been for Terry Gross' Fresh Air featuring the music of Will Marion Cook and Eubie Blake.

In years past, Dick Hyman was music director for Arthur Godfrey and orchestrator of the hit musical Sugar Babies.  He has served as composer/arranger/conductor/pianist for the Woody Allen films Zelig, The Purple Rose of Cairo, Broadway Danny Rose, Stardust Memories, Hannah and Her Sisters, Radio Days, Bullets Over Broadway, Mighty Aphrodite, Everyone Says "I Love You", and Sweet and Lowdown.  Other film scores have included Moonstruck, Scott Joplin--King of Ragtime, The Lemon Sisters, and Alan and Naomi.  His period arrangements were heard in Billy Bathgate.

In the dance field, Mr. Hyman composed and performed the score for the Cleveland/San Jose Ballet Company's Piano Man, for Ivory Strides for Ballet Jazz de Montreal, and for Twyla Tharp's The Bum's Rush for the American Ballet Theater.  He has arranged and performed piano music for Miles Davis: Porgy and Bess, a choreographed production of The Dance Theater of Dallas, now on tour.

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