DICK HYMAN: FACE THE MUSIC - A CENTURY OF IRVING BERLIN

FACE THE MUSIC A Century of IRVING BERLIN liner notes

Way back in 1980, when Irving Berlin was only 92 years old, Dick Hyman began gathering a collection of the sheet music of Berlin's songs. The purpose of his collection at that time was to prepare a Berlin program to be played by his Perfect Jazz Repertory Quintet (Pee Wee Erwin, trumpet, Phil Bodner, reeds, Milt Hinton, bass, Bobby Rosengarden, drums) during a four-week engagement at Michael's Pub in New York. That engagement whetted Hyman's appetite for Berlin's music, and in the years since then his collection of Berliniana has grown tremendously. So when the time arrived to celebrate the centennial of Berlin's birth (he was born on May 11, 1888, and is the second American songwriter within a period of five years to live to be 100 years old; the other was Eubie Blake, who reached 100 in 1983), Hyman was uniquely qualified to explore Berlin's career on this disc. But how can one choose a mere handful of songs from the thousand or more that Berlin published during his 60 years as a songwriter? In the six decades between "Marie from Sunny Italy," for which 19-year-old Irving Berlin provided only the lyrics, and "An Old Fashioned Waltz" when, at the age of 78, he wrote both words and music, as he had for all his songs since 1915, Berlin produced numerous songs that remain constantly popular -- "White Christmas," "Alexander's Ragtime Band," "Blue Skies," "Easter Parade," "There's No Business Like Show Business" -and even a song that is virtually a national anthem, "God Bless America." Faced with such a wealth of material, Hyman let his instincts make the choices -- a mixture of songs that he has frequently played but is still exploring as well as a couple that he had never played and one ("The Night Is Filled with Music") of which he was unaware until it was called to his attention for this disc.