Good Things Happen Slowly

by Fred Hersch

  For the one I love most lay sleeping by me under the same cover in the cool night,

  In the stillness in the autumn moonbeams his face was inclined toward me,

  And his arm lay lightly around my breast—and that night I was happy.

  It blew me away that Whitman dared to write this in the mid-nineteenth century. That poem made me believe that love between two men was possible.

  The arrangement Don and I had was not an exclusive one. It was just one of those undefined sort of relationships. But it was great to be with him and have a positive one-to-one experience with a man I cared about. For the rest of my life, I’ve always connected that feeling with the sentiment of “When I Heard at the Close of the Day.” I was starting to learn that being gay could mean many things—bars and discos and glitter and sex, of course, but also friendship and warmth and quiet happiness.

  I graduated from the New England Conservatory in the spring of 1977, one year early, with honors. My parents came, along with my brother—he was then at Princeton studying English and working as a sports reporter at the college newspaper—to my graduation recital. After so many years of living unhappily together, they were separated, and tension between them was high. I played a trio set with my old bassist friend Bob Bodley, who came up from Cincinnati, and a student drummer. And during my very long solo set I played one classic stride piece, Eubie Blake’s difficult “Charleston Rag.” I also played a series of duos with my musical friends from NEC. Cincinnati guitarist Cal Collins was in town with Benny Goodman, and he played duets with me as well. I showed, musically, that I had a growing and more confident sense of who I was—both on my own and with another person.

  CHAPTER 4

  BRADLEY’S

  On a Sunday in the spring of 1976, Michael Moore and a couple of other musician friends of mine at the conservatory were talking about how so many of our favorite records had been recorded at the Village Vanguard in New York. There was Sonny Rollins’s magisterial A Night at the Village Vanguard, a tenor sax trio date with bassist Wilbur Ware and drummer Elvin Jones from 1957, an album that could be sold as a textbook on the art of thematic variation in jazz improvisation. Chorus after astounding chorus, Rollins extracts everything that can be extracted from every tune, and every phrase sounds fresh and alive. There was John Coltrane’s Live at the Village Vanguard from 1962, a testament to his profoundly fertile creative imagination, followed up by Live at the Village Vanguard Again! from 1966. There was Bill Evans’s landmark of jazz piano trio, Sunday at the Village Vanguard from 1961, and a number of other superb albums recorded at the same location by Dizzy Gillespie, Gerry Mulligan, Elvin Jones, and the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra, among others. What was it about the Village Vanguard and its sound that inspired such amazing music making? We needed to know. The next day, five of us packed into a friend’s car and drove from Boston to Greenwich Village to hear the revered tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon, who had recently returned from his long exile in Europe. We were acolytes making a jazz pilgrimage to the most famous basement club in the world.

  To picture what the Vanguard looked like in 1977, all you need to do is go to the club today. Max Gordon opened it in 1935, and it has barely changed. The only thing missing now is the cigarette smoke. There used to be a mix of jazz, folk music, and comedy—acts such as Josh White, Lead Belly, Lenny Bruce, and Professor Irwin Corey, along with Monk and Miles—but it has presented exclusively jazz since the late sixties. As I write this in the second decade of the twenty-first century, the Vanguard is still owned and operated by Max’s widow, Lorraine, now ninety-four, and her daughter, Deborah.

  The Vanguard is an acoustic miracle, shaped perfectly for projecting the sound of almost unamplified instruments. Many, myself included, feel that it is indeed the Carnegie Hall of jazz clubs, the greatest in the world. Dexter’s huge, warm tone filled the club with richness and a soulful presence that was a thrill.

  Returning to the club a few months later, I heard the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra on a Monday night. To this day, I have never heard anything quite like the way that group sounded from my table, fifteen or twenty feet from the Vanguard’s tiny bandstand. Mel had a Chinese cymbal that sounded like the greatest, most musical garbage-can lid you ever heard. He was magnificent. He seemed to play effortlessly, with the freedom you would usually associate with small-band drumming. The sound was enveloping, far surpassing the expectations I had had from listening to all those Live at the Vanguard records. I watched and studied the pianist, Harold Danko, a fine player in his late twenties, whom I had never heard before, and I thought: I can do what he’s doing. I could play here.

  At the end of the set I went up to Danko and introduced myself. I wrote my name and number on a slip of paper and told him that if he ever needed a sub, he should call me. In my mind that night, I took my next step and moved to New York to set up shop as a working jazz musician.

  A week after graduation, on June 1, 1977, I did it for real. A childhood friend from Cincinnati, Eddie Felson, was an up-and-coming bass player and had moved to New York about six months earlier. Eddie was (and still is) tack sharp and resourceful, a sociable, attractive guy with a quick wit. He heard about a loft on East Eleventh Street in the Village, between Broadway and University Place, available for $350 a month and a fixture fee of $4,000 paid to the departing tenant. Back when lofts were lived in by artists of various sorts and before the term “loft” had come to mean any high-ceilinged apartment only affordable for well-to-do workers in the financial sector, they were unadorned commercial spaces. When the artist moved out, he or she would recoup the money spent installing modifications to make it habitable by charging the incoming tenant a fixture fee. Though the lease was a commercial one, landlords often knew that the spaces were being lived in and looked the other way—but in some cases the artists had to keep their residence in the building a secret.

  I had access to some cash left over from the education fund my grandmother had set aside for me as well as a fair amount of money I had saved from playing countless private parties through the conservatory gig office. I used it, expecting to continue my education in jazz in the New York scene.

  In many ways, this was a dream time to land in Manhattan. The city had been in decline for a decade and was nearly bankrupt, but only economically. Culturally, wild ideas were sprouting from the cracks in the streets. Rents were low and the crime rate was high. Students at New York University, a few blocks south of the loft I rented, were pooling their resources and buying buildings in the East Village, because they could pick up a brownstone for $30,000 or $40,000. Lower Manhattan’s SoHo district (for “South of Houston” Street) was a quiet, sparsely populated neighborhood for artists using floor-through lofts in former warehouses to paint huge photo-realist canvases or construct found-object sculpture. There was no major retail shopping in the neighborhood. Times Square was a wasteland of hard-core porn theaters and pimp bars. Manhattan was open to everyone and everything.

  Not long after I moved to the city, New York fell under siege to the roaming serial killer the tabloids called the Son of Sam, because he claimed to be acting under orders he received telepathically from a dog owned by his neighbor Sam. It didn’t always feel safe to walk home after dark, so you might as well stay out all night and go home at dawn.

  The loft Eddie and I moved into was a primitively fitted-out space in a smallish building—it had recently been converted into a living loft by a sculptor. We had the entire seventh floor, 2,500 square feet, with our bedrooms delineated by cheap particleboard walls put up by the previous tenant, who charged us for them, a very basic kitchen, and the funky stall shower he had installed. The elevator opened up right into our living space. There was no air-conditioning, so we kept the windows cracked wide and used fans. That summer the municipal sanitation workers went on strike. Piles of garbage spilled into the streets, and their aroma wafted into our place.

  As soon as I arrived in New York, I moved the Baldwin from my mom’s house in Ci
ncinnati and sold it to upgrade to a larger German Schimmel grand. Eddie kept his bass next to it. We played a lot of music together and with a floating group of musicians Eddie had gotten to know, as well as others I met as I started gigging around town: bassist Ratzo Harris, tenor player Rich Perry, singers Roberta Baum and Roseanna Vitro, who got romantically involved with Eddie and moved in with us after about six months. People were always coming and going, sleeping on the floor and playing jam sessions at all hours.

  My half of the rent was $175—which was chopped down to just $117 after Roseanna joined us—and we had no cable bill or Wi-Fi service provider to pay. I remember spending more than a month’s rent—$125—at Crazy Eddie’s in the Village to buy an answering machine, the only personal technology available in the days before pagers, cell phones, and home computers. If I got a few gigs that I would have missed by not being at home to receive the call, it would pay for itself.

  I didn’t have to earn a lot of money to keep myself afloat. It was very important to me to make it as a musician, and I had a deep-seated need to prove to myself that I could make a living at this. That led me to play some gigs that were pretty mundane: weddings, private parties, and restaurant background gigs. I just wanted to be working every night, playing jazz—or some kind of music. Looking back, I know how fortunate I was to know deep down that there was family money available if I needed it and that I wouldn’t starve—I never had to wait tables, drive a taxi, or take an office temp job. But my pride in wanting to make a living exclusively from playing music was real.

  I vividly remember my first jazz gig in New York, barely a week after I had moved in. It was a quartet date with drummer Jo Jones Jr. that Eddie got me hired for. Though Jo Jo, as he liked to be called, was the son of the groundbreaking swing drummer “Papa Jo” Jones, he had not inherited his father’s talent. Still, an actual jazz gig in New York City was a big deal to me, and I was stoked. We played at a place called Barbara’s, a block off Washington Square Park on the corner of Thompson and West Third Streets. The piano was painted white (always a bad sign) and was out of tune. It was a door gig, meaning musicians split whatever the club brought in from the cover charge, which wasn’t much. At the end of the night, my cut was $7. It was the sweetest money I had ever made.

  After we packed up, Eddie and I walked over to Mamoun’s, the legendary all-night Middle Eastern joint on MacDougal Street. I got a falafel for seventy-five cents. The experience was exhilarating. I was feeding myself with my earnings as a jazz musician in New York.

  Soon after I moved into the loft on Eleventh Street, I got a call from the contractor for the Woody Herman big band, and I signed on to hit the road with Herman and his current configuration of the Thundering Herd. Herman was a smallish, stooped-over man who had recently been in a car accident. That and his need to keep working to pay the IRS back the money that a former manager had absconded with made him particularly cranky, as he had to ride the bus with us rather than travel on his own. He was in his mid-sixties—not old by today’s standards but ancient and hardened in his attitudes and practices. He had handed off the musical direction to one of the saxophonists in the band, Frank Tiberi, who would count off the tunes and do the conducting most of the time, while Herman stood there with a paisley ascot under his polyester shirt, glowering at the audience. We played his big swing dance hits “Four Brothers,” “Woodchopper’s Ball,” and “Caldonia”—as well as a quasi-hip big-band arrangement of Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man”—every night. The band uniforms were dark blue double-knit leisure suits and lemon-yellow shirts with giant pointy collars that spilled over the lapels. They were suffocating. A lot of guys in the band smoked cigarettes, including me, and many of the uniforms were pocked with holes from ashes dropping on them and melting through the polyester.

  We went through three rhythm sections in the first month. Musicians kept coming on the bus, then getting fired. The great tenor player Joe Lovano was in the band then, and we became friends. He was already well developed as an improviser but had to work with cornball conceits such as a “tenor battle” with Tiberi. Most of the guys were miserable, for good reason, and indifferent to the music, or they were drunks. All they talked about were sports and “chicks.” I felt like I had fallen asleep in the trailer at Kings Island, and when I woke up, everybody in the world had become a macho dullard.

  We went from town to town, by band bus, all over the eastern part of the country, and I never got a chance to practice. The only time I played piano was onstage. Herman fancied himself a progressive musician, so I had to play a Fender Rhodes electric piano on some of the more modern, non-swing repertoire. My big feature was “La Fiesta,” a Chick Corea Latin showpiece that we played really, really fast. The whole experience was hell. The only positive thing Herman did was fire me after five weeks. I wasn’t a particularly flashy player who could get lots of applause by playing loud and fast; that and my lack of enthusiasm did me in. But I can’t say I was disappointed, as I honestly would rather have driven a cab in New York than play with that band much longer.

  I didn’t have a manager or a booking agent. I didn’t know any musicians who did. I would look through The Village Voice, which came out every Wednesday and was the bible for New Yorkers in the days before the Web. It provided all the information you needed to live. Need an apartment? Looking for a job? A date? A good place to eat or hear music? You could find everything in The Village Voice. I would go through the listings of the jazz clubs and the bars and restaurants that advertised “music nightly,” and I would knock on their doors, bringing my demo cassette tape. Sometimes they’d take your information in case they needed a sub, sometimes they’d say, “Thanks, but no thanks, kid,” and sometimes they’d say, “All right, you start next Friday at seven o’clock.” And I learned quickly to befriend other pianists so they could throw me jobs that they couldn’t take—or didn’t want to do.

  I became the pianist in the house band of a club called Jazzmania, which many of us referred to as Jazzphobia. It tried to capitalize on the loft-jazz model of the late seventies—but it was in a safe neighborhood, at Twenty-Third Street near Park Avenue, and the owner also listed it in the personal ad section of The Village Voice as a place for cool yuppie singles to meet. I met so many great musicians there, many as new to New York as I was. Each weekend the house trio would play behind a guest artist—these ranged from saxophone avant-gardists such as Arthur Blythe and David Murray to Monk’s saxophonist Charlie Rouse, Mingus’s trombonist Jimmy Knepper, and baritone sax player Pepper Adams, a mainstay in the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra. There were rarely any charts—they just called tunes or brought in the occasional simple lead sheet. This was a great experience that started to get my name around.

  I played gigs at the Angry Squire, a dive on Seventh Avenue in Chelsea that had a fifty-six-key spinet piano on an elevated area behind the bandstand. Ten years earlier in Cincinnati I had been distraught over my parents’ getting me a Baldwin grand instead of a Steinway, and here I was playing a no-name spinet and glad to have the work. I was too busy hustling to indulge considerations of familial justice. Eventually I was able to play there with the great bassist Sam Jones and the drummer Jimmy Cobb—Wynton Kelly’s rhythm section! These two players were some of the best of their generation—the post-boppers who came after Charlie Parker, Dizzy, Monk, and the rest of the bebop pioneers. Jimmy had even played with Miles (the ultimate stamp of approval), appearing on one of my favorite albums, Friday and Saturday Night at the Blackhawk. We managed to make music despite the wretched piano.

  I played often with a variety of singers at a restaurant a couple of blocks from my loft, on Eleventh Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, called Christy’s Skylight Garden. You got $25 a night and a good dinner for six straight nights—a fantastic deal. In one week I would make my rent for the month and eat pretty well. I got a weekend job subbing in the house band at one of the old Catskills resorts, the Granit. We played dance music—fox-trots, cha-chas,
and merengues—for the cocktail hour, then accompanied the evening touring acts, both musicians and comedians, sometimes having to sight-read nearly illegible arrangements.

  In addition to the weddings and private parties, Eddie and I played after hours with the seriously swinging tenor saxophonist Junior Cook at a place called Joyce’s House of Unity on Columbus Avenue and Eighty-Third Street, which was a sketchy part of town then. We would go to dinner in Chinatown before the gig started at 4 A.M., and we would play till eight in the morning. There were lots of hookers and pimps, and they were the more respectable, working people in the crowd. When you walked into the club, you got frisked. Junior was a masterful player but always high and, even at that hour, always late. The pay was pretty good—$50—but the hours were hard. My body was beginning to adjust to jazz time. Still, this was rough on the system, and more than once I ended up spending the $50 on coke to get me through the gig. I was learning a lot about what jazz musicians had to deal with for the privilege of practicing their trade.

  One afternoon, not long after I moved to New York, I got a last-minute call to play the piano at a gay bar on the Upper East Side. When I showed up, the manager looked me over and asked me to take off my sport jacket. Then he said to take off my tie and dress shirt. “I want to see what you’ve got,” he said, checking me out in my T-shirt. I was going to the gym regularly and passed the inspection.

  “Do you sing?” he asked.

  I said, “No.”

  And he said, “Well, tonight you are going to sing.”

  Though I knew the lyrics to most of the songs I played, I had no desire to sing “Memory” from Cats, the gay anthem “What I Did for Love” from A Chorus Line—or anything sung by Barbra Streisand. But needing the job, I played and sang as best I could that night with a tip jar on the piano—in my tight T-shirt, surely looking a bit uncomfortable. It was the first and last time I sang publicly, with or without a T-shirt. I pulled it off well enough, I think, but had no interest in becoming a piano-bar entertainer and stoking the classic image of the gay man singing and playing show tunes.