Good Things Happen Slowly

by Fred Hersch

  Jaki was much more comfortable talking about Dolphy. He played with Eric in Mingus’s sextet in the early sixties, and on Dolphy’s beautiful album Far Cry from 1960. Jaki had been shaken badly by Eric’s death in 1964. Talking about it with me more than twenty years later, Jaki would still get upset. Dolphy had been in Berlin at the time and collapsed from an undiagnosed diabetic condition. At the hospital the attending physicians assumed that because he was black and a jazz musician, he must have passed out from drug use. They let him lie there on the bed, waiting for the drugs to run their course. But Dolphy was in a diabetic coma and died within hours, untreated.

  In June 1964 he recorded what would be released as Last Date with Dutch musicians in Holland. At the end of the album he is heard saying, “When you hear music, after it’s over, it’s gone in the air; you can never capture it again.” This could be a definitive statement about great live jazz—each performance is unique and lives on only in the memory of the people who were lucky enough to be there to hear it.

  It’s hard for me to think about this without thinking of Jaki Byard’s own death some years later, early in 1999. The history of jazz is laced with tales of unnecessary or mysterious deaths, but Jaki’s had particular resonance for me, in part because of his importance in my early development as a jazz musician and in part because the fragility of human life was very much on my mind in the late nineties—I was thinking, even at a fairly young age, about my own mortality. Jaki had left NEC in the mid-eighties, recruited to teach at the new jazz program at the Manhattan School of Music, which was closer to his home base in Hollis, Queens. One night in his house he was murdered by a single bullet shot through his nose. There were no signs of forced entry, and his two daughters, in their beds on the second floor, heard nothing unusual until the gunshot. The case is unsolved to this day. By this time, Jaki and I had been out of touch, and I was having quite a bit of success as a jazz pianist. I wish I could have had the chance to tell him outright how much he’d taught me. But I think he probably knew.

  In the two years I spent at NEC, I did practically everything a pianist could do there, playing in the contemporary music ensemble, the wind ensemble, Gunther’s ragtime ensemble. Just as in high school, I was an all-around music jock, open to almost anything and excited about the opportunities to try new things and have unique musical experiences. Schuller was a demanding taskmaster as a conductor and his ears were legendary—though we were still students, we were expected to play on a professional level, and mistakes were not tolerated. As part of his program to bring the stature of classical music to jazz, Schuller was actively advancing Duke Ellington as “the American Bach.” To establish Ellington’s music as a canon, he made exact transcriptions of some of Ellington’s works and conducted them in repertory, performed by the NEC jazz orchestra with me at the piano. I was among the first pianists to play this music note for note since Ellington himself performed it, a fact that Schuller made sure I knew.

  I was fascinated by Ellington’s programmatic, almost visual approach to structure and voicing. He had the luxury of composing directly for the specific musicians who stayed with him for many years, and he wrote to their particular sounds and strengths. Some of his writing looks a bit unconventional on the page, but it works perfectly with his idiosyncratic players. I tried to honor him by getting his sound as nearly as possible where there was a written-out piano solo. That’s a challenge, one Ellington himself never had to face. He played only one way, like Duke Ellington, and that was more than sufficient. But to my thinking, there was something misguided and even patronizing in the Schuller conception of Ellington as our Bach, only seeing him—and all of jazz—in relation to European classical music. He was our Ellington. That was a great enough thing to be.

  Duke Ellington loomed large at NEC. On Wednesday nights Jaki had a regular gig leading an Ellington-influenced big band he called the Apollo Stompers at Michael’s Pub on Gainsborough Street, a few blocks from the school. He stocked the band with NEC students, who in turned stocked the club with their friends. Jaki would conduct the band and play tenor and alto saxophone—he was a quirky sax player—and conjure an atmosphere of high spirits. I played the piano in this group most nights and had a ball doing it. The repertoire was solid swing with arrangements and compositions by Jaki. Playing this music in a band with eighteen pieces, I was glad to have begun my lessons in time by studying Ellington at Newport in the back room of the Family Owl.

  After a year at NEC, I requested a new piano teacher, because Jaki’s attendance had become erratic and I also wanted to broaden myself as a pianist. NEC is one of the world’s greatest classical conservatories, and I wanted to take advantage of that as much as possible. I am fortunate to play an instrument that has more than four hundred years of masterpieces composed for it, and now, unlike in high school, I wanted to get into some of them. (By contrast, if you are an alto sax player, the written repertoire is largely mediocre French stuff; the greatest alto sax music was created by the jazz virtuosi.) I started studying with an adjunct instructor in the classical division, Irma Wolpe. She was Romanian and carried with her an air of Eastern European severity. Early in her life she had been married to the German composer Stefan Wolpe, who was admired if not known widely for his austere twelve-tone music. (That genre of somewhat severe music never found a wide public audience, though it was avidly dissected in the East Coast music theory community.) That was the credential factoid that students passed around about her, even though she and Wolpe had divorced decades earlier and she had remarried mathematician Hans Rademacher. Her approach was grounded in the Russian school of piano technique, with its emphasis on arm weight and “scraping” the key toward the body. I didn’t agree with everything she taught, but she got me thinking about the mechanics of sound in my own playing, and that would become more and more important to me over time.

  Along with my awakening to the possibilities of solo piano, I developed a special appreciation for the duo format at the New England Conservatory. There were superb student musicians at the school who would end up having significant careers in jazz: the reed players Michael Moore and Marty Ehrlich; the bassist and guitarist Jerome Harris; the pianists Anthony Coleman and Mike LeDonne, and more. Strangely, though, there were not many first-rate rhythm-section musicians in the jazz program then, so I found myself playing mostly solo piano or duos. The piano practice area of Jordan Hall had a long hallway with rows of rooms equipped with two Steinways. I’d be practicing, and if I saw Michael or Marty—or another of the jazz pianists—walking down the hall, I’d grab him and get him to come in and play some duos.

  I had played some duos in Cincinnati, primarily with a superb and underrated guitarist about ten years older than me named Kenny Poole. He was a sensitive musician who, unlike many other guitarists, never overplayed. He was especially good at anything Brazilian and helped fuel my lifelong interest in the music of Antonio Carlos Jobim and Brazilian music in general. He could play a bossa nova and sound just like João Gilberto. I lost touch with Kenny but learned a few years ago that he had died of cancer in Cincinnati, where he had been playing in his beautiful style in restaurants. It was in Boston, however, that I began to fully grasp the potential of the creative duo format.

  The duo suited my ability to use the entire keyboard to do multiple things at once. It also let me orchestrate the music instead of just playing block chords with the left hand. I learned to play using the piano more like a drum set, having multiple pitches. I indulged my love of spontaneous counterpoint—two (or more) independent melodic lines that are going on simultaneously. I can go from roaring loud to pianissimo instantly. It’s collaborative and also intimate—two musicians, close together. Nothing more. You have to be compatible but also different enough for each musician to offer something unique. You inspire each other and interact in the deepest musical way. It’s almost sex.

  —

  Just as I was beginning to build my identity as a musician in Boston, I started to work out wha
t it meant to be a gay man. There was something of a gay sphere on campus at the conservatory, populated largely and conspicuously by singers in the opera concentration. They all sat together in the cafeteria and carried on in the same near-drag you-go-girl way as the show-tune boys in the trailer at Kings Island. All of us in the jazz department called these guys the “opera queens.” I used the term myself with my straight jazz friends, to prove that I fit in with them. In retrospect, I wish I had used more restraint and shown more respect to a group of people who no doubt knew that everybody realized they were gay and had learned to live with that. I wasn’t ready.

  I had been attracted to men for as long as I’d had any sexual feelings at all. Now, living on my own in Boston, could I act on that in a fulfilling way? What did I need to do to meet other men like me, and then, how should I behave? I knew nothing.

  In 1975 the drinking age in Massachusetts was eighteen, and I had turned nineteen shortly after starting the fall term at NEC. College students were going to bars all the time—and when they weren’t at bars, they were talking about bars. I knew about all the bars in Boston that my straight friends were going to, as well as which ones they were avoiding, because “queers” went to them. I started going to those bars.

  The meat-market atmosphere of gay bars was rattling to me, and I would never be fully comfortable with it. Not since my summers at jock camp in Maine had I found myself trying to navigate an environment where a person’s physical attributes established his worth. I had been known as a musician since I was a child, and it was my musicianship that defined me in most other people’s eyes as well as my own.

  I am not a tall person—not super-short, but just below average. When I was very young, I was pretty chunky, though I lost that extra weight during high school. I’m nearsighted and have worn glasses nearly all my life. None of those physical qualities ever mattered when I sat down at the piano. At the piano stool, my music defined me as someone interesting, someone with a special capacity to reward your attention.

  At a barstool, things were different. Men don’t go to a gay bar just to have a drink. They go to drink and find men to go home with. A gay bar is a place for gay men to meet other gay men—for the pleasure of being in the company of kindred spirits, yes, and for the comfort that a protective environment provides, absolutely. Still, generally speaking, gay bars—just like straight bars—exist mainly to facilitate attraction between strangers. I’m talking about sexual attraction, and that usually starts with physical attraction.

  James Baldwin once said, “I could talk away my looks in ten minutes.” At the piano, I could play away my size and my eyeglasses in half that time. At gay bars I had a harder time. Still, I did all right. Before long, I had a neatly trimmed full beard. I was in reasonably good shape, having started working out with weights and swimming regularly at the YMCA. I now wore contact lenses. I was beginning to become comfortable in my own skin. I was outgoing, and as much as any person can gauge such a thing about himself, I think I was likable. I could approach good-looking guys without too much fear—though that meant learning about rejection more than once. Night by night, I got the hang of the pickup scene. Like most people my age, male or female, straight or gay, I was at the point in my life when sex was extremely important, if not quite all-consuming. I learned from the bars that having sex and plenty of it was what defined being a gay man.

  The bars generally had plain, inconspicuous, almost off-putting street fronts, under-designed façades that signaled to passersby that there must be shadowy goings-on behind those doors. No windows, or glass panes painted over, sometimes no sign, in the manner of speakeasies in the days of Prohibition. All this had the effect of reinforcing to both the bars’ gay patrons and the straights outside that being gay was disreputable, something shameful. I was beginning to grasp how gay men and women had been functioning as a secret society, and this made me feel a little ashamed, which is exactly how the straight world wanted me to feel, but also proud to be part of something outside the mainstream culture. Most of the bars were dimly lit inside, to make it harder to see and hence easier to find the guy sitting next to you attractive.

  At the first bar I went to in Boston, a dive called Sporters, a time came near the end of the evening that we called “the racetrack.” You had your eyes on Hot Guy X all night, and now he was hooked up with somebody else. It was getting late, so you had to act fast and see if there was anybody left you could still hook up with—so you walked slowly and deliberately in a circle around the bar in the center of the room holding your drink. Close to the 2 A.M. closing time, people would get frantic, hitting on people they wouldn’t have bothered with an hour earlier. It was nerve-racking and not exactly uplifting if you were one of the guys who would get picked up at the last minute, in sexual desperation.

  The dance clubs were very different scenes. This was the mid-1970s, the early days of the disco craze. I was aware of disco from hearing Top 40 by happenstance now and then—on a streetcar ride, I might hear a song like Barry White’s “Love’s Theme” or the Hues Corporation’s “Rock the Boat” on one of the passengers’ radios—but I was concentrating on jazz and contemporary classical music and had not been paying much attention to other genres since my pop-music listening back in high school. It was only later that I learned disco had begun in the underground gay dance clubs of Manhattan, where it was inextricable from the gay subculture. I discovered disco after it had begun to be appropriated and assimilated into mainstream pop music. When I first walked into a gay dance club, I was unprepared.

  Shortly after I moved to Boston in August 1975, I found myself passing by a disco near where I lived in Allston, near Boston University. It was called the Land of Oz. It had taken its name, unsubtly, from the dream world in the classic Hollywood musical that had made Judy Garland a star and provided the secret password—“Are you a friend of Dorothy?”—for midcentury gay men who needed to know who was gay and who was not so they didn’t get the crap beaten out of them or taken down to the precinct. Steeling myself, I walked into the club from the gray landscape on Commonwealth Avenue, feeling like Dorothy Gale stepping out of her collapsed black-and-white farmhouse to enter the Technicolor fantasy of MGM’s Oz. I inched my way to the bar. I stood there nervously clutching a gin and tonic and stared out at an army of men dressed up in open polyester shirts with wide wing collars and crotch-hugging pants, dancing the Hustle. Glitter drizzled from the ceiling, the disco ball was spinning, and the air was thick with cigarette smoke and the sour, intoxicating smell of male bodies sweating. I got picked up by a decent-looking guy and went home with a total stranger for the first time in my life. I was not very comfortable doing this, but I just thought, If you are gay, this is what you do. I had no instruction yet from older men in how to embrace my sexuality. But over time, and as I hit the bars more often, I began to develop friendships with some older gay guys who let me into their circle and taught me the ropes of the scene.

  The bars and clubs always stocked piles of gay newspapers and flyers for gay-oriented services—massage parlors and gay-friendly businesses such as gyms and hair salons. I picked up the gay papers and noticed the personal classifieds, which were like the meat market of the bars in a more efficient form. It seemed easy—you could shop for a sexual partner as easily as shopping for a sofa or a car. I answered an ad once and arranged to meet a guy at a bar. I’ll just say that his self-description in the ad showed exceptional creativity and imagination. That was the first and last time I used the personal ads in Boston.

  When I moved to Back Bay, in a sketchy area on Westland Avenue near the conservatory, I was down the block from the notorious Fenway, where men went for nocturnal hookups. A friend took me there once after midnight, and I was amazed—it was like being in a gay Fellini movie, men having sex under the moonlight in couples and in groups. I was titillated, and I went on my own several times just to look, much too frightened to participate. But something in me said that it was not my scene and that it could all too eas
ily become addictive—or that I could get arrested. So I stopped going there.

  I had an affair with a handsome graduate composition student my first year at the conservatory. But as it often went in those carefree days, he also had a girlfriend; and she had another boyfriend; and I sort of had a girlfriend too, though our relationship was largely platonic. Somewhere along the way, we all got crab lice and, after a lot of intense conversations and finger pointing, traced the crabs to one of our sofas. The couch was summarily dumped on the street with an appropriate note pinned to it.

  But I had not yet had anything close to an actual relationship with an out gay man. There were the close high school friendships with guys I was obsessed with. And when I was living in Cincinnati as an upcoming jazz musician I had some drunken or stoned sexual experiences with some of my musician friends. Those men were straight but curious, and our sexual intimacy was a secret. It wasn’t until the summer of 1976 that I had an ongoing connection to one man, though I wouldn’t say we were boyfriends, exactly. I had met Don, a smart, good-looking guy, in a bar. About five years older than me, he had a cute smile, a nice build, and soulful brown eyes. He was wearing a knitted cap the night we met. When we got back to my apartment and he took his hat off, I saw that he was, for the most part, bald, which wasn’t a turn-off at all. After a month of spending time together, he told me he needed a place to live, so he moved in with me that summer. We didn’t set up housekeeping together. We cohabitated, essentially like friends in a roommate situation, but there was some sex and genuine affection between us. Some evenings we would just hang out together and listen to music. Don was sort of bookish and sweet and had a beautiful, clear tenor voice that was perfectly suited to the folk songs and old Americana material that he loved to sing, accompanied by his guitar.

  Don introduced me to the “Calamus” poems by Walt Whitman, which we hadn’t studied in my poetry class. He showed me “When I Heard at the Close of the Day,” which ends with these words: