Dick Hamilton plays to a beat of his own

Dick Hamilton realized he knew how to play the piano one Sunday afternoon at his grandparents house. There was “nothing else to do,” so why not try?

He was 4 years old.

“They had a piano in the living room, so I walked over and started playing the keys,” Hamilton says. “Suddenly, I realized I could predict what the next one was going to sound like. So then I started playing tunes on it.”

But that wasn’t the true beginning of the Sarasota-raised musician, composer and recording artist’s introduction to music. Hamilton says his parents played records for him from the time he was born. At the age of 2, he had his own record player. Now, he’s the music director for the Savory Swing Band, an 18-piece big band that performs charity concerts throughout Sarasota.

“I inundated my brain,” he says. “Or my mom did, because she found out if I was doing something naughty, she could put a record on and I would stop doing it.”

By the age of 9, he had also learned how to play the trombone. A year later, he added trumpet to his repertoire. And it branched off from there.

But it isn’t the number of instruments Hamilton can play that’s notable. It’s that he taught himself all of them.

His mom tried to get him into formal piano lessons with an old friend of hers, but it turned into a songwriting lesson.

“I ended up teaching her how to play by ear,” he says with a laugh. “I played her some things that I had made up and she asked me if they were written down. I said, ‘No, I’m not going to forget them.’ And she said, ‘You’re what, 8? You’re going to forget them.’”

So it was she who taught him the very basics of composing, something that would become the focus of his music career further down the road.

Hamilton and his family moved to Sarasota in 1950, and soon he formed a small music group with friend and fellow musician Jim Martin in junior high.

When they got to high school, that group was made up of all the first-chair players in the Sarasota High School band. They were so good (and the rest of the school band was so bad, he says), that the band director would ask if Hamilton’s group had a gig before booking SHS for any parades. He wouldn’t take the rest of the high schoolers without them.

After SHS, Hamilton did one semester as a composition major at Florida State University before realizing he was wasting his time.

He recalls his first class including a lecture on different musical devices, prompting him to go back to the dorm to write a bunch of pieces using said devices. He gave the works to his teacher the next day, who responded by saying it wasn’t an assignment and they wouldn’t be doing that until graduate school.

“I said, ‘Well, I’ve been doing that for years.’”

Hamilton believes the best type of musical education is listening and absorbing the best music you can get your hands on. Eventually, he says, you develop a musical language of your own.

His career took off after that. From several years traversing the Chicago jazz scene to writing a large part of the first book of the Navy Band to 47 years of studio work in Hollywood, he’s experienced the music scene from a variety of lenses.

He even quit playing for 17 years to focus on writing for commercials, films and TV. But now he’s happy to be back to his first love: playing music.

“It was a lot of fun, and now it’s even more fun here,” Hamilton says of moving back to Sarasota. “There’s so many places to play and so many good players as opposed to when we were growing up.”

Hamilton was asked four years ago to be music director for the Savory Swing Band, which he considers the best big band on the West Coast of Florida.

His profound effect on the band is evident in the theme of its next concert, “Music of Dick Hamilton,” which honors his work.

The main goal of the talented group, however, is philanthropic, with 100% of the proceeds from every concert going to All Faiths Food Bank.

Hamilton says he couldn’t be happier playing and making a difference in his community.

“This is what retirement is supposed to be. When you keep on doing all the stuff you were doing — except you don’t do any of the dumb stuff.”