Dick Hyman

Throughout a busy musical career which got underway in the early 50's, Dick Hyman has functioned as a pianist, organist, arranger, conductor, and composer. His versatility in all 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. A new recording with orchestra is known as From The Age Of Swing.

Mr. Hyman's concert compositions include his Piano Concerto, Ragtime Fantasy, and Sonata For Violin And Piano. 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 Derek Smith, Roger Kellaway, Ralph Sutton, and the late Dick Wellstood. For the past ten summers he has acted as artistic director of the acclaimed Jazz In July series of concerts at New York's 92nd St. Y and frequently appears in the United States and abroad in solo recitals. In 1995 Mr. Hyman was inducted into the Jazz Hall Of Fame of Rutgers Institute of Jazz Studies and the New Jersey Jazz Society.

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 recent program, Bubbe Meises. He has been a guest performer on Garrison Keillor's radio broadcasts, and is frequently heard with the Jim Cullum Jazz Band on Riverwalk, Live From The Landing on Public Radio International. Mr. Hyman's arrangements are heard in the new Barry Manilow CD, Singin' With the Big Bands.

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, and most recently, Bullets Over Broadway and Mighty Aphrodite. 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 Ballet'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.

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