When Dick Hindman was eleven years old, he heard his father play Tchaikovsky's "None but the Lonely Heart" haltingly on a spinet piano. He asked his dad to show him how to read the notes and a few days later he was playing the piece for himself. That first piano lesson ignited his lifelong passion for music.
His father was a career military officer, so Dick grew up in many places and environments. He studied only classical music for the first several years, spending three years in the Washington, D.C. studio of concert pianist Harry McClure, while also studying musical composition with noted neoclassical composer and scholar Robert Evett. Later his family moved to Heidelberg, Germany, where he learned to speak German and studied briefly with the Director of the Conservatory of Music at the University of Heidelberg.
As a teenager, Dick naturally became interested in the popular music of his age group. He started playing rock 'n roll in Heidelberg with a band that performed in the local American Teen Club. "We concentrated a lot on Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, Ray Charles, Little Richard, and the like. I still like that music a lot," he says of those years. "That's where I learned to use my ears and to keep the form when playing with other musicians." Then, in 1961, someone changed his life by loaning him an Oscar Peterson record. He was thrilled by the combination of the Oscar's dynamic rhythms, blues foundations and the sophisticated harmonies of classical music. Eagerly he began listening to Eroll Garner, Art Tatum, George Shearing, Ahmad Jamal, the Miles Davis Quintet with Wynton Kelly, and Bill Evans.
Eventually the family returned to the US, moving to Colorado Springs, Colorado, where Dick started playing in night clubs. In 1968, he approached the great teacher and conductor Antonia Brico*, founder of the Brico Symphony Orchestra in Denver, and asked her to help him further develop his classical playing. The resulting three year relationship culminated with Dick's appearance as soloist with the Brico Symphony, performing Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1 to a capacity crowd of over two thousand people. The concert was a great success.
Dr. Brico encouraged Dick to develop a career as a concert pianist, but his mind was already moving more towards the realm of composition and improvisation. It was during this same period that Dick appeared on his first recording, entitled JAZZ CITY, produced by and starring Los Angeles saxophonist Pete Christlieb.
* For more information about Antonia Brico, see Judy Collins's Academy Award nominated film "Antonia: A Portrait of the Woman"
