August 5, 1999
LIBRARY / MUSIC ENCYCLOPEDIAS
A Century of Pickin' and Riffs on CD-ROM
Dick Hyman's Century of Jazz Piano
(JSS Music; $49.95, Home version;
$99.95, Pro version; Windows 3.1 and
later, and Macintosh 7.0 and later.)
By BEN RATLIFF
ick Hyman, the jazz pianist
and historian, has produced
an educational CD-ROM, Dick
Hyman's Century of Jazz Piano, that
might be a little more autobiographical than consumers may have bargained for. Through his own work
and as producer of the Jazz in July
concerts at the 92d Street Y,
Hyman has spent his career educating audiences about the great figures
of prewar jazz. As a result, the videos, études, biographical nuggets
and diabolically difficult quiz on this
two-disk set are weighted toward the
giants of jazz piano -- Jelly Roll
Morton, Art Tatum, Fats Waller,
Earl Hines, Teddy Wilson. Oh, yes:
and Dick Hyman.
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Linda Rosier for the New York Times
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PIANO LESSONS - Dick Hyman - musician and now CD-ROM author - has studied every period of jazz piano.
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The project tries to be comprehensive (it covers 63 pianists), though it
shouldn't need to; presumably, no
aspiring pianist is going to learn everything from one source, and since
Hyman has more to say on the
prewar styles, he might have done
better simply to devote both disks to
the first half of the century.
In any case, Century of Jazz Piano
is full of valuable and specific knowledge. Hyman isn't offering beginner piano lessons here.
But for
pianists or even vaguely interested
casual musicians with a bit of jazz
knowledge, Hyman gracefully, if
a bit too self-referentially, connects
the dots of a historical line that can
be hard to follow.
Some of the features reviewed
here, like the MIDI files, the quiz and
the video lessons, are included only
in the Pro version.
Hyman has studied every period of jazz piano.
That works in his
favor where permission fees are concerned: for Chick Corea, Keith Jarrett, Cecil Taylor, Bill Evans, McCoy
Tyner and others of the last 50 years,
he often supplies his own études
based in their style or plays a standard in their style.
His imitations are
skillful and useful, but sometimes
they amount to parlor tricks pushed
a bit too far. In the Chick Corea
section, for example, he presents improvisations rooted very generally in
Chick Corea's style, although, as he
puts it, his improvisations ""are in no
way based on any of Chick's."" Something this far removed from the
source really belongs in the Dick
Hyman section, if it belongs at all in
a history of jazz piano.
Elsewhere on the disks, in a MIDI
application (MIDI being the computer language used for musical notation), the user can see all these tunes
-- originals and Hyman's imitations -- played on a digitized keyboard seen from above, with red dots
lighting the appropriate keys as the
music moves along.
That is helpful,
though not for sight-reading; even
better would have been an added
application where one could read notated transcriptions of the tunes and
improvisations, with staff-notes
lighting up along the way.
There are a few dozen Quicktime
video lessons, each one lasting a few
minutes.
Hyman plays stylistic
examples as he talks.
He's comfortable in this role, and good at it. One
large section is given over to Art
Tatum, where Hyman details
runs and intervals, analyzing
Tatum's style; in ""Ragtime to
Stride"" and other segments, he emphasizes how successive styles built
on what came before, such as how
the role of the left hand gradually
changed from ragtime (a basic oom-pah) into stride (richer or leaner
bass accompaniment) to the sophisticated post-stride of, say, Teddy Wilson and finally to the jabbing bebop
minimalism of Bud Powell.
On the other disk, an image of New
York's 52d Street clogged with 1950's
cars and giant nightclub marquees
offers you eight genre options, including Harlem, Kansas City, Ragtime, Greenwich Village and, yes,
Dick Hyman.
A click on Greenwich
Village yields two options: the Village Vanguard and the Knickerbocker Bar and Grill.
Click on Knickerbocker, and you're presented with
five artist choices, among them Teddy Wilson and Dave McKenna.
Click
on Dave McKenna and you get either
a McKenna tune or a Hyman tune in
the style of McKenna; a short,
generalized analysis of it written by
Hyman; a few still photographs,
and in some cases, a short film.
And
for each artist there is a link to the
MIDI function, so that you can see
the keyboard fingering of the songs
as they move along; while that happens, you can change the tempo, create a loop to repeat a section of the
piece, or transpose its key.
There are some bugs in the disks.
In some of the MIDI files, ghost keys
seem to be held down for long periods, making you wonder if Tatum actually had three hands.
The jazz quiz is the most flummoxing part of the tutorial; it will reduce
almost everybody to the status of
jazz moron. I headed straight for the
advanced questions and was quickly
humiliated. ""Why did Dave McKenna develop a powerful left hand when
he started playing for money at age
13?"" Among several plausible answers, the correct choice is ""D: A
lack of bass players in Milford, MA.""
(Of course!) Finally, a few of my
right answers were registered by the
program as being wrong.
In the easier questions, I learned
some interesting things about interventions into the careers of Oscar
Peterson and Thelonious Monk by
their mothers, the exact dollar take
of George Gershwin and Irving Caesar on the sale of their first song and
the various nicknames under which
Dick Hyman has performed.
The individual pianists' sections
include video clips of Art Tatum,
Lennie Tristano, Horace Silver and
Bud Powell, among many others.