by Fred Hersch
Meanwhile, I was playing in a chamber music trio at Grinnell—piano, violin, and ’cello—and that, in a strange way, primed me to want to play jazz. Chamber music is a communal music, played with other people. And jazz, I was discovering, was a language that, once you learned it, enabled you to tell spontaneous musical stories with other musicians in real time. It made me realize what had been missing in my musical life: the satisfaction of making music in a cooperative way with musical equals. Playing classical piano is usually a solitary thing, with lots of hours spent alone at the keyboard, torturing oneself. The atmosphere with the trio was light but stimulating. We debated how to interpret the pieces. Playing together was fun. I loved it.
The so-called energy crisis hit in late 1973, and that winter, Grinnell panicked over the cost of heating the buildings and closed the school, extending the winter break for six weeks. I went home to Cincinnati, and it was there that I had my jazz epiphany. I would go back to Grinnell only once—to accompany the musical Once Upon a Mattress, which I had committed to, and to pack up my things.
It happened on a night in December 1973. I knew of a folkie club near the university called the Family Owl and went in expecting to catch some bluegrass music in the basement. But at the club entrance I noticed a sign that said LIVE JAZZ UPSTAIRS and made a spur-of-the-moment decision. Instead of heading down, I climbed the stairs to the second floor, where a local saxophone quartet was playing. I sat at a table near the front, ordered a beer—though I was eighteen, under the legal drinking age in Ohio at the time—and listened. I was mesmerized.
The leader was a tenor saxophonist named Jimmy McGary, a fiery little man in his forties with a reddish-gray beard and sparkly eyes. He was a strong player with a full tone and a hard-swinging feel. As I learned later, he was revered by all of the local jazz musicians in Cincinnati, and he had earned that admiration.
The bassist was a wiry guy of indeterminate age named Bud Hunt—a solid player but not quite on McGary’s level. The drummer was a hulking, mad-looking bear of a man named Grover Mooney. He played in the mode I would later associate with Elvin Jones, with a broad downbeat and a kind of rolling approach to jazz timekeeping. The pianist was playing a Fender Rhodes electric piano.
I listened as they played a set of some standards, some of which I knew, and some jazz tunes. There was no sheet music on the stage, and they seemed to be creating the music out of thin air. Nervously, on the break at the end of the set, I worked up my courage, went up to McGary, and asked if I could sit in. He said, “Know any tunes?”
I said, “I think I can play ‘Autumn Leaves.’ ” McGary nodded, and when it was time to start the second set he waved me on. Though I had been in the jazz band in high school, playing with a professional rhythm section is a very different thing, as I would discover. I took a seat at the Rhodes, trying to look casual about it, and played “Autumn Leaves.” Actually, I overplayed it and messed up the form of the tune without knowing it. After the number, my adrenaline rushing, I went to the bar and listened to the rest of the set. There, a local bass player kindly introduced himself to me as “Alex Cirin—but you can call me ‘the Dancing Bear.’ ” That was the coolest thing I had ever heard.
When it was over, McGary came up to me at the bar and said, “Hey, come with me, kid.” He brought me to a small musicians’ break room in the back of the club. There was a table in the corner that held a portable record player and a few LPs stacked next to it. Jimmy lit a joint and passed it over to me—this I took as a good omen. While I was taking my hit, he pulled an album out of a sleeve and put it on the turntable. “Now listen to this,” he said. “Don’t talk—just listen.”
The LP was Ellington at Newport, the live recording of the performance by Duke Ellington and His Orchestra at the 1956 Newport Jazz Festival. That concert—and the subsequently released recording—was such a sensation in its day that Time magazine made it a cover story. Jimmy picked up the tone arm and dropped the needle on the second track of the second side: “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue,” the number that made the performance a sensation, with twenty-six improvised blues choruses by the tenor saxophonist Paul Gonsalves. I sat and watched the record spin and listened intently. The energy was extraordinary, building with every chorus Gonsalves played. You could feel Ellington and the rest of the band egging him on, and you could hear the crowd going wild. People were hooting and hollering like it was a rock concert. It was absolute hysteria. But beneath it all you could hear the fabric holding it all together, the shared sense of swing that brought the musicians together—the basic rhythm of jazz. At the end, Jimmy picked up the needle and looked me in the eye. “That’s time,” he said.
“Now, you have to have time. And you have to know some tunes. So, as soon as you’ve done some listening and you’ve worked on your time and you know some tunes, you can come back and play.”
Excited, later that week, I went to Mole’s Record Exchange, a cluttered store near the campus of the University of Cincinnati that sold used albums for a buck or two. With nothing to guide me except my intuition, I rifled through the jazz bins, working my way from A to Z, and bought every album that had a version of “Autumn Leaves” on it: records by Miles Davis, Ahmad Jamal, Bill Evans, Oscar Peterson, Erroll Garner, Stan Getz, Chet Baker, Cannonball Adderley—thirteen in all. I brought the pile home and played each version of the tune, skipping all the other tracks. Then I played them all again, one by one. It was a revelation. Some were subtle, some virtuosic, some brisk, some meditative. They all had a mastery of time. I realized that each version was unique, and all of them were great.
I thought about my reluctance to devote myself to the classical repertory after hearing Horowitz play canonical pieces so spectacularly, and it struck me: In jazz it’s individuality, not adherence to a standardized conception of excellence, that matters most. With this music, musicians are completely free to be themselves within the tune. Difference matters—in fact, it’s an asset, rather than a liability. There is no describing how exhilarating this epiphany was for me, as a person who always felt different from other people. In jazz, difference is the key element that makes the artistry possible.
Listening to all those versions of “Autumn Leaves,” I not only recognized the value of individual expression in jazz, I also saw that the music has a standard framework—melodic and harmonic structures that facilitate collaboration. All the recordings I played had a few things in common. They all had formal integrity, harmonic sophistication, and, at their heart, a deep pulse. And they were all wonderful on their own terms—I couldn’t say that one of them was “the best.” I could feel in my bones what Jimmy McGary meant when he talked about time.
Fueled by the thrill of discovery, I set out to learn all I could about jazz from the musicians on the scene in Cincinnati. To appease my parents, who might not have approved of this pedagogical strategy, I enrolled in the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music as a classical piano major. But I thought of that as an extracurricular activity. The education I was after would take place in and around the jazz clubs, playing and hanging with the older musicians. For the first time in my life, I was involved in music that my parents knew very little about. It was mine.
Setting up my new life—in Cincinnati but away from my parents—I moved into a clapboard house in the conservatory neighborhood with four other guys, all musicians studying at the school. I didn’t spend much time with them. I was focused on working my way into jazz. I made myself a fixture in the clubs, got to know the musicians, and soaked everything up.
In the 1970s the jazz scene in Cincinnati was fringy and tenuous, kept alive by people who played and supported the music for the love of it. No one was making much money being a jazz musician. Over the years since then, as I got to know musicians from all over the country, I learned that this was the norm in most American midsize cities at the time. Jazz, in the era of Top 40 stars such as Barry Manilow and the Eagles, was far from the center of American popular culture. J
azz education had not yet become a fixture in music schools, so there wasn’t an audience of young musicians—and jazz musicians couldn’t get daytime teaching jobs to support their evening jazz habit. In fact, jazz had not had much in the way of mainstream visibility since West Coast “cool jazz” was popular, a generation before. Musicians were not playing jazz for glory and riches in the 1970s. They were playing jazz for the sake of playing jazz.
There were rarely big jazz concerts in Cincinnati then. But there were jazz-circuit clubs in Cincinnati and nearby Dayton that regularly brought in many of the living legends. I heard the elegant pianism of Teddy Wilson and Bill Evans; the hard-hitting post-bop of drummer Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers; the organ trios of Shirley Scott and Richard “Groove” Holmes, and the more spiritual jazz of saxophonist Pharoah Sanders.
Sometimes these shows took me to the outer reaches of jazz, to the most distant orbit. The first time I went to Gilly’s in Dayton, I sat at the front table with my friend Eric listening to Sun Ra and his Intergalactic Arkestra. There must have been nine or ten musicians onstage, and I use the term “musician” loosely, as many of them seemed stoned beyond words and were mostly banging on things and making deliciously bizarre sounds. The great tenor saxophonist John Gilmore was in the band, and he played at a level surpassing everybody but Ra himself. There were slide projections behind the band, and two nubile dancers who for the most part slithered around and occasionally wandered through the audience. Sun Ra was seated at a Farfisa combo organ, dressed in a sequined kaftan and wearing an oversized headpiece with glittery stars affixed to it. At one point during his iconic number “Space Is the Place,” Ra got up from the organ and came to our table. Standing over us, he intoned repeatedly, “Saturn is the planet of discipline.” Eric and I were both high on weed, and even had we not been, the music was trippy enough to qualify as psychedelic. We felt transported to another dimension.
Though I was under the legal drinking age, the proprietors of these clubs were happy to have another warm body listening to the music and buying a beer or two. I went as often as I could. One night I introduced myself to pianist McCoy Tyner (who had been a member of the groundbreaking John Coltrane Quartet) at the Viking Lounge and discovered that we were both vegetarians, which was not as common then as it is today. I boldly asked him to lunch the following day, and to my surprise he said yes. He was good company and put me right at ease, so much so that when we’d finished lunch I invited him over to my rather funky student digs, where I had a DeKalb baby grand piano. I played a few tunes for him. Tyner was in his late thirties by then, and even though I was just nineteen, I’d like to think he saw something in me as a player. We sat and talked, and I peppered him with obvious questions. “What was it like playing with Coltrane?” “Can you give me some insight into how you approach jazz piano harmony?” He was very kind and patient and did his best to answer my questions, but he wasn’t prepared to give me an on-the-spot piano lesson. Still, spending time with one of my idols, eye-to-eye, gave me a sense that what he had accomplished might be possible for me. And it made me see him, a major jazz artist, as just a really nice guy who happened to do what I did—but a whole hell of a lot better.
Cincinnati local jazz was an underground phenomenon and not particularly remunerative. Gigs in clubs paid $40 a night, if that. More often than not, the band would split the proceeds from the door—say, a $5 cover charge multiplied by the twenty people who showed up, divided by the four people in the group: $25 per person for playing three sets. The only way to make a reasonable living was to do studio session work or land a hotel job, tinkling cocktail piano in the restaurant or the lounge, along with playing parties and weddings on the weekends. There were jazz musicians in Cincinnati who cobbled together a livelihood this way. I was very impressed by them.
The bassist Bud Hunt, I learned, had a side business selling marijuana. If you were looking for pot, you’d go to Bud Hunt. His name sounds like a gag from a Cheech and Chong movie, but this is the truth. The hitch was that you could buy from Bud only if he accepted you as a musician—you had to be able to play. When I copped my first bag from Bud after a few months playing around town, I knew I had arrived as a jazz musician in Cincinnati.
Bud was bony and earthy-looking, with a prematurely wizened face like Chet Baker in his later years. He may have been in his thirties, or he may have been in his fifties. He had a farm in Evansville, Indiana, and reminded me of the dust bowl sharecroppers that Walker Evans photographed for the Farm Security Administration. He grew his pot on that farm, and it was named for the location. Nobody ever referred to it as marijuana or reefer or pot. It was always Evansville—as in, “Want a hit of Evansville?” or “I could go for some Evansville tonight.” It was bright green and had a character unlike any other pot I have ever smoked. It never made you feel wigged out or paranoid. It made you want to play. I have always found pot to be a terrible performance drug, with the singular exception of Evansville. You had to be able to play to get it, and it rewarded you by making you want to play more.
The musicians I got to know and play with in Cincinnati were all kind to me, even if their kindness took the form of jazz-world tough love. I was learning on my own as I went along. I picked up one of those one-thousand-song fake books with the melodies and lame chord changes that wedding bands use. I watched up close and listened to the other musicians, played records constantly, and started to come up with chord substitutions based on hearing other musicians do it and by using the foundations in harmony I had learned from Walter Mays. Some of the musicians would give me pointers now and then, and Jimmy McGary, by being a non-teacher, was the best teacher of all. We’d start to play some tune I’d never heard before. I’d make my way through the opening melody—the “head”—and I’d be floundering with the harmony. Jimmy would walk over to me and say, “Now, figure it out. You’re a jazz musician. Use your ears.” Then he would walk off the bandstand.
Around Cincinnati at that time there were two camps of jazz pianists. One was led by a hard-swinging pianist named Frank Vincent. Vincent and his crowd were the Oscar Peterson worshippers. Oscar was a direct musical descendant of the blind Toledo-born pianist Art Tatum—even Horowitz was awed by Tatum’s virtuosity, his musical imagination, and his round, pearly sound. I understood why these guys bowed before Peterson—his technique was indisputably impressive, and he was a dazzling player, if a bit stiff. But even then, when my ears were still developing, I wasn’t much impressed by impressiveness. I was more drawn to playing that stirred a feeling or evoked a mood or had a more creative edge, some danger to it. I respected Oscar Peterson but wasn’t the least bit interested in learning to play like him.
The other camp was clustered around the highly eccentric pianist Ed Moss. Moss and his followers were the avant-garde. Moss owned two businesses, a coffeehouse called the Golden Triangle and a jazz club named Emanon, after the Dizzy Gillespie tune—“no name” spelled backward. So conceptual. Moss was a self-absorbed alpha-male cult-leader type. A largish man with a larger ego, he sported a beard and a ponytail and a huge collection of hats (think Thelonious Monk), drove an early-sixties Cadillac hearse, and always wore vintage suits from the forties. All the men who worked for him also had beards and ponytails and drove old Cadillacs. He had a harem of women who worked at his establishments whom we called the Mossettes, many of whom bore his children out of wedlock. Late at night, when the gigs were over, the staff and the musicians would hang around the Golden Triangle, sipping Turkish coffee or cognac and smoking high-quality hashish till dawn. There would be fantastic music playing on the stereo, and that’s where I first tuned in to Ahmad Jamal and Erroll Garner and got deeply into Monk. Listening to that music, stoned on hash, in this communal way allowed me to hear not only the notes being played but the space around the notes. “The scene” was seriously kooky and kookily serious. I much preferred it to the Frank Vincent–Oscar Peterson contingent, despite my discomfort with Moss himself. I was one of the few people who would cal
l him on his pseudo-intellectual bullshit or his musical opinions. I’d say, “Ed, uh…I don’t think you’re right,” and everybody would gasp.
—
I played anywhere I could get hired, with anybody half-decent. At one point I got a months-long booking in a trio backing a jazz and blues singer, James “Popeye” Maupin, in a place called Robert’s Neoteric Lounge. The walls were painted black and decorated with Day-Glo posters. The owner was a double for Isaac Hayes, and Popeye could have been his larger and even wilder-looking brother. He was enormous and bald and had a goatee; occasionally he performed in a gold lamé cape. He got the name Popeye because he had a glass eye he could pop out for dramatic effect. He wasn’t a great singer technically, but he was a marvelous entertainer and could really swing. I was playing with him and having a good time at it when my parents came one night to watch. They were there with another couple after a night at the symphony, all dressed up. Robert’s Neoteric Lounge was not their scene, though they may have thought themselves a bit hip for showing up there. I loved being in a world they knew very little about. I couldn’t imagine what they thought, and I didn’t ask them. They could see that I had talent as a jazz pianist, and it was clear that I was having fun, so they left me alone about it.
In 1974 I took my first gig on the road—with the South of the Border Revue, a two-bit Mexican family circus. There was a dog act (the featured performers sometimes peed on the stage), jugglers, a contortionist. The musical ensemble consisted of trumpet, drums, and me on Fender Rhodes. We wore sombreros and ponchos and made $75 cash per night—each—playing seedy arenas and run-down theaters in such Ohio glamor spots as Youngstown, Akron, and Lima. They had no book of music for the band, and after “Guantanamera,” “The Mexican Hat Dance,” and “Tico Tico,” we ran out of appropriate material. So we would just make up long “Latin-sounding” vamps and hope for the best.