THE MOOG & ME [:90]

RUFFIN: NOW A JAZZ MOMENT

KEYBOARDIST DICK HYMAN IS NOTHING IF NOT VERSATILE. SO IT’S NO WONDER HE WAS TAPPED TO EXPERIMENT WITH THE BRAND-NEW MOOG SYNTHESIZER IN THE LATE 60S.

Dick Hyman: It was not unlike the electric organs that I had played. In fact, that was my chief entry into it, electronic sounds that you could modify and play in various interesting ways. But with the Moog, there are a lot of possibilities that simply—didn’t exist in other keyboards. You could glissando. You could go from a low note to a high note without—without the individual tones, so that you’d go (sings a glissando), and you can control the rate of the ascent or the descent. And all sorts of—of manners of producing a tone, and once we got into it, it was the most interesting thing. Excerpt of “The Moog and Me” composed and performed by Dick Hyman, from the album Moon Gas, used courtesy of The Omni Recording Corporation and by permission of Eastlake Music Inc. [ASCAP].