Good Things Happen Slowly

by Fred Hersch

  Sam Jones recommended me to Art Farmer, the wonderful flügelhorn player who was in the top tier of jazz soloists in the second half of the twentieth century. Art came in to hear me play with Sam at Bradley’s one night as a sort of audition. Sam had given me a heads-up, so I played some tunes that I knew were in Art’s repertoire. This scheme must have worked in my favor, because shortly afterward Art hired me to play a two-week gig at a sketchy club called Dummy George’s on the outskirts of Detroit, off the notorious 8 Mile Road.

  We stayed in a motel with no food service, it was August, and it was miserable. I didn’t have a car and had to walk half a mile along the highway to the closest convenience store, where everything—the cashier and all the merchandise—was behind bulletproof glass. You had to point at what you wanted, if you were hungry for chips or a Royal Crown cola, which is pretty much all they carried. Art Farmer had been living in Vienna since the sixties and was starting to come to the States more often but wasn’t well enough connected to the American scene to know all the players. As a result, the bass player and the drummer he hired for the engagement were horrendous—he had gotten their names from somewhere and hired them without hearing them. At the end of the two weeks at Dummy George’s, I said to Art, “I really love your music, but if this is the rhythm section you’re going to go with, I’m afraid I’m just going to step out.”

  He paused for a few moments, thinking. Then he said, “Who would you choose?”

  I said, “Let me think about that,” then I helped him put together a much better band for an upcoming tour. We hired the bassist Mike Richmond, who had been working with Stan Getz, and the drummer Akira Tana, whom I knew from the New England Conservatory. Ray Drummond stepped in on bass after a while. I basically became the contractor for Art’s band. Since he was living in Europe, he would call me up when he was planning to come stateside and I would round up the rhythm section for all of our engagements. It was a precious opportunity, because I had a hand in choosing whom I’d be playing with, and I could help give a boost to people such as Akira in the same way that Art was boosting me.

  I started playing with Art regularly, including the very visible two-week residencies he would do three times a year at Sweet Basil on Seventh Avenue South, off Sheridan Square. The place would be packed every night. The American economy was supposedly weak, not yet having rebounded from the recession of the seventies. New York was still regarded as dangerous. Yet people were eating, drinking, doing drugs, and listening to jazz every night of the week. As I’ve said, there was a lot of coke flying around then, and I can’t help but think that this was a boon to the jazz business. Everybody in town was so wired up, they didn’t want to stay home. The high-speed, ecstatic volatility of jazz seemed perfectly suited to the coke-fueled atmosphere of the time.

  I learned a lot about how to fit in with a horn player and a rhythm section as a supportive voice in an ensemble. Art didn’t make conventional note choices often. As the pianist, you had to be prepared for anything. You had to listen alertly and be able to voice chords in all sorts of ways—and react quickly so as not to confine Art harmonically or come off like an idiot.

  Art had a terrifically varied and unusual repertoire, full of interesting and beautiful but offbeat tunes—from “Sing Me Softly of the Blues” by the melodic but unconventional pianist Carla Bley, “The Cup-Bearers” by jazz composer-trombonist Tom McIntosh (a staple of Tommy Flanagan’s repertoire), and Michel Legrand’s “The Summer Knows,” to lesser-known standards such as “Namely You” and “She’s Funny That Way.” His tastes and mine were compatibly eclectic, and I drew inspiration from the way Art brought unity to such varied material through the individuality of his warm and lyrical approach to the music. He also encouraged me to write my own tunes, something I had been afraid to do. His Viennese pianist, Fritz Pauer, had contributed a few very fine tunes to the book, and Art said one day, “You know, the way you play, there’s no reason you shouldn’t be writing your own tunes.” When I started showing him my first songs, he not only played them, we eventually recorded them, giving me some bit of confidence that I could be a composer as well as a pianist.

  In the spring of 1982 I played on one of the five albums I would make with Art Farmer in as many years—a pop-oriented record, unusual for Art, for Creed Taylor’s CTI Records, which had become justifiably famous as a contemporary jazz label. There were three keyboard players on it: Don Grolnick, Warren Bernhardt on electric piano and synthesizer, and me. I wasn’t a studio heavy like the other guys on the date—I was there because Art insisted I be part of the band. One of the tracks was actually a Bee Gees song, “Stop (Think Again).” Tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson was a co-leader on the date, and it was through that session that I met him. At first I was intimidated. Joe was widely acknowledged to be one of the great sax players of all time, and I was a huge fan. But I knew he was from Lima, Ohio, and after I broke the ice by telling him I was from Cincinnati, he was quite friendly. We bonded over our shared opinion that the repertoire for the album was kind of lame. He didn’t have a pianist for an upcoming weekend gig in town, and at the end of the second day of recording, he asked me to play with his quartet.

  The first time I played with Joe, we were at Seventh Avenue South, the club owned by Randy and Michael Brecker, and I was so overwhelmed with excitement entwined with pride and insecurity that I could barely function. It helped that I already could play much of his repertoire—most of it consisting of his first-rate original tunes that I had often played at jam sessions and on gigs. Still, this was the sideman job of my dreams, and it put me in a bigger fishbowl.

  We started playing regularly at the Vanguard. One night I looked over from the piano at the bandstand, and there were Joe Henderson, Ron Carter on bass, and Al Foster on drums, all living legends. I thought, What am I doing here? I’m a gay Jewish kid from Cincinnati. How the hell did this happen? I told myself that I wouldn’t be on that bandstand if I wasn’t good enough. That’s what I had been telling everyone else. Now I had to convince myself.

  From my very first set with Joe, I found myself wondering how much I should be playing behind him during his solos. Having studied his classic Blue Note albums back in Cincinnati, I surmised that he had a huge sound and was a pretty aggressive guy. But he actually had a light and flexible approach to the tenor, maintaining a close relationship to the microphone as an integral part of his sound, and he was as mild-mannered as they come. He would play one of his epic-length solos, and at a certain point I would have an instinct to stop playing. He didn’t give me a look or say, “Stroll” or “Lay out.” There was just a vibe. I just felt, Okay, I need to let this guy go for a while. Then, at a certain point, I’d just sense, Oh, I’m invited back in. I’d have this experience in almost every set.

  I didn’t bring it up, because he wasn’t much for discussing the work. But then, after a couple of years working together, we had a little downtime backstage at the Vanguard one night, and I finally said to him, “Joe, when I’m laying out behind you and then coming back in, I assume that’s cool. I mean, you’ve never said anything.”

  He looked at me through his big, thick glasses and said, “If you feel it, it’s right. If you think it, it’s probably not right.”

  What an amazing lesson—play what you feel! Work from the inside out. Don’t apply an external idea that could shake you out of the moment or inhibit you. Don’t get into routines. Joe, in his old-school laissez-faire jazz way, had been leaving me to learn that by experience. But it helped me to hear it articulated. Ever since then, I’ve kept that lesson in my mind on the bandstand, and when I started teaching jazz piano myself, I made a point of passing it on.

  Joe was the living embodiment of an old-fashioned jazz cat. He would often leave the club during our breaks, sometimes returning late or only a minute or two before the appointed set time. His nickname was “the Phantom” because you could never find him when you needed him—he would simply vanish. He would leave a message on my answering mach
ine saying he was coming into town and wanted me on a gig, sometimes long in advance. I would try to get back to him to confirm, leaving multiple messages, but I’d get no response. I just had to go on faith—and he never stood me up. Joe liked coke. He also liked smack, and alcohol when he couldn’t get either. He didn’t do it to excess, at least most of the time when we played together. But he enjoyed it, and knowing that, I tried to have a little blow on hand to offer the boss before the set. For a junior member of the band like me, that was simply common courtesy. Once on a Friday night at the Vanguard my connection hadn’t shown up in time, so we went onto the bandstand straight. We played well enough, but I didn’t feel like I was doing anything special. Between sets, my connection came. I gave Joe his taste, and I had a little myself. We played the second set, and afterward I thought, Man, that was killing!

  I was in the habit then of recording my gigs with a Marantz cassette recorder the size of a phone book. (I still have boxes of old tapes from those days, and when I have listened to them I have been amazed at how much talking was going on in the audience—there wasn’t the silent reverence for the music that there is in the Vanguard of today.) A week or so after that Friday-night gig in 1983 with Joe, I played the cassette I had made of that evening’s three sets, and I was flabbergasted. In the second set, the one I thought was so great at the time, I was rushing and pushing. The phrases went on much too long. I sounded cold. It was an exercise in pointless, unfocused, wasted energy. But the first set, when I was sober, was surprisingly good—grounded, related to the other musicians, and much more interesting. From that day on, I never did drugs on the bandstand. Joe could get a little high before the set, and it never seemed to hurt him. So could plenty of others I’ve played with. Not me. I’m not making a moral judgment when I say this. I’m just saying drugs aren’t compatible with my music making. If I’m playing well—or badly—I want to know that it’s really me who’s up there on the bandstand making the music.

  The issue is the same one at the heart of Joe Henderson’s comment “If you feel it, it’s right.” Thinking isn’t the only thing that can undermine emotional connectedness. In my experience, anything that takes you too far from authentic feeling carries the risk of taking you out of the music.

  That said, I’ve seen people play spectacularly when they were profoundly fucked up. It’s almost as if drugs help some musicians connect—or liberate them from something obstructive inside them. After playing the same music for years, it can get to be routine, so they try to duplicate the feeling of “getting off” with the music like they used to when it was all fresh and new—and they imagine that drugs or booze can help them get there, sometimes the more the better. I’m thinking of Chet Baker, whose addiction to heroin took over his life. His days and nights revolved around getting the money for the fix, getting the fix, and getting the money for the next fix. When I saw him at Sweet Basil after I’d been in New York for a few years, he was physically ravaged—a skeleton with hollow eyes where that beautiful specimen of manhood used to be. He was so messed up that night that his embouchure was shot and he couldn’t play the trumpet. But he needed the money, so he scat-sang the whole show, and it was amazing. Delicate melodies of heart-wrenching beauty that sounded just like his trumpet playing. The drugs tore apart his body and, no doubt, his mind, but they could not kill his music.

  I encountered Chet half a dozen times before he died, in 1988—still in his fifties but looking twenty-five years older. He struck me as a sweet, fragile man. We were at a jam session once, at a musician’s loft in Chelsea. At the beginning of the night someone brought out some heroin—I snorted some for the first time. Chet and some of the other cats shot up. We played together, and it felt like I could do anything. My senses and musical instincts were heightened in a new, laser-focused way. When it hit my bloodstream, I felt a rush of delirium like no high I had ever had, and when I came down, I naturally wanted to have that feeling again. But I thought, Oh…I see how this works. It was just too good. And that was the last time for heroin and me.

  —

  Over more than half a decade of playing with Art Farmer and Joe Henderson, I learned quite a bit. I learned about pacing—how to be patient with yourself night after night, week after week, year after year, taking the long view. I learned how to program a set. Sometimes with Joe, early in the night, I’d hear him do a lot of the same things I had heard him do before. It was like, Okay, Joe, we know you know how to play that. Then, five choruses into the tune, it would be like, Whoa!! Where the fuck did that come from? A long, steady idle, and all of a sudden, fifth gear.

  Art and Joe both taught me about hanging in there during a solo. Sometimes, you need to get through some messy choruses before you get to something good. Sometimes, the good shit is there from the start, and you just say, Thank you, God. But there are nights when you have to wallow through some crap or be less than pleased with the way things are going in order for things to get better.

  I was a young, hungry man in a hurry and needed to learn to step back, take a breath, and pace myself for the long haul. One day I got a call to fill in for the pianist Jim McNeely on a gig with Stan Getz, a tenor player with matinee-idol looks who had achieved international fame in the sixties playing bossa novas such as “The Girl from Ipanema” and “Desafinado.” We were at Fat Tuesday’s, a basement club on Third Avenue that booked major acts. I had never played with Getz before and loved his assured way of phrasing, his deep sense of swing, and his warm, huge tone. George Mraz was playing bass, and Al Foster was on drums—master musicians. For some reason, though, I wasn’t having a great night. Between the sets I sat in the minuscule dressing room, feeling down. Stan came in, and it was obvious that I was in a funk. I wasn’t expecting any comfort from him. It wasn’t his job to nursemaid me, and he had a reputation for brusqueness with musicians.

  Stan said, “Hey, Fred, man—what’s the problem?”

  I said, “I don’t know—I feel like I’m playing the same shit over and over. I feel I’m not doing anything new.”

  He said, “Did you play one chord progression different tonight than you played it last time?”

  I said, “I’m sure I did.”

  And Stan said something like, “Well, if you do that once a night, at the end of the year you’ll do three hundred sixty-five new things. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel every time you play.”

  That was an important lesson for someone who wanted everything immediately, as I did. I had much more ambition than patience. One of the reasons I love jazz is that it’s a music of the moment, the here and now. With some help from people who had been playing the music a lot longer than I had, I started to see that there was something beyond the moment at hand. I began to grasp that jazz careers are built from individual moments, accumulated over time.

  Coming up as I did in New York during the late seventies and early eighties, I was among the last jazz musicians to develop on the job the old-fashioned way, figuring it out by fucking up, getting back on your feet, fucking up again, hanging out, learning from the masters. I managed to establish myself as a versatile, in-demand sideman. The job called for deference to the musical personality of the leader, and I repressed aspects of my own playing accordingly. I played one way for Art Farmer, a different way for Joe Henderson, and another way for a singer such as Chris Connor. It was more at Bradley’s and other venues where I played piano-bass duos and trios that my own musical personality emerged, and it was a work in progress.

  In the early summer of 1979, while I was playing with Art, I got a call from his agent, Abby Hoffer, telling me there was a new club in Tokyo called the Blue Shell that was looking for a piano trio to play for two months. Could I put together a band and go to Tokyo on short notice? I hadn’t played much out of the country—only once in Europe with the post-Coltrane Black Saint saxophonist Billy Harper (not a great musical experience)—and I was eager to explore Japan and travel internationally as a bandleader. I often played duos with Red Mitchell at the
time, so I hired Red. On drums I got Eliot Zigmund, who had just left the Bill Evans trio.

  The club was in Roppongi, the nightlife district where the foreign embassies are located, so all the visiting dignitaries could go out clubbing on their government expense accounts. (It was rumored to be owned by the Japanese mafia; what better way to launder some money than to open a pricey jazz club?) Like many of the clubs in Roppongi, this one was on an upper level in an austere, glass-skinned office building. You walked out of the elevator and onto a plexiglass floor with white sand and seashells under the surface, perfectly lit to create the illusion that you’re walking on the beach. There was mahogany everywhere and nautical portholes in the walls. Thousands of pieces of Italian glass dangled from the ceiling to create an underwater atmosphere. And there were floor-to-ceiling water tanks embedded in the walls on all sides, with varieties of large, exotic tropical fish swimming around and others lying on the bottom, thrashing about with their fins flapping, dying from some problem with the water or rotten-fin disease. The venue was billed as the Blue Shell: Deep Sea Jazz Experience.

  The bandstand was set up inside an enormous mechanical clamshell that was like something out of a Busby Berkeley movie. Red, Eliot, and I would enter through a trapdoor behind the shell and get into position. When I pressed a foot switch, the clamshell would open, revealing the trio, and we would be playing a little ditty that Red wrote called “Clam Time.” It was a short series of “Asian-sounding” ascending intervals of fifths; when the set was over we played the series of fifths in descending order and the clamshell closed.