by Fred Hersch
I went to the Vanguard at least a couple of times a month. When I didn’t have the six-dollar cover charge, the door person would let me sit on the steps leading down to the club, and I’d listen from there. In my first couple of years in New York, I saw—or at least heard—Bill Evans, Milt Jackson, Joe Henderson, Bobby Hutcherson, and many other great jazz musicians. Though some nights I wasn’t even in the room, I was learning by osmosis, by getting as close as possible to the living jazz legends, some of whom I had heard live already, and some only on records.
There was another club in town that was actually the happening place for pianists specifically: Bradley’s. A long, narrow storefront bar on University Place just half a block from my loft, it was elegant and woody inside, like an old library, with mahogany wainscoting and modern art on the walls. The owner, Bradley Cunningham, was a gregariously imposing former marine in his early fifties. He had a tousled-hair Robert Redford look and loved jazz, especially piano jazz. He could play a bit himself, in the manner of a talented amateur who never fully applied himself to his instrument but got a kick out of music and knew good piano playing when he heard it. I learned at one point that he had served in the Pacific during World War II, and had interrogated Japanese prisoners of war. Word was that he had extracted some valuable military secrets from captive soldiers. He had a knack with people, a great asset for a saloon owner. Under Bradley Cunningham, Bradley’s was more than a venue of presentation for piano jazz and piano-bass duos; it was a hang, the place where jazz musicians went to be with other musicians, to hear gossip, learn material, steal ideas, get drunk, and get high and possibly get laid.
I started hanging out at Bradley’s, insinuating myself into the scene. There was rarely a cover charge, and most of the time there wasn’t even anybody at the door to take the money. It was at Bradley’s that I first rubbed elbows with—and played with—some of the great, great musicians of all time. All the heavyweight pianists played there and came in there when they were off for the night—Tommy Flanagan, Jimmy Rowles, Joanne Brackeen, Sir Roland Hanna, Kenny Barron, John Hicks, Cedar Walton, everybody. I watched drummer Art Blakey hitting on a young NYU coed at the bar, learned to spot the coke dealers discreetly going in and out of the men’s room, and met some of the odd locals who also frequented the Cedar Tavern, the legendary abstract expressionist artists’ bar a block up the street.
At the end of the night, pianists who weren’t on the bill would take a seat at the piano and show the others a tune or two. There were basses propped up in every corner from the cats who were coming from their other gigs to hear the music and have a nightcap. Fantastic horn players such as trumpeter Woody Shaw and saxophone legends Zoot Sims, George Coleman, Al Cohn, and Phil Woods would sit in and hang out. All these people I knew from records and idolized—there they were, and I was there among them. I saw them drunk. I saw them stoned. I saw them when they were having a bad night and just weren’t playing well. I got to see them as people like me, and, just as significant, they got to see me.
I came to New York to make it and play with the greatest players in jazz—isn’t that why most young jazz musicians come to New York? I was only twenty-one when I started hanging at Bradley’s, but I was ambitious and knew what I wanted. I could play and I knew it. I had a good skill set for those days. I knew lots of tunes. I could sight-read. I could accompany in any style. I could swing. I was ready.
Truth to tell, I was pretty full of myself and probably too pushy. I suppose I was a nuisance at Bradley’s, in everybody’s face a little too much. I could have lain back and taken things more deliberately. If I could go back in time and meet the Fred from those days, I don’t know if I would like him very much. He was awfully arrogant for a guy who hadn’t done that much yet.
But I know what he would say to me. He would say, I know what I can do. I have the goods. I want to be playing with the best musicians in the world. Why should I wait?
I don’t know if I was overcompensating for any ongoing feelings of inadequacy, any lingering sense that my arms were just too short, or if I was pushing my way past any intimidation I felt in the company of these masters. But push is exactly what I did.
I made sure all the pianists knew who I was, and I constantly asked people if I could sit in. Most of them were nice about it, considering how obnoxious I was. Jimmy Rowles graciously let me sit in a few times, and he showed me some great, obscure tunes after hours. One night Jimmy sat me down and taught me “Lotus Blossom,” the beautiful Billy Strayhorn ballad. Strayhorn was the man behind the scenes in the Ellington band—some of the signature tunes we associate with Duke were actually composed by Billy, such as “Take the ‘A’ Train.” He also arranged and orchestrated a great deal of music for the band and could mimic Duke at the piano when Ellington needed to be out front conducting. And he was a major songsmith, writing music and lyrics; “Lush Life” (completed at age nineteen) and “Something to Live For” are among his best-known tunes. There was something of a thing for Strayhorn at Bradley’s—a special appreciation for his subtlety and harmonic sophistication. Much of the music Strayhorn wrote was intimate and not that well established in the jazz canon yet, but musicians loved the challenge of playing his tunes, and they were just right for a clubby, jazz-insider setting such as Bradley’s. Another night, Tommy Flanagan showed me Strayhorn’s “UMMG (Upper Manhattan Medical Group),” written in honor of the staff at the hospital where Billy spent time as a patient.
Tommy was one of my favorites. A bespectacled, light-skinned, and soft-spoken man, he had been Ella Fitzgerald’s accompanist for years, had a huge repertoire, and had recorded the very tricky “Giant Steps” with John Coltrane. With an elegant touch, a graceful swinging beat, and deceptively tricky yet always melodic phrasing, he took a lot of chances when he soloed. That meant that he was not quite as consistent as his Detroit peer Hank Jones but that when he was having a good night, it was something truly special.
I harassed Kenny Barron at Bradley’s for so long that he finally let me sit in with the great bassist Buster Williams. Buster grudgingly let me play that time, but as the years passed we played together often and became quite friendly. Eventually, the bassist Red Mitchell, whom I had sat in with a few times, said to Bradley, “Give the kid a gig already.”
I was just twenty-two when I was booked to play a full week at Bradley’s. It was heady. There was nobody else my age headlining at a place so prominent. Nearly all the other pianists who played Bradley’s were twice my age or older. For my first week there, I hired bassist and fellow Cincinnatian Michael Moore (not the Michael Moore from the New England Conservatory), but he took another gig at the last minute, so I hired Bill Evans’s former bass player Eddie Gomez. Bradley liked me, and I guess he got good feedback from the other cats and the bar’s regular patrons, so for my second weeklong engagement not long afterward I had the good sense to hire Sam Jones, a veteran musician highly respected in the Bradley’s circle. In addition to having been the bassist in the band of Julian “Cannonball” Adderley, Miles’s alto player of choice, he served significant stints in the trios of Oscar Peterson and Bill Evans. He always played the right note, and he made it look easy. His time was impeccable—his beat had a special lift to it, and it was hard not to swing when you were playing with him. He also was a sometime bandleader and a composer of numerous catchy tunes, his “Unit 7” being Cannonball Adderley’s theme song. The perception of me after that was Hey, if Sam thinks he can play, he can play. That was serious cred—I was in.
I was paid $100 per night—a lot of money for me in those days, almost my month’s rent. And Bradley offered you free dinner or free drinks—I was doing my small hits of coke toward the end of the night and I never drink on the bandstand, so I took dinner before the gig. I was probably the only person who played there who took that option. Bradley insisted that “this is a saloon, not a concert hall” and as such I had to play what he called “fifty-dollar tunes” during the early dinner sets: Porter, Kern, Gershwin, and maybe
a bossa nova or two. Four sets a night—forty-five minutes on, thirty off—from 9:45 to 2:45.
The first time I played at Bradley’s I got my first flattering coverage in The New Yorker. I think that this, more than anything I had done in my life up to that point, impressed my parents, who, even living in Cincinnati, subscribed to the magazine and read it religiously. The magazine’s longtime jazz critic Whitney Balliett put previews of upcoming shows in the magazine’s influential “Goings On About Town” section—something close to mini-reviews. In a listing from my first gig at Bradley’s with bassist Eddie Gomez, Balliett described me as “a slender, bearded, light-fingered poet of a pianist.” To be recognized at my age by someone as highly regarded as Balliett was awfully gratifying, and to be called a poet specifically was a thrill. I couldn’t help but bristle a bit at “light-fingered,” though. I get that he was saying I didn’t have a heavy hand, and that was great. But I thought of light as a loaded word. It was a common anti-gay slur to call someone “light in the loafers.” Was Balliett trying to suggest something about me in a non-musical sense?
I was paranoid, for sure—secretive about my sexual identity and terrified that the truth would come out and hurt me professionally just as I was beginning to have some success. There was not yet any gay consciousness in the jazz world. I was playing Billy Strayhorn’s music but didn’t even know that Strayhorn had been gay. Jazz is an intimate art—you’re interacting spontaneously with other musicians, expressing yourself and responding to the way they express themselves. As a musician, I have always played with sensitivity and emotionality, qualities Balliett was probably getting at by calling me a “poet.” My fear was that if the straight musicians I played with knew I was gay, they would mistake my intense musical connection to them for coming on to them, and I didn’t think that would go over well.
One night I went to a gay bar on Christopher Street, and as I walked out, a straight jazz pianist I knew, Jim McNeely, passed by. I thought, Oh shit—there goes my cover. Now McNeely’s going to tell everybody my secret, and I’m sunk.
—
My repertoire expanded at Bradley’s as I was introduced to new material through other pianists and composers who frequented the club. I got to know the blind British pianist George Shearing, who came to Bradley’s from time to time just to listen. He invited me to his spacious three-bedroom apartment on the Upper East Side for tea with his wife, Ellie. He had a Bösendorfer concert grand in the living room and two nice Yamaha uprights in his music room. George liked to have musician guests play duos with him. We played Bach’s Piano Concerto in D Minor on the two uprights with me taking the orchestra part—a lot of fun but a challenge that made me wish I’d kept up my sight-reading after graduating from the conservatory. Ellie was a mezzo-soprano and loved to sing lieder and asked me to accompany her on some Brahms and Schubert. I hacked my way through. George turned me on to some fairly obscure tunes that he loved—things like “The Heather on the Hill” and Cole Porter’s “Dream Dancing.”
As a jazz player who had been hugely popular with his quintet in the fifties, George was business-savvy and quite well off financially. He was also one of the first established professionals to offer me career and business advice. He gave me tips on negotiating fees and told me, to my everlasting gratitude, that I should always hold on to my own publishing rights for my original compositions, calling it “the gift that keeps on giving” in the form of royalties when you (or some other artist) recorded a tune you wrote. He made a small fortune from his hit “Lullaby of Birdland” in its instrumental and vocal versions. He recommended me to an old-school agent who, owing to my lack of name recognition, was only able to get me one weekend gig, playing solo in Schenectady.
One night in 1978 I was playing at Bradley’s with a bassist whose name escapes me now when Alec Wilder came in. Wilder was an eccentric composer of classical concert music and had composed a sonata for every orchestral instrument, ensuring that his music would be kept alive in conservatories, since not that much was written for some of the more obscure ones. He also was the author of the classic reference book American Popular Song, and his own tunes were popular with the Café Carlyle set. He sat near the piano, at the front table, and listened intently. He stayed for two sets. When I was finished playing, he said nice things about what I was doing and asked me if I’d mind if he sent me his songbooks. That’s how I discovered his beautiful compositions “Moon and Sand” and “The Winter of My Discontent.” I was twenty-three years old. It had only been a year since I pushed my way onto the piano bench at Bradley’s, and Alec Wilder was sending me his music. Naturally, this made me feel like I was heading in the right direction.
Bradley’s could be humbling as well. In the fall of ’79 I was playing with Sam Jones when Charles Mingus entered the club. This was late in his sadly abbreviated life—he would die from ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) at the age of fifty-six in less than six months. He was using a wheelchair, aided by his devoted wife, Sue. I saw him start to roll down the aisle toward the piano, and I thought, Oh my fucking God…Other than Miles Davis himself, nobody could have been more intimidating to me—I had such awe and respect for him. As a master bassist, highly significant composer, and all-around jazz legend, his presence totally freaked me out. I finished the set early, bolted up, ran to the back office, and barricaded myself in. I hid there for about twenty minutes until Sam came in with a glass of sherry and a concerned expression and sat down next to me.
He said softly, “Fred, you have to get a grip on yourself. Listen—there’s nothing you can play that that man hasn’t heard before. Just play your stuff, do your thing. He came out of his house in a wheelchair because Bradley told him you had something going on. You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t deserve to be.” So when the break was over, I went up to Mingus and nervously said, “It’s an honor to meet you. Thanks for coming down to hear Sam and me. Your music has been an inspiration to me for as long as I’ve been listening to jazz.” He just smiled and said, “Thanks.” This wasn’t the tempestuous Beneath the Underdog Mingus of yore, but still, just being in his presence gave me a shiver.
Trying to look cool, I went back up and I played what I played, and Mingus liked it well enough to sit there at his table listening. This may not sound like that big a deal, but it was tremendous validation to me as a new citizen of the New York jazz community. Jazz, after all, is a music steeped in tradition as well as innovation. Every generation of musicians learns the music from the model of its elders—in the oral tradition. And everyone steals ideas from predecessors as well as from peers. The elders carry weight. Mingus’s attention was his tacit mark of approval. That night he silently confirmed something I had been telling everybody else but wasn’t entirely sure of myself, deep down: I was good enough to be playing there as one of the “cats.”
I have always played with my eyes closed. Somehow it helps me to hear the space around the music and feel the piano action better, thus getting a more connected sound. One night at Bradley’s I sensed a special presence in the club and opened my eyes. I saw a woman with long blond hair in a Chinese-red silk dress coming down past the bar accompanied by a tall, good-looking African American man. It took me a few seconds to realize that it was Joni Mitchell and her boyfriend, percussionist Don Alias. I was floored. They sat opposite the piano and had dinner. Thinking on it now, I realize that in a strange way, Joni’s music, particularly the iconic album Blue, helped me get into jazz. I spent hours in high school trying to decipher the chords she was playing on that record (and many of her other ones)—they were not major or minor necessarily. It opened up a whole new harmonic palette for me. After the set, I went up to her like a timid schoolboy and told her how much I dug her. She cracked a broad smile and thanked me.
There was a lot of cocaine at Bradley’s. Then again, there was lots of cocaine all over New York in this blithely free and blindly decadent time. Bradley liked coke and would treat the musicians in his inner circle to a few lines in the office
, just as a good host of another era would pop a bottle of chardonnay or pour a round of shots. For a time in the late seventies, cocaine was so commonplace as a social lubricant that to spend any amount of time with someone without sharing a line was practically rude. I have always wanted to fit in, so I did my share of coke both inside and outside of Bradley’s. I never overdid things, though, and never mainlined cocaine or smoked crack. Pot had been my drug of choice—especially for listening, though I learned back in Cincinnati that it is a terrible performance drug. I was wired by nature, but I enjoyed the extra energy and feeling of confidence coke gave me. Just a small snort made me feel more powerful and in command—at least for as long as I was high.
After establishing myself at Bradley’s with Sam Jones, I would play the club three or four weeks a year—with Sam or other great bassists such as Charlie Haden, Red Mitchell, Buster Williams, Ron Carter, and George Mraz. Between those gigs, I would play at the Knickerbocker, a bigger and noisier piano duo room three blocks to the south on University Place, with various bass players. I’d pick up trio dates as I could, and fill in the calendar with odd jobs, playing parties or accompanying singers including Chris Connor and, later, Sylvia Syms—some great vocalists who taught me the value of knowing lyrics, selling a song, and putting together a set. If I got a decent trio gig and it paid $200, I would hire Buster Williams and Billy Hart, both of whom had played with Herbie Hancock, and I’d pay them $100 each. I didn’t make a dime, but I was getting a fantastic free lesson—and it made people believe that I was good enough to hang in there with them. I was becoming one of the cats.