Good Things Happen Slowly

by Fred Hersch

  One night the three of us in the band were near Cleveland on a rare evening off. I had heard that there was a club there called the Smiling Dog. Miraculously we found it, pulled up in front, and read the marquee: OPENING TONIGHT: MILES DAVIS. We were stunned. We got high in the car, walked right in—the club wasn’t two-thirds full—and sat two tables from Miles for two sets. His band at that time had the same personnel as his extraordinary album Get Up with It, which he dedicated to Duke Ellington right after his death in 1973—including drummer Al Foster, percussionist James Mtume, saxophonist Sonny Fortune, and guitarist Pete Cosey. I guess it was fated that I took that circus gig—this experience was the real payoff. Miles was in his high-fashion period, rail thin with an expensive scarf, flared slacks, knockout shoes, and of course his huge square tinted glasses. The music was hypnotic, not as much about people taking solos as it was about creating a trippy fabric of sound. Miles prowled back and forth in front of the band, at times weaving in on trumpet but mostly letting the musicians use their imagination. He’d let things percolate and then pick just the right moment to play a phrase or two to move things forward. When he did play it was so compelling that everything else kind of melted away. This was the only time I heard Miles in person, and experiencing his powerful, mysterious presence at close range was a watershed moment for me.

  My life was completely centered on jazz—both the music and getting high, which at the time to me seemed of a piece. I hung out on the scene, listened to records all night, and slept during the day. I was feeling my way on my own without guidance any more specific than Jimmy McGary telling me, “Now, figure it out.” I learned by experimenting, fucking up, and making my mistakes, whether I was rushing the time or turning the beat around, or if I didn’t know the harmony or all the substitute chords that were possible in a progression. And I learned by listening, to other musicians both live and on records. It was then that I developed the habits of an autodidact. It never occurred to me to ask one of the older jazz pianists around town for lessons; I don’t know if any of them even taught young pianists. Though I might have saved myself a few steps by asking questions, in the end I think just following my instincts during these developmental years may have helped me evolve my own style.

  One of the beautiful paradoxes of jazz as an art form is that it is spontaneous music, invented on the spot every time it’s played, and also a music with canonical works—masterpieces of improvisation documented on records and not on printed music. The vast history of this improvised music is accessible for appreciation and study on recordings. I didn’t transcribe other pianists’ solos note for note—common practice for budding jazz musicians now—but I would sit down, play a tune I associated with them, and try to channel them as I played. I hoped to get inside their musical minds by inexact imitation.

  In Cincinnati I started collecting Duke Ellington records, and I made an important discovery. I realized that Ellington always got the same piano sound, whether the music was recorded in the forties, the fifties, or the sixties. One record could be solo piano and the other a full orchestra, one could be mono and the other stereo, and Ellington’s playing always had a consistent sound. It was stunning to me that a musician could have a sound not dependent on the specific piano or the style of recording. His sound was round, clear; it seemed chiseled out from everything going on around it. This got me considering sound in a deeper way. From Duke, I started thinking about what it was that made Thelonious Monk’s sound and Ahmad Jamal’s sound and Herbie Hancock’s sound and Bill Evans’s sound. I was a long way from finding a sound of my own, but I began to see it as a possibility.

  Records had a profound effect on my early development. I can still recall vividly the moment when I decided to fully commit myself to being a jazz musician. I was seriously stoned and listening to records with some older musician friends, and I heard two albums on the same night. One was Miles Davis’s In Person Friday Night at the Blackhawk, the great live quintet set from 1961 with Wynton Kelly on piano. The way Wynton accompanies Miles is wondrous. He knows just where to place the chords behind Miles to complement his solo and help the music groove, and he swings with a truly joyous time feel. The other was Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus, Charles Mingus’s 1964 album of soulful modernist compositions for an ensemble of eleven pieces—it sounded to me like Ellington in a fever dream. I thought, This shit is just too cool. This is all I want to do for the rest of my life. I want to swing like Wynton Kelly and write like Charles Mingus.

  I took the work I could get, playing as much jazz with good musicians as possible but also doing gigs of lesser seriousness for the sake of the work, because that’s what the jazz musicians I knew had to do. It was during the summer of my second year back in Cincinnati that I took that gig in the band at Kings Island amusement park and found myself sitting alone between the two trailers, with the jazzmen on one side of me and the gay boys on the other.

  Like all practitioners in the apprenticeship stage of their art, I was absorbing the influences of my tutors and the masters they had learned from. My conception of what I could do in the future was framed by what others were doing around me and what their predecessors had done. I wanted to be like Wynton Kelly and like Charles Mingus but had only the vaguest conception of how to be Fred Hersch.

  CHAPTER 3

  BOSTON

  When I discovered jazz in Cincinnati, I saw a world of possibilities—a place where I could escape the rigidity of classical music as I came to know it from my piano lessons and evenings at the symphony with my parents. Before long, though, I began to see more limits than possibilities.

  I mean no slight to Cincinnati or the musicians I got to know there. I made good friends in the local jazz scene—the great guitarist Cal Collins, the pianist Steve Schmidt, and others. I came to care dearly for them and respect them very much. I just started to feel like I couldn’t do what I wanted to do and be what I wanted to be if I stayed in Cincinnati. At every gig, the leader would just call out whatever commonly known tunes he felt like playing at the moment—no one seemed interested in expanding their repertoire beyond the standards and basic jazz tunes, and nobody rehearsed a band or played original music. The audience seemed content with this casual approach to a set. So I had to get out before I ended up settling comfortably at a hotel lounge or in the house band for The Nick Clooney Show.

  One of the pianists I was fascinated with, along with Wynton Kelly and Ahmad Jamal, was Jaki Byard. Jaki was well known for his ability to internalize and express every historical style of jazz piano imaginable in a way that was completely his own, sometimes combining multiple styles in one solo. He had played sophisticated “composer’s piano” with Charles Mingus’s ensembles, made his own albums, and was an electric—and eclectic—virtuoso. I was startled to learn that he was teaching in a new program in jazz studies at the New England Conservatory in Boston. Jazz studies? What?! I thought I was doing jazz studies the only way it could be done, buying records and playing the music following the advice of Jimmy McGary: “Figure it out—you’re a jazz musician.”

  I decided to investigate the program Byard was teaching in. I wrote a letter of inquiry to the conservatory and got a brochure in the mail. The program it described was unique in the world: an accredited conservatory degree in jazz taught by working masters of the music at an elite conservatory—in a major metropolitan center over seven hundred miles away from Cincinnati, at that. It was one of only a handful of music schools in the country that acknowledged jazz as a valid musical art form at that time.

  Gunther Schuller, the conductor, composer, and French-horn player who straddled the spheres of classical music and jazz, had assumed the presidency of the New England Conservatory in 1967, and he instituted a jazz studies program two years later, with a faculty including Byard, jazz composer George Russell, and the brilliant and underappreciated improvising pianist Ran Blake. Schuller had played horn on Miles Davis’s Birth of the Cool album, the famous manifesto of postwar musical hybridization
and intellectualism, recorded in 1949 and 1950. Along with the arranger Gil Evans (who had done some of the writing on Birth of the Cool) and the pianist John Lewis (with the Modern Jazz Quartet), Schuller emerged in the fifties as one of the leaders of the third-stream movement, entwining elements of both jazz and Western classical music. For example, Schuller’s “Transformation,” perhaps the first third-stream piece, starts as a twelve-tone row, morphs into a twelve-bar blues, then ends back at the twelve-tone row. The Charles Mingus album that had such an impact on me, Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus, with its dense compositions by Mingus and orchestrations for large ensemble by Bob Hammer, could have been thought of as third-stream music, and though I’ve never been a big fan of the term or the intellectual pretensions associated with it, I relished the way composers and arrangers such as Mingus and Evans were expanding the jazz palette without sacrificing human feeling.

  When Schuller launched the program at NEC, it was called Afro-American Music, in the proudly postcolonial lingo of the day. Its implicit mission was to elevate the status of jazz in the culture by welcoming it into the academy alongside music in the white European tradition. In that conservatory brochure, published in 1975, Schuller proclaimed: “Students are instructed in the art of jazz with the rigor associated with classical training.” I appreciated that the school was treating jazz as an art form, and I wasn’t too frightened by the threat of rigor in the training. I knew my parents would support my going to a prestigious conservatory, even if the curriculum was in jazz.

  In April 1975 I set up a road trip to Boston with Grover Mooney, the crazed drummer from the Family Owl, and his girlfriend, Roxy. Trading off the driving in his beat-up 1964 Oldsmobile Cutlass, we did the ride in one very long stretch. The night I arrived I went out to catch an emerging young guitarist at a small club in Central Square: Pat Metheny. The next day I found the main building of the conservatory, Jordan Hall—a grand structure that housed the classrooms, faculty offices, and rehearsal spaces as well as an exquisitely ornate, acoustically superb concert hall—and I wandered around, hunting for Jaki Byard. I only knew him from record covers, and when I found him, in a hallway on the floor that held the piano teaching studios, I was surprised to see not the clean-cut figure I had expected but a heavyset man with a wild mass of soft, gray-and-black hair. (He was part Cherokee, a fact that I didn’t know at the time but that became apparent as we spent time together.)

  “M-Mr. Byard,” I stammered, “I drove here all the way from Cincinnati, I love your playing, and I really want to come to school here and study with you, and…”

  “All right,” he said, looking me over. “I think I have fifteen minutes.” He took me into a nearby room with two pianos. I sat and played two or three tunes—I don’t recall what they were, I was so nervous—and when I was finished he said, “Okay, you’re in.”

  And that was basically it. The school’s catalog may have promised the rigor of classical training, but the admissions process was pure jazz, as loose as a club date.

  I enrolled in the fall of 1975 as a sophomore in the four-year bachelor of music program with a major in Afro-American studies. I had saved a little money playing gigs in Cincinnati, but my family came through with support; for all our squabbles over the years, they could see I had found my passion and was following it in a serious way, by getting a conservatory degree. My grandmother Ella covered the tuition, and my father helped me secure an apartment, covering my rent until I could earn my own money in Boston. The curriculum included undergraduate courses in the liberal arts, which I certainly benefited from—I took a poetry class and delved into Walt Whitman and Wallace Stevens for the first time. But in terms of my musical education, I felt as if I was in graduate school. I had done my undergrad work at the Emanon and at Robert’s Neoteric Lounge in Cincinnati.

  Jaki Byard was in his fifties and still active as a player, though owing to a fondness for alcohol and a stubborn personality his career was never what it could have been. He was a living encyclopedia of jazz piano, skilled in every style from ragtime to stride to swing to hard bop. He could play like Fats Waller or Bud Powell and demonstrate the mechanics of each technique. He had a profound and detailed understanding of why each pianist sounded the way he did—to this day, I’m not sure where he got such vast knowledge. For that ability alone, he was ideally suited to teaching. He was also funny as hell and great company. He taught from the deep well of experience he had accumulated over many years as a professional musician—he had a lot to teach. But he was somewhat unorganized and would sometimes show up late for a lesson or come clutching a bottle of cheap wine, or not show up at all. As an educator, he didn’t do much to refute the trope of the jazzman as brilliantly creative but unreliable.

  I learned a lot from Jaki simply being in his presence. As a musician and as a person, his spirit was fearless—he didn’t let stylistic constrictions get in his way of playing whatever he felt—and he was not the least bit ostentatious. He had an unmanicured view of jazz and life in general. At NEC he counterbalanced Gunther Schuller.

  NEC wasn’t a jazz studies “program”—we didn’t even have the benefit of the small, faculty-led student ensembles that are at the core of modern jazz education today. Jazz was simply one of many departments in the school. Other than George Russell’s Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization—an early attempt to make theoretical sense of what jazz players hear naturally—and a big-band arranging class, we took the same courses the classical students did. And for that I am boundlessly grateful. Though I went to NEC for Jaki, I didn’t go to study jazz as much as I went to open my ears and become a better musician. The faculty comprised almost exclusively creative, working musical artists. For example, my favorite theory teacher, Joe Maneri, never graduated high school but could play crazy, Eastern European–influenced, microtonal jazz just as well as he could guide me through Schoenberg’s Theory of Harmony. Students would get to learn music history from someone who wrote music himself, not an academic.

  It was Jaki who sparked my interest in solo piano, something that would absorb me for the rest of my life. He introduced me to the solo work of Earl “Fatha” Hines, James P. Johnson, Fats Waller, and Teddy Wilson. He was an aficionado of stride and got me into a stride-piano kick for a while. (Stride, a descendant of ragtime, with its loping, “striding” left hand that alternates low bass octaves with chords in the middle register, was the dominant jazz solo piano style in the first half of the twentieth century.) I couldn’t get enough of Hines especially—his solo work, even by today’s standards, is some of the most commanding and creative jazz piano music ever recorded. I had always had a good left hand, having played a lot of Bach, and I liked to do more with it than rudimentary “comping” block chords. This inclination had gotten me into trouble in Cincinnati. Once, when I was playing with Jimmy McGary, I was doing some independent, contrapuntal things I thought were interesting with my left hand, and Jimmy snapped at me, “What’s that shit?” I have always heard music as based on four independent voices—going back to listening to string quartets and playing Bach chorales and fugues—and thought that the left hand should be active. To me, what was revolutionary about Bill Evans was the voice leading in his left hand. I loved moving things around down there instead of playing chord “voicings.”

  When I was at the conservatory, the living North and South Poles of solo piano in jazz were Cecil Taylor and Keith Jarrett, both of whom I loved. I’ve always been fascinated by how Cecil’s music sounds so free and kinetic and chaotic when it’s actually meticulously structured—something you can only appreciate if you take the time to study it. Keith’s music can be the near opposite, sounding like he’s playing a structured composition when he’s really just playing what occurs to him in the moment. I was more familiar with contemporary figures such as Cecil and Keith than I was with Earl Hines or Teddy Wilson until Jaki showed me the lineage behind them. I began to see solo piano as a long and deep tradition.

  Jaki was the first great
solo pianist I had ever had the opportunity to study at close range. He would sit down, and off he’d go. In the course of a lesson with me, he might play in half a dozen styles. But no matter what tune he played or what style he played in, the music was definitely his. Jaki had his own approach to line, to rhythm, to color, and to touch. I learned quite a lot from watching him over the keyboard, playing piano duets with him, and just simply listening to him—thank God, because I didn’t get very much out of the exercises he gave me. He would hand out worksheets—exercises where you would do things in twelve keys or take different chords through the circle of fifths, so you’d always have those techniques under your fingers. Though I regret it now, I didn’t bother much with any of that. I had never been good at doing things I didn’t want to do, and that didn’t change at NEC. What I took away from Jaki was what I learned from being next to him while he played, watching him use the whole instrument, top to bottom, style by style, in a way that always had his own musical signature.

  Working with Jaki was the first time I connected directly to someone who had been a part of major moments in jazz. He had played with Charles Mingus on Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus and on The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady. He had worked with saxophonist and flutist Eric Dolphy and the legendary drummer Art Blakey. I asked Jaki about Mingus, but he didn’t want to talk about him. I got the clear impression that something had gone on between them, but I never knew what.