JazzWax

Interview: Sammy Nestico (Part 1)

Count Basie's finest album of the 1960s is easily Straight Ahead. Recorded in 1968 for the Dot label, the album's tracks were composed and arranged from top to bottom by Sammy Nestico. He even conducted the band. What's remarkable about this album is how naturally Sammy's charts swing within the Basie idiom. Sammy's up-tempo numbers build repeatedly to satisfying crescendos, leaving plenty of room for Basie's punctual piano, while Sammy's ballad compositions are rich showcases for Basie soloists. This year, Sammy was nominated for a Grammy for his new album [pictured], Sammy Nestico and the SWR Big Band: Fun Time, which swings relentlessly. Sammy arranged 10 Basie albums, four of which won Grammy Awards.

I first fell in love with Sammy's writing in the early 1970s. Back then my high school dance band played a few of his charts. Before Sammy went Hollywood, he was an educator-entrepreneur who had created packages of more than 600 band charts. Included in each was a floppy black vinyl record so you could hear what the finished arrangements should sound like. As soon as you heard things like Warm Breeze on that record, you ached to play them.

In Part 1 of my two-part interview with Sammy, 85, the West Coast arranger, who has worked on more than 200 albums and has arranged and orchestrated for virtually everyone in the music business, talks about growing up in Pennsylvania, playing and recording with Charlie Barnet, and the one life decision he still regrets:

JazzWax: How was it growing up in Pittsburgh in the 1930s?
Sammy Nestico: It was hard. But everyone on our street wound up like us, so we never felt we were poor. During the Depression, my dad worked for the railroad in the yards moving switches back and forth and repairing locomotives. There was money coming in, but he and my mom didn’t get along. They separated several times, but each time they’d get back together they had to split up again. The third time he left, we moved next to my grandma, and my whole life was happier.

JW: Why?
SN: There was no more strife. When we moved, peace came. I was 10 years old and became the man of the house. I was the oldest, with a younger brother and sister. When I was a kid, I wanted to be in a big band. After listening to the radio day and night, I knew what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. The great swing bands of 1938 and 1939 were just coming in, and I was listening to shows being broadcast from Frank Dailey’s Meadowbrook [pictured] in New Jersey and other unbelievable places. It was just wonderful. Trombonist Tommy Dorsey was my favorite because I was a trombonist in school. I can still name all the musicians in his band then.

JW: Did you listen to records?
SN: Yes. I had a $5 record player that I had received second hand. I wanted to buy records but we didn’t have any money. My mom was giving me 10 cents a day for food, which meant that after two five-day weeks, I’d have a dollar. I saved my dollar by not eating for two weeks. I was hungry but doing without was worth it.

JW: How many records could you buy for $1?
SN: [Laughs] I would go to this little store that sold used jukebox records and buy seven of them for $1. They were all scratchy but I didn’t care. I played them on that little record player. I still remember Charlie Barnet’s Night and Day and Tommy Dorsey’s Song of India with Marie on the flip side. When I finally played with Tommy later in the 1940s, I told him that he had given me lessons [laughs]. I had studied his records to learn what positions he used on the trombone to make his different notes sound so clean.

JW: How could you afford a trombone in school?
SN: I started playing a school instrument in the 8th grade. By the 10th grade I was working in local nightclubs. I came to it naturally and loved playing so much. I bought a trombone on one of those store lay-away plans with a $24 down-payment from my two weeks on the job. I told my mom she wouldn’t have to worry about making the payments, that I would handle them. But I didn’t keep at it, with school and everything, so she paid the rest, little by little.

JW: When did you start working professionally full time?
SN: In 1941, at age 17, I was in the orchestra employed by WCAE, the ABC radio affiliate in Pittsburgh. People would come in to plug their songs. If the band’s leader liked the tune, he’d give me the piano sheet to arrange. I wasn’t the main arranger, but little by little I was writing things for him. It was a simple little band at the time.

JW: How did you learn to arrange?
SN: I just had listened and analyzed every record I bought. There was no book then telling you how to write pop records. I learned from my hits and my misses. I wrote some awful things and told myself, “I won’t do that again.” I had no formal training at all.

JW: Did you always enjoy swing?
SN: Yes, from the start. I learned a lot about swing by listening hard to those Sy Oliver  [pictured] arrangements for Tommy Dorsey. 

JW: Hold on. You’re making it all sound a little too easy.
SN: It wasn’t easy [laughs]. In my first arrangement for the radio band, I wrote all of the parts in the bass clef [laughs]. Even the drummer knew something was wrong. So I took the arrangement back home. The next week when I returned, my arrangement sounded better—but something was still wrong. I had forgotten to transpose the saxophone parts. So I had to work on it again. Little by little, I got things right. I would listen to my favorite records and try to imitate my heroes. The radio station was a great lab for me.

JW: When you put a record on, what were you hearing?
SN: I’d tune in to the background. Back in those days, arrangers painted a picture. There would always be something in there that was fascinating, and I’d try to imitate it. I didn’t even have score paper nor did I know how to write for different parts. I’d just fill papers with notes. I taught myself the piano, learned the staves and started voicing. Little by little you listen, you learn, you imitate and eventually the result becomes you. Eventually I became Sammy. [Pictured: Sammy in 1940]

JW: Your first big-band experience was playing with Charlie Barnet in 1946.
SN: Yes, what a great band. Six trumpets and four trombones and six reeds including Barnet. It was an integrated band, too. There were three black musicians in the band and two writing for the band, in addition to Billy May. Trombonist Porky Cohen was my roommate, and I was thrilled, like I was in heaven. Charlie Barnet was terrific. He was a playboy and a millionaire who just played music for the joy of it. He was easygoing. If there was anything that had to be done that wasn’t easy, he’d give it to the band manager to do.  [Pictured: Sammy Nestico]

JW: What did you do after playing on Barnet’s band?
SN: I returned to WCAE in Pittsburgh. But that was a mistake. I should have gone with Barnet to California in the fall of 1946. But my mother kept saying, “You should be a teacher.” So I listened to her and enrolled at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh and earned a music education degree. My girlfriend at the time had said, “Let’s go to California.” But I didn’t listen, and I always regretted that decision.

JW: Why?
SN: If I had gone, I would have been writing for dozens of bands throughout the 1950s. Many of the guys left the Barnet band when it arrived in Hollywood and got an early start out there. But I never held my decision against my mom. She pushed me to stay in education, out of love. But it was a bad decision, career-wise.

JW: So you became an educator?
SN: Yes. In 1950, I taught high school for a year but I didn’t like it. I loved the kids, but the administrators drove me nuts. They were a drag. I hated academia because of the administrators.

JW: Then what did you do?
SN: By then, the swing era was all but finished and the rock era was starting with Bill Haley. I re-enlisted and became staff arranger for the Air Force Band in Washington, D.C. for 15 years. During this time I became the leader of the Airmen of Note, the top Air Force jazz outfit. When my period of service was through with the Air Force, I enlisted with the U.S. Marine Band and led that orchestra.

JW: You seem to have enjoyed leading these bands.
SN: Oh very much so. But it was tricky. Most of the musicians were great but occasionally you had guys who didn't swing immediately or didn't have the passion. One time I said to the band, "When the trumpet is playing a beautiful solo, can we have a little more support from the trombones?” One of the guys in the band cracked, “If you wanted more support, you should have written it in.” I said, “If I’d written in all the things you’re supposed to do in that bar, there’d be no room for notes.” I grabbed my ears and said, “You see these? These are what you’re supposed to be using. Your two ears—that’s called musicianship.”

JW: Were you a good educator?
SN: I think so. I was always about the feel and the execution. When I taught at the University of Georgia, I’d always tell my students, “Don’t go on to the next page after you play something. Go back and analyze the music until you understand how it works.” I never had lessons in my classes. We'd rehearse tirelessly until they got it.

JW: How did you finally wind up in California arranging?
SN: In late 1960s, I had heard about this tenor sax player with Woody Herman named Sal Nistico. But that's a whole other story.

Tomorrow, Sammy talks about his connection to Sal Nistico, how he wound up writing arrangements for Basie, and how his successful charts led to a major West Coast career that began at age 44.

JazzWax tracks: Sammy Nestico and the SWR Big Band: Fun Time is an album that just won't quit. The SWR Band is a German orchestra made up of the country's finest musicians. You'll find Fun Time at iTunes and at Amazon here.

JazzWax notes: Sammy has just self-published his autobiography, The Gift of Music. It's available here or at Amazon here.

JazzWax clip: Here's Count Basie in 1968 playing Sammy's composition and arrangement of The Magic Flea...

Here's the SWR Big Band playing Blue Samuel, the opening track on Sammy's new Fun Time CD...

Herb Pomeroy: A Splendored Gig

Before he became an educator at Boston's Berklee School of Music, trumpeter Herb Pomeroy briefly led a big band in the late 1950s. The band had a solid, swinging sound, like a steam locomotive going at full tilt. While Maynard Ferguson's band during this period was about the sonic impact of the brass section and frenzied daring of its soloists, Pomeroy's short-lived orchestra specialized in rhythm and round tonality, with an airy emphasis on the reed section. Through deft composing and arranging, Pomeroy managed to combine Count Basie's swing with Duke Ellington's grace, and the result was foot-tapping bliss. Sadly, Pomeroy recorded only three albums with this band. The first was Life Is a Many Splendored Gig, recorded for Roulette in 1957.

Pomeroy throughout the early 1950s was a fixture on the small-jazz scene in Boston. He was often found leading groups at The Stable, and he recorded between 1951 and 1954 with the likes of Charlie Mariano, Jaki Byard, Dick Twardzik, Varty Haroutunian, Serge Chaloff and Ray Santisi (even Prestige producer Ira Gitler wound up on a recording playing bells). Pomeroy's groups even recorded in Boston, not New York. In 1954, Pomeroy toured with Stan Kenton's band, the one with Lennie Niehaus, Charlie Mariano, Bill Holman, Jack Montrose and Boots Mussulli in the reed section.

Pomeroy didn't have Ferguson's show-biz flair on the trumpet nor was he a household jazz name in 1955. Pomeroy had spent much of his career up until this point in Boston. Though he had played with Charlie Parker at Boston's Hi-Hat and Storyville clubs in 1953, Pomeroy remained out of the limelight. The same was true for many of the guys in his big band. A good percentage were family men who worked day jobs, which made putting together a band for steady rehearsals, gigs, touring and recording tough. One musician in the band worked in a bank, one sold women's shoes, one worked as a maintenance worker and another was studying to be a dentist. Paying rent on a big band musician's salary wasn't what it had been 10 years earlier. [Pictured: Herb Pomeroy with Duke Ellington in 1957]

While the band didn't have big backers, as some other bands did, the musicians Pomeroy was able to assemble could rock chairs and tables across a room. In addition to Pomeroy, the first band featured Lennie Johnson, Augie Ferretti, Everett Longstreth and Joe Gordon (trumpets); Joe Ciavardone, Bill Legan and Gene DiStasio (trombones); Dave Chapman and Boots Mussulli (alto saxes); Varty Haroutunian [pictured] and Jaki Byard (tenor saxes) and Deane Haskins (baritone sax), Ray Santisi (piano), John Neves (bass) and Jimmy Zitano (drums). Tenor saxophonist Zoot Sims was added on half the tracks.

After Pomeroy assembled his working orchestra in 1955, the band stuck close to home and day jobs. The band worked steadily at The Stable in Boston—first one night a week, then two. After two years of gigs and relentless writing and arranging by Pomeroy, the band was ready, and the orchestra traveled to New York to record for Roulette.

Every single track on the Life Is a Many Splendored Gig is a knockout. There's no filler here, no padding for extended solos. This is largely an old-school band with a sound unlike any other of its time. There's plenty of fire, but the passion is collective, and solos are smoothly executed rather than fuse-burners.

Most of the tracks on the album are Pomeroy originals. Blue Grass, Wolafunt's Lament and Jack Sprat are swingers while Feather Merchant, another swinger, comes out of the Basie book. Jaki Byard's Aluminum Baby is pure Ellington, while Bob Freedman's Theme for Terry rests on a "Four Brothers" reed sound. No One Will Room With Me probably comes as close to the Ferguson sound as any of the tracks on the album. There are jazz standards as well. It's Sand Man features a fine Sims solo while Tadd Dameron's Our Delight breaks from the gate on the opening notes and keeps on going. Big Man is a mid-tempo tune that opens with a Latin beat and resolves into a walking jazz tempo. The album closes with Less Talk, another rip-roaring original.

The beauty of this band is how Pomeroy used the reeds to frame melodies and solos. Pomeroy's trumpet style also should not be overlooked. His open-horn solos were firm and fluttery, without sounding studio or hysterical on the high end. They were pretty, workmanlike and conscious that listeners needed to be delighted. For Pomeroy, taste and craftsmanship mattered. That mantra remained with him throughout his career, right up until his death in 2008.

JazzWax note: Chuck Stewart photographed the cover of Life Is a Many Splendored Gig. To the oddball album-cover sleuth, the image on first glance would appear to be knickknacks from a surrealist's garage sale.  But when you know the back story to the album, as related above, you realize that the stuff displayed is an inside joke. What you see are items that represent the bandmembers' diverse daytime occupations, from teacher and bank teller (that's cash in the middle) to shoe salesman (there's a shoehorn in there) and dentist (note the false teeth at the bottom center!).

JazzWax tracks: Unfortunately Herb Pomeroy's Life Is a Many Splendored Gig is out of print on CD and is going for about $100 here. But it's likely available as a download at many online e-retailers.

JazzWax clip: Here's Herb Pomeroy in 2003 playing It Could Happen to You. Dig his round, understated style on the horn...

Interview: Dick Hyman (Part 3)

Pianist Dick Hyman is as precise with his words as he is with his notes. During our conversation, Dick often stopped mid-sentence momentarily when answering a question, as if rolling his choice of words around in his palm before selecting them. His pauses weren't abrupt or disconcerting. They were lyrical, like his playing, coming almost like quarter-note rests in a swinging measure of music. What's even more interesting about these pauses is that there were no "uhhhs" or other unconscious devices to buy time. They were just brief, Pez-like moments of space as his mind politely gave the rest of his sentences a chance to catch up. [Photo of Dick Hyman backstage at New York's 92nd St. Y in 2003 by Hank O'Neal]

In Part 3 of my three-part conversation with Dick, the pianist, composer and arranger talks about recording on the organ and Moog synthesizer, and working with Benny Goodman, Woody Allen and Norman Jewison:

JazzWax: How did you wind up playing organ on so many albums in the 1960s and beyond?
Dick Hyman: Alvy West, a fine alto saxophonist who played in radio and television orchestras, asked me to try it. In those days, there was always a Hammond B3 in every studio. At the time, Alvy had a small band for a radio show and thought that the organ could fill things out.

JW: A good move?
DH: Yes. I'm glad I began playing it so early because the instrument quickly grew in popularity and was in demand starting in the 1960s. At NBC I played soap operas and game shows. For a time, I played more record dates as an organist than a pianist. I went from a Hammond to a Lowery organ, which could do certain things a Hammond couldn't. But you needed the Hammond to get that Jimmy Smith sound.

JW: You're the one playing the organ on Surfboard, from a Certain Mr. Jobim in 1967.
DH: Yes [laughs]. I remember almost getting dizzy because the song and arrangement were so highly syncopated. Three bar phrases against four. The band is playing the composition in 4/4 but the whole thing is built on three-beat phrases. And it never lets up and doesn’t resolve for 16 bars [pause]. I'm still fond of the bossa nova. 

JW: You were one of the first jazz-pop musicians to record on the Moog synthesizer in the late 1960s and you had a hit in 1969 with The Minotaur.
DH: The album was for Command Records, which was founded by Enoch Light, with Bobby Byrne running the A&R department. They were always on the lookout for new things that were happening sonically. They asked me to learn something about the synthesizer, and I had great help from Walter Sear, who was Robert Moog's partner.

JW: Did you have to practice on the Moog?
DH: No. You couldn't exactly practice on it but you had to learn something about its capabilities. The Moog was just a keyboard with notes that produced sounds. It had to be programmed. Some of the tracks on the album were organized and arranged by me on piano. The rest we just layered as we went along. Walter would suggest sounds and we'd overdub them. I have to confess that the album isn’t quite as remarkable as it sounds when you listen to it.

JW: Why?
DH: You can’t play more than one sound at a time on the instrument. For example, on The Minotaur, we started off with the drum track. Then we'd add a swooping melody. Then a sitar-like drone sound. Then the bass. That's typically how it worked. 

JW: How did you and Sear work together?
DH: It was great fun. I'd say to Walter, “I want to start with some kind of ethereal background, like arpeggios on a piano. Then he would set it up. That would suggest to me a particular melody or rhythm. Some of the things were arranged as though for organ. Two keyboards and a pedal board, but with many extra features, like the famous swoops and sweeps.

JW: In 1985 you played a big role in the Let’s Dance tribute to Benny Goodman for PBS.
DH: I was flattered when Benny made me the music coordinator of what turned out to be his last TV show. I never had an issue with Benny the way others said they did. He was precise and wanted things just right. I completely understood. The only issue that came up during the show was his legendary fiddling with the status of the section musicians. When I assembled that band, Benny would change his opinion about who should play which part.

JW: Was that unnerving?
DH: No, not at all. That was nothing new. In fact I expected it. Throughout his career, Benny was highly picky. Benny often changed the status of players in the brass section, for example, forcing guys to switch chairs and parts to get a different sound. For instance, during that 1985 performance, he assigned Laurie Frink to be lead trumpet without any notice before the show began. And throughout the program, he wasn’t quite sure he liked having a fifth saxophone—the baritone. He had dedicated the evening to Fletcher Henderson and perhaps wanted to cast the sound in that direction. So on some songs he had Danny Bank play the fourth tenor part on the baritone sax, and when that happened, Loren Schoenberg didn't have a great deal to do. [Photo of Benny Goodman by Herb Snitzer]

JW: Talk about perfectionists, what was it like working with Woody Allen as composer and arranger for many of his movies?
DH: He gave me a delightful amount of freedom after we set some ground rules. Those rules might be discussing the kind of music he wanted for a particular scene. Or if I came up with a song or theme, I'd have to audition it on the piano for him first. For the most part, though, when it came down to the writing, I was completely on my own.

JW: Was Allen there when you recorded?
DH: Yes, sometimes. When Woody attended the sessions, he'd generally stay in the back room and transmit comments through the person running the session.

JW: Did he ever want something changed or altered?
DH: Once or twice I guessed wrong and wrote something that didn’t quite work.

JW: For example?
DH: On the movie, Everyone Says I Love You, there’s a scene where the Indian Sikh cab driver [Robert Khakh] is driving back from LaGuardia Airport and suddenly bursts into song. He’s singing Cuddle Up a Little Closer in Hindi. First of all, we had to get the song translated into Hindi, so we had to find someone who could do that. Then we had to find someone who could sing it so we could dub it in later. We found a fellow [Sanjeev Ramabhadran] who could not only translate but sing. He was attending college at Princeton, I think. As with most of the musical numbers, we recorded to piano first and added the orchestration later.

JW: So far so good.
DH: Yes, but when I began to orchestrate, the first thing that came to mind was a sitar-sounding instrument and gongs and percussion.

JW: Did Allen have a problem with that?
DH: Let's just say that I learned about comedy very fast. Woody said my concept was too much on the mark. He said, “You don’t want to be that literal.” So I rescored the piece, this time with a syrupy string background, and we re-recorded it on the following session. The visual combined with the singing became much more ludicrous with this Andre Kostelanetz-like background.

JW: What was it like working with Cher on Moonstruck?
DH: I never saw Cher. I worked with director Norman Jewison. We recorded the soundtrack in Toronto. Norman lives up there. We brought up only one New York musician, accordionist Dominic Cortese, who was absolutely right for the session. For the rest, we used local musicians, including saxophonist Moe Koffman [pictured]. He had had a hit in the late 1950s with Swingin' Shepherd Blues.

JW: Did everything go smoothly?
DH: Almost. We had trouble figuring out how to open the film. The first time it was screened publicly for a test audience, no one laughed for a half hour. They didn’t understand that the film was a comedy. It was clear something had to be funny a lot sooner.

JW: What was the issue?
DH: The movie referred often to the opera La Boheme, and we knew we needed something Italian-American pop-ish. I thought of an Italian-American wedding band playing bits of Puccini. I knew that perfectly well after playing plenty of those weddings coming up in the business. I also had made lots of records with guitarist Tony Mottola, accordionist Charlie Magnante and other good friends.

JW: How did the wedding music idea go over?
DH: That was fine, but I thought it would be great to write a tarantella for the opening. Unfortunately, Norman didn’t care for that, although we wound up using the tarantella later in the film. We really didn't know how to open the film. Someone suggested using the overture to La Boheme, but there isn’t one. Besides, we needed to set a humorous tone for the audience so they knew the film was a comedy.

JW: How was the problem solved?
DH: The film editor had been listening to the radio and heard Dean Martin singing That’s Amore. We put that on the soundtrack, literally, and from then on audiences understood immediately what the movie was about [laughs].

A JazzWax thanks to photographer Hank O'Neal for the image at the top of this post. Said Hank in an e-mail: "The funny thing about this photo is that it is not a setup. Dick did this all the time—warming up while reading The New York Times. Of course he had to stop using both hands when he turned the pages. I first saw him do this at engineer Rudy Van Gelder's studio nearly 20 years ago."

JazzWax tracks: Dick Hyman playing organ on Antonio Carlos Jobim's Surfboard can be downloaded here off A Certain Mr. Jobim, a spectacular bossa nova album from 1967 with arrangements by Claus Ogerman.

Moog: The Electric Electrics of Dick Hyman, featuring Dick on the Moog synthesizer, is a fascinating period album that still holds up. Recorded in 1968, the album has a groovy, turned-on feel. But don't expect jazz. You have to put this instrumental recording in its proper historic context. What you have here is an electronic mash with the blended feel of the Mamas and the Papas' California Dreaming, Simon and Garfunkel's 59th Street Bridge Song, George Harrison's Within You, Without You, Paul Mauriat's Love Is Blue and even the Doors' Hello, I Love You. Today, the album would probably be considered "lounge" music. But viewed through lavender-tinted granny glasses, it's an electronic folk-rock trip, man. Unfortunately this one is out of print but may appear as a download at e-retailers.

Dick's upcoming release, a re-issue of Great American Songbook first released in 1994, is due out January 12th. It can be pre-ordered here.

Dick Hyman hits: Dick had three entries on Billboard's Top Pop Singles Chart. They were Moritat (Mack the Knife) (1956), Hi-Lili, Hi-Lo (1956) and The Minotaur (1969).

JazzWax clip: Here's a clip from Benny Goodman's Let's Dance PBS special in 1985 that Dick orchestrated. Dick is on piano, Louis Bellson on drums, and down the end of the sax section is Danny Bank on baritone, with (moving left) Loren Schoenberg and Ken Peplowski on tenors...

Interview: Dick Hyman (Part 2)

Dick Hyman can play anything and sound like anyone. Too  often this has been unfairly characterized as impersonation. As anyone who has listened carefully to Dick knows, his ability to play fluently in the style of, say, James P. Johnson or Erroll Garner isn't an attempt to pass himself off as someone he's not. Rather, Dick is merely slipping into another pianist's shoes and exploring a lost approach, reviving a technique to give it a modern airing. Dick's point always is to inform and educate, not mimic or clone.

That Dick is able to play an encyclopedia of historic jazz piano styles is alone remarkable. Even more astonishing is his virtuosity. Dick's flawless command of the keyboard and his impeccable fingering make his archeological digs shimmer with surgical accuracy. And Dick makes it all look so easy, as though he just returned in a time machine from an afternoon learning secrets from past greats. Dick's closest peer in the ivory hunter game is Billy Taylor, who was Art Tatum's protege and, like Dick, is a precise and noble teacher. 

In Part 2 of my three-part interview with Dick, the pianist-composer talks about Lester Young, playing behind Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, and recording one of Coleman Hawkins' most unusual and sole easy-listening sessions:

JazzWax: When you were playing with Lester Young in the 1950s, what did you notice most about his playing?
Dick Hyman: By then, Lester was at the point where his playing had become different, more sad than the peppy lines he had played on early Count Basie recordings. He had gotten into slowish tempos—which still swung, but his style was less incisive and more oozy. My experience playing with Lester allowed me to develop a different set of values when playing.

JW: You first played with Charlie Parker in 1950.
DH: I was playing at New York's Cafe Society with the Tony Scott Quartet at the time. Parker came in often, usually toward the end of the evening, which was about 4 a.m. Hearing him play was an electric feeling. You can still sense how exciting he was from his recordings.

JW: What do you mean by electric?
DH: As soon as Parker began a solo, you’d feel as though a current was turned on in your body. He was a very nice, agreeable kind of guy. I played with him soon afterward at Birdland one night when pianist Bud Powell was late. When I played with Bird, I understood where he was going harmonically but his melodies and phrases were amazing. When I hear some of his solos on recordings now, they still intrigue and puzzle me.

JW: You're at the piano in 1952 on one of the only video clips of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie playing together.
DH: Yes. You see a face with horn-rim glasses and a lot of hair for a nanosecond at the keyboard, to the left of Parker. You also see me at the very end of the program, when the camera backs up and everyone’s smiling. [Pictured: Dick to the left of Charlie Parker]

JW: How did you come to be playing with them?
DH: It was my show. Back then I had a nightly program on the DuMont Television Network, which was based in New York and lasted until 1956. I was doing quite a bit of piano work and composing for the network. My show was called Date on Broadway. It was just bassist Jack Lesberg and me. We’d play the show’s theme song and then accompany a singer or featured musician. There would be interviews with Broadway types and then another song or two.

JW: How did Gillespie and Parker wind up on the show?
DH: We had a progressive producer, and in 1952 he decided to feature Broadway columnist Earl Wilson introducing jazz critic Leonard Feather, who presented Down Beat awards to Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. So we had Bird and Diz perform on the show. We engaged drummer Charlie Smith for that show and Sandy Block was on bass.

JW: What was it like playing with Parker and Gillespie?
DH: It was together. Those guys played with such good time and feel. It’s a terrific performance considering it was a pop show with just two cameras. It was another night at the office for me. I was doing a lot of things in those days.

JW: Some observers of the clip say that Earl Wilson was being condescending and even racist toward Parker and Gillespie and that Parker's expression reflects this. You were there. Is this true?
DH: Not at all. People look at the clip and make modern assumptions and see what they want to see. Both Gillespie and Parker were happy to be there. Everyone was graceful. There was no coded racism. Awkwardness, perhaps, but that had more to do with the new medium of television and how to work with the cameras.

JW: And the observation that the cameras consciously worked to avoid showing an integrated group?
DH: Again, that's just how things worked out with two cameras. In any case, you can clearly see Sandy Block, the bass players, behind Dizzy and Bird in most of the segment. Today on TV you have camera shots fading into closeups, other lightweight cameras moving into unusual positions to show everyone on stage, often with candid perspectives. My show was from the dawn of television in 1952. Two clunky cameras moved in and out, and whatever they captured they captured. There wasn't as much thought going into what was done as our eye expects today.

JW: You were close with Tony Scott. What was he like?
DH: Tony was a wonderful, open, warm and excitable guy. He was the way he played. He shrieked. He played with a heavy beat. And he was a good friend. He was cutting a new path with his sound on the clarinet, and he felt greatly in competition with Buddy DeFranco. He used to get annoyed with critics who preferred Buddy.

JW: Was the rivalry real?
DH: Not really. Tony was a wonderful player. I saw him when he played with Buddy at Iridium in New York, maybe 10 years ago. I sat in with the band. Tony had reached the point in his devotion to high excitement while he played that the clarinet was an impediment. What he really wanted to do is yell and scream and be ecstatic during the performance. Quite different from Buddy, who was calm and schooled. But they got along, and that surprised me.

JW: Did you socialize with Tony?
DH: All the time. In the early 1950s, Tony and I used to have great times in Greenwich Village with my wife and his girlfriend of the moment. We’d go up to his place and listen to records and eat. That doesn’t sound like much today. But back then, when you played very late in nightclubs, as we did regularly, you get to a certain point where you’re running on exhaustion. It’s a romantic time of day, when everyone’s asleep, you’re finished with work and diners are open. The city is very quiet, there are no distractions and you’re in a relaxed state. [Picture: "Jive in the Park," 1955, by Ernst Haas]

JW: In 1963 you recorded with Coleman Hawkins on an unusual album with strings.
DH: I had gotten to know arranger-conductor Frank Hunter through Muzak dates and NBC orchestra recording sessions. Every now and then the jazz and easy-listening worlds crossed. This was one of those times. The rhythm section was Osie Johnson, Milt Hinton and me. Osie and Milt were always a team. They were on a lot of recordings together. I was lucky enough to be with them. When I wasn’t playing with them, Hank Jones was usually the pianist. There are a lot of little cliques in jazz of guys who came together and hired each other on dates. For instance, I did an early morning show with Eddie Safranski, Mundell Lowe and Don Lamond, and we wound up recording a lot together.

Tomorrow, Dick talks about his organ recordings, including Surfboard from A Certain Mr. Jobim, his recordings on the Moog synthesizer, and how he solved a particularly tricky problem in Woody Allen's Everyone Says I Love You.

JazzWax clip: Here's the famed clip of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Dick Hyman, Charlie Smith on drums and Sandy Block on bass...

Interview: Dick Hyman (Part 1)

Few pianists have been there and done that as often as Dick Hyman. In addition to playing with Charlie Parker, Lester Young, Tony Scott and Red Norvo, Dick studied with Teddy Wilson and recorded with Benny Goodman, Zoot Sims and virtually every other jazz great you can think of in the 1950s. In the late 1960s, Dick was among the first to record on the Moog synthesizer. In the 1970s, his Scott Joplin: Complete Works for Piano recorded in 1975 became a classic and remains so today. Starting in 1979, Dick began composing film soundtracks, including many of Woody Allen's films, and he composed the music for Norman Jewison's Moonstruck (1987). From the 1960s onward, Dick led a dual life as a jazz performer and a studio musician, acting as music director for Arthur Godfrey and others, recording easy listening albums, shifting often from piano to organ.

Dick also is known as a one-man piano museum. There isn't a style the virtuoso pianist hasn't mastered, and his six-CD set Dick Hyman's Century of Jazz Piano (and accompanying video series) is considered a masterpiece and an educational blessing. Marian McPartland credits Dick with knowing more songs than any other musician she knows, and has gone so far as to playfully challenge him to an obscure-tune shootout. Dick laughed diplomatically when I told him what Marian had said during my conversation with her.

In Part 1 of my three-part interview with Dick, 82, the pianist, composer and arranger talks about growing up in New York, taking lessons from Teddy Wilson and the importance of Jo Jones' smile:

JazzWax: Where in New York did you grow up?
Dick Hyman: On the Upper West Side. When I was 13 years old my family moved to Mount Vernon, N.Y., about a half-hour north of the city. As a kid in the 1930s, I never had any sense of deprivation.

JW: Who introduced you to jazz?
DH: My big brother Arthur collected jazz records, which in those days were 78-rpms. He brought them home from Harvard. He exposed me to Bix Beiderbecke, Art Tatum and all sorts of great musicians. This was when I was 12 years old, an impressionable age.

JW: Do you still have those records?
DH: In fact I do. The Bix record was Somebody Stole My Gal. On the other side was Rhythm King. The Tatum record was Tea for Two and Gone with the Wind. With Bix, I’m still trying to figure out what makes him so special. The music isn't as easy as it sounds. I’m still a sucker for Bix. I continue to find new things in what I hear, and those things delight me. I played three times in Davenport, Iowa, Bix’s birthplace, at summer festivals. I’m always eager to discuss the minutia of Bixology.

JW: Is part of the appeal Bix's mystique?
DH: I think so. People have been fascinated by his legend. You know, young man with a horn and all that. The idea of a young man living it up to excess and dying at age 28, with only eight years in jazz, but so in command of what he was he was doing. There’s some old mythology at work here: The artist who dies young after burning himself out. That legend was always an aspect of Bix that drew me to him.

JW: Did you play music professionally before entering the service in 1944?
DH: Yes, at school dances and so forth. I was taking piano lessons at age 12 or so and got to know my way around the keyboard very quickly. Before that, my brother Arthur showed me how things worked on the keyboard. He was a pretty good player. It also helped that we had a player piano in our home. The jolly sound of those piano rolls scrolling down left a huge impression on me. Best of all, you could slow down the rolls and figure out what was going on with the music. I've read that Duke Ellington learned James P. Johnson's Carolina Shout from a roll this way.

JW: What did you do in the service?
DH: I enlisted in the navy in 1944 to become a radio trainee. Otherwise I would have been drafted into the army. But when I was shipped to Great Lakes Naval Station [pictured], outside of Chicago, I flunked radio training and instead began playing in band activities on the base. The navy was a good experience, and I was very fortunate that the war in Europe ended soon after I went in. I got out in 1945 after only 13 months in the service.

JW: What did you do after the navy?
DH: I enrolled in a liberal arts program at Columbia University under the G.I. Bill. Liberal arts students were a special category—not like those majoring in business, law and medicine. Fortunately I was able to concentrate on music, and I took as many music courses as I could. I also became active at the campus radio station, which in those days was called CURC—Columbia University Radio Club. At first, it transmitted only on campus over the radiator system [laughs].

JW: What did you do on the radio?
DH: I played on various radio shows. In college I also wrote a varsity show—basically a musical—and I played piano for the performances. I did the same for some other musical shows. Around this time, radio station WOV in New York announced that it was holding a jazz piano competition so I entered. The guy who organized it was Art Ford, who later hosted Art Ford’s Jazz Party during the early years of television. On the radio judging panel were Teddy Wilson and John Hammond.

JW: How did you do?
DH: I won. The prize was 12 free lessons with Teddy Wilson. That experience was life-altering.

JW: How so?
DH: I had spent years trying to learn to play like Teddy, and there I was taking lessons with him. I went up to his apartment on St. Nicholas Ave. Each lesson lasted an hour. I wasn’t his only student. He was teaching at the Juilliard School of Music at the time.

JW: Was Wilson a good teacher?
DH: He was. He was very instructive and open. He showed me exactly how certain things were done, like alternative harmonies on songs and keyboard runs.

JW: Did he play for you?
DH: Just by example to suggest proper tempos and styles of songs. Teddy installed in me a lifelong passion for practicing and precision. Early on he asked me how I thought I played. I said “I think I play pretty well a lot of the times and some days not well at all.” Teddy said, “That’s why you practice.”

JW: What was Wilson like in the intimate setting of his home?
DH: Teddy was very patient and very calm, like his playing. He also was very giving and always in control of the music. Over the years, I continued to be friendly with  him and would see him from time to time. When he was a guest on Benny Goodman’s Let’s Dance musical tribute on PBS in 1985 [pictured], we were both there. I was playing with the orchestra and I also was the music coordinator for Benny. Both Teddy and Benny died the following year in 1986. To have them both leave us was a sad time for me. Teddy and Benny were the epitome of musical excellence when I was a kid and both had played important roles in my career and development.

JW: When did you first play with Goodman?
DH: In 1950, soon after winning that radio contest. Teddy had a lot to do with getting me the job. He recommended me to Benny.

JW: How did you get so good so fast?
DH: That came from the large record collection I had. I listened often to records, backward and forward. I played clarinet as well in those days and used to jam along with Louis Armstrong and Bix Beiderbecke on the records. Doing that gave me the feel.

JW: Did knowing how to play the clarinet help your piano playing?
DH: Yes. It was similar to  Teddy Wilson’s single note style in the right hand, which made me realize that piano solos didn’t have to be so elaborate, like Fats Waller’s or James P. Johnson’s. Teddy taught me about the importance of melody and time.

JW: You also played with Sonny Stitt and Gene Ammons in 1950 at Birdland?
DH: Well, just incidentally. Birdland had a remote wire back then that allowed radio shows to be broadcast from the club. During this time I was one of several musicians who played piano there regularly. I started playing there with Max Kaminsky’s Dixielanders. Because I was there under a weekly salary, I played with many musicians, including Sonny Stitt [pictured], Gene Ammons, Hot Lips Page and Lester Young. 

JW: Did you enjoy playing with Young?
DH: Yes, but more influential in that group was drummer Jo Jones. People get mystical when they try to define what jazz drummers do. Jo had a certain something, a special sense of swing and always the correct tempo. And he had the greatest smile. I've always preferred smiling drummers to sneering drummers.

JW: A sneering drummer doesn’t sound very pleasant. But why? What’s the big deal?
DH: You have to understand that like most pianists, I’m constantly watching the drummer and bass player. That’s how you keep things together. You cue each other to changes and when to start solos and to stop them. Jo’s expression was always inviting  and inspiring. It makes a difference when you have a section working to sound as one. [Pictured from left, Teddy Wilson, Lester Young and Jo Jones]

Tomorrow, Dick talks about the 1952 videoclip of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie (Dick was on piano), hanging out in the 1950s with Tony Scott and recording one of Coleman Hawkins' only easy-listening string sessions in 1963.

JazzWax tracks: If you look at Dick Hyman's massive discography, you might come away with the impression that he slept in recording studios. For those unfamiliar with Dick's work or who don't know where to begin, here are three albums that should serve as a wonderful introduction:

Dick Hyman: All Through the Night (Music Masters Jazz)—plays the music of Cole Porter. Each track on this 1990 album is a rollicking journey through the composer's melodies and thinking, with Dick's often-shifting piano style. It's available as a download here.

Dick Hyman: Thinking About Bix (Reference Recordings)—piano impressions of the fabled cornetist recorded in 2008. You can hear Dick's deep passion for Bix on each exploration. It's available as a download here.

The Party's Over: Dick Hyman Cocktail Piano (Reader's Digest)—despite its title, this baby is gorgeous. Dick covers a wide range of songs, from I Wish You Love to Young and Foolish. For some reason, it's not listed in his discography. It's available as a download here.

JazzWax clip: Here's Dick Hyman and Billy Taylor playing Tadd Dameron's Hot House...