  Using deformations of associative products, derivative nonlinear Schrodinger
(DNLS) hierarchies are recovered as AKNS-type hierarchies. Since the latter can
also be formulated as Gelfand-Dickey-type Lax hierarchies, a recently developed
method to obtain 'functional representations' can be applied. We actually
consider hierarchies with dependent variables in any (possibly noncommutative)
associative algebra, e.g., an algebra of matrices of functions. This also
covers the case of hierarchies of coupled DNLS equations.
