TT 282: Dick Hyman plays "Dizzy Fingers"

Rarified touches to a minor Zez Confrey classic

(the following is basically a continuation of yesterday’s post)

In his book Piano Pro, Dick Hyman spends some time talking about Zez Confrey. Confrey pairs smoothly with Ferde Grofé, who I wrote about a week ago. Grofé was born 1892, Confrey 1895, and George Gershwin in 1898. Gershwin was the genius, but Confrey and Grofé were also important in the Roaring Twenties and early Thirties, when American composers ranging from pop to symphonic were writing out some early form of jazzy material while transitioning from Ragtime to the Swing Era.

If you were a home pianist in 1921, you had to have Confrey’s “Kitten on the Keys” in your stack of sheet music.

Confrey himself recorded his hit, proving that he was a full-blooded swinging cat who didn’t treat his published score as holy writ. (His left hand is closer to Jelly Roll Morton than you might expect.)

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The other familiar Confrey piece is “Dizzy Fingers.”

“Dizzy Fingers” is, objectively, a pretty bad piece of music, although it is touched by near-genius in at least one respect: playability. The right-hand “dizzy” figurations fit the hand smoothly and are reasonably easy to play at lightning speed. The feel resembles a fast rag but the left hand “oom-pah” — that bête noire of the amateur rag pianist — is simple single notes with no wide jumps.

In other words, an amateur can live up the promise of the title. After a rickety reading, the amateur’s friends at the party can exclaim, “Wow, your fingers move so fast we are getting dizzy!”

Hyman recorded an album of Confrey in 1983. Modest to a fault, Hyman lets slip this is one LP that he’d like to see reissued on CD. (I don’t think he suggests this for any other album in Piano Pro, and this is a man who has recorded dozens of obscure LPs.)

I was intrigued by Hyman’s Confrey advocacy, so I searched out what was available on YouTube. And, yes, there’s a “Dizzy Fingers.” The upload of Hyman’s rendition even comes with a scrolling score.

When I started watching, I felt a familiar impatience: Hyman’s fluent chops are not really enough to save the opening A Major theme from the curse of utter banality.

However, as the performance progresses, Hyman inserts a few wonderful surprises. I have marked the places in the score below.

1. At the first return of A Major, Hyman inserts a left hand “thumb line” that sounds like a French Horn or Trombone.

2. At D major, Hyman plays the silly stuff up an octave the second time. To compensate for a potentially empty middle, he also add chords in the left — making it more like full stride piano — to generate the right texture.

3. And the big finish: for the final A major, Hyman adds in an “answer” up the octave.

These delightful flourishes transform an underwhelming party piece into a virtuoso experience. Kudos to Dick Hyman! I will search out the LP. Based on this performance alone, I suspect Hyman is the greatest interpreter of Zez Confrey.

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Coda: bringing this back home to more familiar jazz:

I suspect the opening two strains of Earl Hines’s wonderful “Panther Rag” (recorded 1928) are inspired by the novelty rag stylings of Zez Confrey, especially the B-flat strain of “Kitten on the Keys.”

After those opening strains, Hines blows fiercely on “Tiger Rag” changes before moving even further afield.