Good Things Happen Slowly

by Fred Hersch

  When we moved into our new home, my father’s mother, Ella, offered to replace the Lester piano I had been using with a superior instrument. It was high time that I had an instrument appropriate to my skills, my seriousness, and my potential. At age eleven, I was evolving fast as a musician and needed a piano that I could continue to grow with. I also had the fantasy that if I had a better piano, I would practice more. (This search for the ultimate piano has led me to swap out and to constantly tinker with various vintage pianos over the years, though it has not led me to being more of a practicer.) I was tremendously excited to know I would be getting a new instrument, hopefully a Steinway. My friend Mark Hornstein down the street had one, and so did my grandmother. I used to love playing my grandmother’s piano, with its excellent responsiveness to touch and a rich, warm tone that befitted the music I was playing. And I could hear that special sound on all of the recordings of the great pianists that I was constantly listening to.

  When the new piano arrived, it was a baby-grand mahogany Baldwin. Curious why my parents had chosen to buy a mid-level instrument, I asked them, “Why didn’t we get a Steinway?” It must be said here that I am truly grateful that I grew up an upper-middle-class child having all my material needs provided for and being given what I asked for, within reason, and I don’t want to come off as totally spoiled. But even at that age I was old enough to know the difference between an okay instrument and a high-quality instrument. My grandmother had the means to pay for a Steinway, without a doubt, and there was plenty of room for one in the new, larger living room. Plus, the piano was for me; I was the one who’d be communing with this new instrument, and yet they’d never even asked me about it, never involved me in the selection process.

  My mother, put off by the question, said they thought the Baldwin was perfectly fine, and I should be happy with it. Supposedly, my teacher selected it. Though Jeanne herself had a Steinway, she was on the Baldwin artists’ roster, and the Baldwin factory was in Cincinnati at that time. I don’t know whether my parents asked her about a Steinway. And my mom made the excuse that the local Steinway dealer was anti-Semitic. I have a hard time believing this knowing the many piano dealers I do today and their eagerness to sell pianos to whoever wants them. The message was plain: I was lucky to be getting this piano, because there were many youngsters who didn’t have any grand piano to play. At any rate, my teacher said it was a fine piano, and my grandmother paid for it. If I wasn’t happy to have this piano, there must be something wrong with me.

  I tried my best but could never get the classic Steinway sound I wanted from that piano. It became frustrating to play, and every time I made the effort it reminded me that my parents didn’t consider me worthy of the same high-quality instrument that other serious musicians around us had. I felt hurt. From that day on, for as long as I lived in that house, I got less and less enjoyment from practicing classical music.

  But there was a nice stereo in the den, and I loved to sit there and listen to records. Being alone was not always easy for me, and it would remain a challenge well into adulthood. I was attracted to boys but had no validation of gay identity in my life. I knew my musical ability and my interests in mythology and Renaissance art history were unusual among youngsters my age, and at the same time I felt inadequate and had a difficult time connecting with my peers. The message that my arms were too short echoed endlessly in my mind. I was not terribly comfortable with myself. When I was alone with music, though, I didn’t feel quite so alone.

  When I turned eleven, I got Horowitz at Carnegie Hall: An Historic Return, the celebrated double LP from 1965, for my birthday. The whole album is extraordinary, but I was especially taken by Horowitz’s performance of Chopin’s Etude in F Major, op. 10, no. 8. I heard that, tried to play it, and thought, Well, there’s no point in my trying to do this. It’s already been done. And it’s not easy!

  I was familiar with the classical piano repertoire from the score analysis I had done in my music studies and also from attending the Cincinnati Symphony with my parents, who went weekly and often brought me with them. I saw most of the heavies of the 1960s in their prime: David Oistrach, the thrilling Russian violinist, and Byron Janis and Gina Bachauer, two titans of the piano. Listening from the center balcony of the Music Hall, I had a deep appreciation for classical music from firsthand exposure to it on a high level, but I had no idea how to make it my life given my lack of a work ethic.

  Not that I had any other ideas. I was floundering—succeeding in highly visible ways as a young pianist but without much in the way of emotional grounding or focus. And I had no idea that being a composer—let alone an improvising pianist—was a career path that was open to me. I had memorized most of the biographies in History’s 100 Greatest Composers, and it seemed to me that many of them had either emerged fully formed or died young and penniless—these tragic stories seemed very romantic to me. But I couldn’t wrap my head around the effort involved to compose music on a high level.

  At one point in my high school years, my teacher, Jeanne, played a house concert in our living room of prepared piano music by John Cage, which she had recorded for Columbia Records—with Cage himself in attendance. These pieces involved precisely placing screws, bolts, rubber bands, and other objects on or between the strings of the piano, thereby creating otherworldly, non-pianistic sounds. Cage stayed at our house for two nights, and I remember eagerly showing him my compositions. This was around the time of a big New York Times feature on him that had me very intrigued. At that time I was not a great listener, and I remember talking more about my music than asking about his. But he was very sweet about it, and I think he got a kick out of me. For a larger man, there was something elfin about him. I remember a distinct twinkle in his eye as he enthusiastically shared with me his non-musical interests of foraging for wild mushrooms and designing neckties. He just seemed like a kind, somewhat kooky, unpretentious older man. I had no idea of his prominent place in music history or that he was gay. I wish I could sit down with him now.

  When I was in high school, of course, I listened to a lot of the music that other people my age were listening to, and the early seventies were an insanely great time for pop music. There was Janis Joplin, connecting rock to Bessie Smith and the ballsy blues queens of the early twentieth century. There was Crosby, Stills and Nash, with their lush harmonies and songs about the natural world. I loved Aretha Franklin, Motown, the Beatles, James Taylor, and Joni Mitchell. Because their music was keyboard-based I listened to Traffic and Emerson, Lake and Palmer. I liked Elton John for the same reason—he was a piano player, and I tried to ignore the trite gibberish that his lyricist, Bernie Taupin, wrote for him. As my hippie friends and I rode around stoned in one of our parents’ cars, the AM radio poured out the Carpenters, the “Philadelphia sound” of the Stylistics, and the disco predecessor Isaac Hayes’s “Theme from Shaft.” I got my own stereo at fourteen and two years later, when I was able to drive, went to the record stores often after school, spending all my allowance on albums, when I wasn’t spending it on weed.

  As a Christmas gift around that time, I received The New York Times Great Songs of the Sixties, an anthology of sheet music with piano arrangements by Milton Okun. Since it was from the Times, I assumed that these songs were indeed “the best,” and I eagerly learned many of them. As I remember, the collection included multiple songs by Burt Bacharach, some European art-house movie themes, and “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” as sung by Glen Campbell. I played the notes as written but also began to change the chords based on what I was hearing and using the music theory that I acquired from Walter Mays. I began to make my own money playing background music at parties given by my friends’ parents out in the suburbs.

  While most boys were busy dating or chasing girls, I just hung out with my straight guy friends, suppressing many aspects of my personality, trying to fit in. Meanwhile, I found kindred spirits in the social misfits who were in the stage crew from the school productions. By ninth grade, I was
especially tight with my buddy Jim, a bright-eyed kid who was good-looking, naturally athletic, and super-cool. Even at a young age, he had an acute awareness of his sex appeal. We would get stoned and listen to rock records, or hang around Calhoun Street, near the university, where the hippie culture flourished, and chow down at Skyline Chili—one of Cincinnati’s two great contributions to our national cuisine, the other being Graeter’s ice cream. I was smitten with Jim, though of course he was straight. We fooled around once when we were high on acid. We didn’t talk about it until many years later—and when we did, he said he didn’t know at that time whether to enjoy it or beat the crap out of me. I not only had a crush on him, I wanted to be him—he was that self-assured.

  Then, during the last couple of years of high school, I grew closer and closer to my friend Ron, who was into the same music I was into. While the two of us were on an eight-week backpacking trip in Western Europe the summer after high school, I was barely able to contain my attraction to him. But Ron was straight, too. Our connection was real emotionally, but it went only one way physically.

  There was sweetness in this adolescent budding of ardor and eros—though looking back, I have come to know these as romantic obsessions. Both Jim and Ron were nice guys, but the relationships were intrinsically imbalanced in a way that only fed my insecurity about being gay. I had to erase a large part of myself when I was around them to try to act as cool as they were. After a while I didn’t enjoy getting stoned all that much, but I kept getting high, as I didn’t want to miss out on anything or seem weak. My attraction to both Jim and Ron was strong, but the lack of reciprocity and inability to talk to anyone about it left me feeling small.

  Despite my social awkwardness, I was fairly popular and was invited to lots of parties. More often than not, I would end up at the piano, playing Elton John and James Taylor songs for the other kids. I began to see music as my social currency.

  Starting in ninth grade, I vented my multiple frustrations by acting out, indulging in increasingly reckless behavior. Like most of the kids I knew, I smoked a lot of pot, trying to be “in,” and then I started to smoke more and more and more. I dropped acid and took speed. I smoked more pot. I skipped classes. I got high in school. I shoplifted and got arrested. I dropped Quaaludes. I drove while stoned. My grades plummeted. I was subconsciously begging for attention, hoping my parents would see me.

  Toward the end of high school, I began to discover jazz. Having been demoted from studying with Jeanne because I wasn’t “serious” enough, in ninth grade I had started studying with Bill Cammarota, one of her graduate students. He was a hip young guy and an accomplished classical player who showed me a few jazz chords and some simple tunes such as Herbie Hancock’s “Maiden Voyage.” And he was the first person who mentioned the name Bill Evans to me. I joined the high school jazz ensemble, a pretty primitive group that played some forgettable funk charts and songs by the rock group Chicago, which was thought of as jazzy because it had a horn section. I had only a couple of jazz albums then: Dave Brubeck’s wildly popular Time Out and Ramsey Lewis’s funky Wade in the Water.

  In 1972 I bought Miles Smiles, the seminal album of Miles Davis’s second great quintet, with Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams, with that bright orange, almost pop art cover. I also had Cannonball & Coltrane, which featured the Miles Davis sextet of 1959, without Miles—Cannonball Adderley and John Coltrane on saxophones, with Wynton Kelly, Paul Chambers, and Jimmy Cobb as the backing trio. It had an abstract cover featuring black orbs in an array like billiard balls against a gold background. I bought both records for twenty-five cents apiece at a yard sale, because I liked the covers, without knowing that much about the musicians or the music. Alone in my room, I put Miles Smiles on the turntable and listened to it stoned. I found it totally enigmatic. The players were communicating with one another in what seemed to me like a musical code. Herbie Hancock hardly uses his left hand and doesn’t exactly accompany the soloists. To this day, I’m not sure what they’re doing on parts of that album, but I found myself compelled by it. The deeply felt yet highly intellectual music on that record confirmed that there were more levels to this art form than I understood. It came out of my speakers like a miraculous new language I wanted to learn.

  CHAPTER 2

  DIMINUENDO AND CRESCENDO

  When it came time to plan for college, everyone assumed I would apply to the big music conservatories. I went to the guidance counselor’s office at Walnut Hills, and as I looked over the brochures for Juilliard and Oberlin and Eastman, the sound of Horowitz at Carnegie Hall played in my head. I thought to myself, Why am I doing this?

  I didn’t want to be another Vladimir Horowitz. Horowitz had been doing that job rather well. I wanted to be Fred Hersch—I knew that much. I just didn’t know who Fred Hersch was, as a musician or a man.

  Besides, I wasn’t really prepared to apply to the major conservatories. I had a Beethoven sonata in my repertoire and could play some Bach, but I had never buckled down to memorize a big Chopin ballade or scherzo. It’s not just that I didn’t have the discipline; I didn’t have the interest. I felt guilty about it at the time, because there were well-established, long-standing expectations for musicians who could play as well as I could at my age. You were supposed to choose a couple of impressive audition pieces and practice them for months until you had them down cold, so you could spend the rest of your life doing the same thing, over and over, as a classical concert pianist. I didn’t want to do that. At the same time, I didn’t know what I wanted to do instead. So I felt ashamed and lazy, like I was chickening out, and there was nobody giving me the guidance that might have made me feel better about myself.

  I decided to go for a liberal arts education. Even though my grades were spotty, I did well enough on the SATs, and I was a National Merit Scholarship semifinalist. I visited Grinnell College in Iowa with my friend Ron and got accepted there. It helped that Ron was going to attend as well. I thought, No better place to figure out what I want to do than in Iowa in the middle of the winter—nothing to distract me. Although I didn’t know it at the time, Grinnell has a small but notable jazz legacy. Herbie Hancock had attended the school briefly, as an engineering student, and Gary Giddins, the jazz critic and biographer, had graduated the spring before I arrived.

  Living away from home for the first time since my summers at jock camp in Maine—other than a summer semester at Andover, the prep school in Massachusetts, where I studied film and art history—I felt a tinge of the nervous anticipation that’s surely typical of college freshmen. I wondered if I would meet many other guys like me, attracted to men. I was hopeful but tentative, uncertain of what to expect and how to handle whatever I would find. And soon after my arrival at Grinnell I saw my first example of a gay male couple, out and proud, students strolling around the campus hand in hand. Blown away by their boldness, I was too awed by their self-confidence to speak with either of them.

  Not long after I settled into my dorm, I met an upperclassman, a hot-looking athlete I’ll call Paul. To my disbelief, I found out that he was having sex with another guy on my floor. Upon close inspection of his room, I noticed that he had an extensive collection of cute stuffed animals and figurines—something that would make my gaydar go off today. Over time, I would come to feel my attraction in the secret, unspoken language of gay men conditioned to communicate in code. You meet another man, and your eyes lock for a nanosecond longer than they would with someone else; the message is clear.

  I would often go to Paul’s room to “study,” though he was older and we were not taking any of the same courses. Basically I just wanted to moon around him, as I had in high school with my friend Jim. One night he grabbed me, beginning what I was excitedly hoping would become the first fully mutual, grown-up sexual experience of my life. Instead, he quickly and firmly took command. He forced me to lie on my belly, and he raped me from behind. No explanation and no tenderness.

  I had never before thought
about anal sex and, believe it or not, had no idea that it was conventional sexual practice for gay partners—and, for that matter, many straight partners as well. I certainly didn’t consent to what Paul did to me. He did it to me, not with me. I stuffed away this memory until the term “date rape” came into the lexicon many years later.

  I left his room quaking but never confronted him. Though we lived in the same dorm, I never talked to him again, and he ignored me, making me feel completely defective. Like many victims of campus rape, straight and gay, I told no one what had happened. I was ashamed and confused. I didn’t know how to process what had taken place. Was that supposed to be okay? Was I wrong to think it was wrong? Was it my own fault for letting it happen? I felt powerless and ignorant, and hated myself for feeling that way, nearly as much as I hated Paul. For many years afterward, when I was rejected by a man I would always assume that there was something wrong with me.

  —

  It was at Grinnell that my eyes began to open to jazz in a more significant way. The school had a charismatic professor, Cecil Lytle, an imposing African American man who taught classical piano and could play credible jazz as well. He had won first prize in the International Liszt Competition and recorded ragtime for Nonesuch. In addition to our piano lessons, he introduced me to Amiri Baraka’s book Black Music, a groundbreaking treatise on African American aesthetics that had been published a few years earlier. I haunted the college record store for the music Baraka had written about—Coltrane, Ellington, Pharoah Sanders, Mingus—and began to understand jazz as a lineage, how it had synthesized the blues, Creole music, ragtime, and other genres. I read books on jazz with the same fervor that I had read History’s 100 Greatest Composers and found everything about it fascinating.