by Fred Hersch
We played four sets a night, from 8 P.M. to 2 A.M., for stretches of ten days straight, with time off when we’d be too exhausted to do anything. After the shows we’d crawl to a bar for a drink or dessert before crashing in the little studio apartments they provided for each of us. We were trapped in a surreal aquatic hell, and the heat and air pollution of Tokyo in August was stifling. I barely saw anything of the city other than the club and my air-conditioned apartment. After a few weeks I could relate to those fish flapping their fins at the bottom of the tanks.
Red had been a mainstay on both the jazz and recording-studio scenes in L.A. in the fifties and sixties—recording everything from major movie scores to one of Ornette Coleman’s pioneering early albums. Unusually, he tuned his bass in fifths, like a ’cello (it is normally tuned in fourths), and played some of the most beautiful, lyrical bass solos ever. His lefty politics and increasing cynicism led him to move to Stockholm, where he was living when I had met him at Bradley’s. An outspoken liberal, he always railed against the people he called the “me-firsters.” I felt I could talk openly to him, so one night toward the end of our underwater ordeal, Red and I were having a late-night dessert, and I told him I was gay. I just blurted it out, and that was that. After all, he had agreed to be a sideman in my band, I was getting some musical confidence and positive feedback on the scene, and I had every expectation that I would be able to be honest given his openness about most things. He didn’t scream or run in terror, and I thought, Okay, that went pretty well. Maybe this is something I can tell people without a lot of drama.
When we returned to New York, we picked up our lives. I didn’t play with Red much after that, though I saw him play fairly often at Bradley’s, and every time we were together hanging out, he would ask me if I had a girlfriend or if I had gotten married yet. I didn’t know if he was joking or what, but he kept doing it. It was weird.
Red left Sweden and moved to Oregon, where he died in 1992. After his death I was in Bradley’s one night, chatting at the bar with one of the regular coke dealers and I told him how strange I thought it was that Red was always asking me if I had a girlfriend or if I had gotten married. The dealer said, “Didn’t you know? Red told everybody that while you were in Japan together you came on to him.”
The jazz world was small, and Bradley’s was a gossip den. Without my knowing it, Red had been spreading the word for years that I had hit on him. He was the first jazz musician of his generation whom I had confided in—and this was what he did with my trust? I felt betrayed—and was amazed by his arrogance. But things were different in the eighties, and I was still mainly in the sideman pool—and not “out” to the jazz world as gay. Today, if Red asked me if I had a girlfriend, I would just say, “No, Red, I don’t have a girlfriend. I’m in love with a man.”
CHAPTER 7
CLASSIC SOUND
I have always been fascinated by songs: from the discs on my kiddie record player, hymns I heard at our temple, all of the great pop music of the sixties, and later, classic American popular song. I simply love words and music—that’s why I had gotten into that Great Songs of the Sixties book. Soon after I learned each song, I would play it in my own way using the rudimentary chord symbols in combination with the book’s piano arrangements and my budding knowledge of harmony acquired from Walter Mays. I also began picking up tunes by ear from the radio and from pop and rock LPs—James Taylor, Joni Mitchell, the Beatles, Traffic, and Elton John—and played those too, sometimes for my friends alone or at a high school musical cast party or before or after a rehearsal at school.
Given all of the above, I had a different conception of composition than many of the older jazz musicians I worked with in New York. Since improvisation is a kind of spontaneous creativity, many of the jazz musicians who came up in the era before me were content to apply their creative imaginations to soloing, rather than composing in the traditional sense of planning out and writing down an original tune. They would draw from the existing repertoire—the beboppers often using the harmonic progression of an existing standard and writing their own melody over it so they got to keep the publishing royalties—and maybe compose an original piece every now and then if the impulse struck them, if they got a musical idea they thought was worth developing, or if they needed to fill out an album. Many musicians were content to play others’ music—in their own way. Coleman Hawkins didn’t write much original music—neither did Art Tatum.
Of course, some of my favorite jazz musicians were also important composers—Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, Wayne Shorter, Ornette Coleman, and Charles Mingus foremost among them—and they had highly personal approaches to composition. They drew deeply from their own point of view and their individual aesthetic in the music they usually crafted to be compatible with their own playing style. The great jazz composers’ approach to writing music was idiosyncratic and individualistic. It seemed to me of a piece with the way the Beatles, Joni Mitchell, and the other singer-songwriters I grew up with approached their writing. They drew from life to give voice to something meaningful to them—or they wrote something fun, catchy, and seriously grooving. But I have always made the distinction between standards (which have lyrics) and jazz compositions, written by jazz musicians for jazz musicians to improvise upon—even if, in the case of Ellington and others, lyrics were added later for commercial appeal. I believe that a great jazz composition should inspire—and leave room for—the musicians playing it to make it their own. And of course—and this is true of all music—the most important attribute of any composition is memorability.
I had virtually given up composing after writing “A Windy Night” and the score for the fifth-grade production of Peter Pan at the age of ten. I didn’t realize what was going on with me at the time, but when I reached adolescence and began to confront my sexual orientation, I essentially stopped composing and taking my classical piano lessons seriously. It had never occurred to anyone to mention that being a composer was a career path—it seemed to be concert pianist or nothing. The “classical” music I had been composing as a youngster seemed a distant memory—and I was too insecure at that time to think that I could write jazz tunes of any lasting value.
When I was first playing at Bradley’s and spending late nights hanging out with the piano legends of the day, we would often sit around the piano and show one another tunes—or at least share the altered chord changes we were using. Jimmy Rowles taught me his haunting ballad “The Peacocks,” and Tommy Flanagan showed me many of Strayhorn’s greatest compositions. So when Art Farmer started encouraging me to compose, I wrote my first jazz tune and called it “II B.C.”—the title was a play on “I X Love” from Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus, and the “B.C.” was for Bradley Cunningham. It was a thirty-two-bar chromatic ballad in the key of D-flat (the original key of “Body and Soul” and “Lush Life,” perhaps the definitive jazz ballads), and I used a lot of the musical language of Mingus and Strayhorn. It was certainly derivative and betrayed my influences at the time, but writing that first tune was nonetheless an accomplishment for me.
During the summer of 1981, Sam Jones grew seriously ill, suffering from lung cancer. He was only in his mid-fifties, but the illness was so advanced that he could no longer play. The word at Bradley’s was that Sam didn’t have long to live. I cared deeply for him, and after I went to visit him in the hospital in Englewood, New Jersey, seeing him for the last time led me to compose another tune: “One for Sam,” a joyful, up-tempo celebration of Sam’s ebullient spirit and positive influence on me. I used as a template the sprightly bass-and-piano unison tunes of Sam’s contemporary, bassist Oscar Pettiford. Art included it on his new album, A Work of Art, along with a second tune of mine, a light samba called “Summersong,” inspired by the sunny lightness of spirit that I felt with my first boyfriend, Eric. Art received a Grammy nomination for that album, and I thought that was pretty cool.
Within a year I would write two more tunes for Art’s ensembles. “And Now There’
s You” was my first love song, which I wrote with Eric in mind even though there weren’t any lyrics. Art featured it on a mixed-bag album skewed slightly toward romantic numbers, Warm Valley, recorded with a quartet of Ray Drummond, Akira Tana on drums, and me, again for Concord Jazz Records. Then, we made a quintet album with the same band plus Art’s frequent collaborator Clifford Jordan, on tenor saxophone, for a small label called Soul Note, and Art named the record for a tune of mine on it, “Mirage.” A slow bolero with a mournful melody, the music was meant to evoke the image of camels crossing the desert. I wrote the introduction and the A section rather quickly, but it somehow seemed that the tune needed another section; it just wasn’t complete as it was. I kept at it from time to time, and one afternoon several months later I played the section I had composed already and the bridge just seemed to come from nowhere—another mirage.
Through these first compositions I was beginning to reconcile my two selves—the gay Fred and the jazz-cat Fred—in music, without any overt plan to do that. I was writing, to some degree, from my heart and from personal experience. At the same time I was trying to figure out how to compose jazz tunes, and one of the ways I did that was to give myself assignments to write with other musicians in mind. This started a practice of dedicating compositions to musicians and other people in my life—these dedication pieces now number almost forty. Once again, it’s much easier to compose if you have a subject in mind and are not just staring at the manuscript paper waiting for creative lightning to strike. Starting around 2002, when I was feeling artistically stuck I began using a kitchen timer set to forty-five minutes (matching the duration of the standard psychotherapy session) and would challenge myself to complete a tune—in scribble—in that time. Often I would randomly pick a starting note, starting key, or specific rhythm to make the game more challenging and get me going faster. This practice—like speed writing for authors—has led to some of my favorite compositions, as the notation occurs as close as possible to the speed of improvisation.
I had avoided writing for years partly out of insecurity. I already had a huge repertoire of great tunes, and I thought to myself, I’m never going to write anything as good as Thelonious Monk or Billy Strayhorn or Wayne Shorter. Why bother? When I decided to try to write seriously, I used a technique to impose some structure on the work. I said to myself, Okay, I’m going to write a post-bop tune in the vein of Sam Jones. It will be my way of honoring Sam and help focus me, too. I would say, Now I’ll try writing a thirty-two-bar ballad in the style of Strayhorn. It was a device to get me started, and ironically, working with other musicians in mind led me to write pieces that were very much my own. They spoke of the people I was honoring but in my language.
When Art decided to record those first two songs of mine, someone at Concord Records asked me the name of my publishing company, and I said I would get back to him. I turned to Bob Mintzer, the saxophonist and arranger, who is only a couple of years older than me but had been working solidly in New York for a while and knew the music business better than I did. I had a lot of respect for Bob as an all-around, can-do jazz professional. He told me I needed to sign with a performing-rights organization such as ASCAP or BMI. I asked him, “Which one are you with?” He said, “BMI.” So I went up to the BMI offices on West Fifty-Seventh Street to sign on with them as a composer.
The woman at the desk there told me I needed to put the name of my publishing company on the paperwork. I thought about that for a minute, then wrote down “Fred Hersch Music.” It felt a bit pretentious—Fred Hersch Music? Who is Fred Hersch?” But I couldn’t think of anything else to call it. After all, what kind of music was I making? It was Fred Hersch music.
Around this time, just as I was taking my first steps to develop a voice as a composer, I took an equally important step in my development as a pianist. I knew how to get around the piano, of course, but I had yet to find a completely integrated personal sound as a pianist. I had facility and speed, could swing and play in most styles, and didn’t lack for musical ideas. But I did not quite yet have a sound of my own. I was honing in on it, but I needed someone to unlock the secret for me.
I had heard that the wonderful bebop pianist Barry Harris was studying piano with an older gentleman named Joseph Prostakoff, and I was intrigued. Prostakoff lived in a cavernous apartment on the Upper West Side and agreed to take me on—only if I would do exactly as he told me. Normally I would have resisted this dry, technical, and dogmatic approach, but something told me to take a leap of faith. He gave me no say in what pieces I was to work on, and in turn he showed me how piano playing doesn’t use the fingers as much as I had thought.
The method Joe taught was originated by a renowned American piano teacher of the mid-twentieth century, Abby Whiteside, with whom he had studied from 1948 until Whiteside’s death in 1956. I studied with Joe, as he mandated, three times a week for a month at first, then once or twice a week thereafter—in those days, this was a huge drain on my resources, but I kept at it. Around that time I heard that Joe had a colleague, Sophia Rosoff, who was his fellow student and teaching assistant under Whiteside, and a while after I met her, I decided to study with her. She and I would work together for the next thirty-five years. (As I write this in the middle of the second decade of the twenty-first century, Sophia, at ninety-six, is still teaching sporadically.)
Joe and Sophia could have not been more different from each other in personality and outlook. As dry as Joe was, Sophia was warm and brimming with life. They both told me, in different ways, about Abby’s holistic approach to musical performance—a way of thinking that considers the whole body, as well as the mind, and not merely the fingers.
As Sophia recalled to me, she had been working with some success as a concert pianist in New York but was growing increasingly uncomfortable at the piano. Her joints were stiffening, and her body ached when she played. She mentioned this to Artie Shaw, the jazz clarinetist, literary dilettante, and serial husband who had intellectual aspirations and nurtured associations in the classical-music world. (When he gave up jazz to play classical music, she was his accompanist—and later in life he asked her to marry him; she preferred his friendship.) Shaw had made friends with the conductor and pianist Morton Gould, a student of Whiteside’s. Shaw recommended Whiteside to Sophia, and Sophia found studying with her to be a life-changing experience, just as I found studying with Sophia.
Sophia, by way of Abby Whiteside, taught me how sound is produced not by the fingers alone but by the entire body. Much piano pedagogy starts by building up the individual finger muscles, but in Abby’s world, the fingertip is at the end of an integrated chain that starts farther back in the body—this eliminates the need for some very tedious and mindless exercises. You need to have some finger strength and coordination, of course, but these things are not as important as many would have you believe. And I will always love her for saying, “Don’t use the word ‘practice’—it sounds like a chore. Think of whatever you are doing as an experiment—that’s much more fun and interesting.”
If you look closely at the way jazz drummers sit when they play, you can see how this approach works. Drummers are constantly shifting their body weight. They sit on a seat that swivels for good reason. Sophia taught pianists to approach sitting at the bench the way a drummer might approach sitting at the stool, with flexibility and freedom of movement in their lower bodies. She said pianists have to get into the optimum postural position to allow the mechanics of producing sound to come naturally. The piano is part of the percussion family—something is struck (the hammer by the key), and the sound always fades from the initial attack but doesn’t fade as quickly if you find that sweet spot in the piano’s action to get the best sound, not overplaying. And the tip of your finger—like the tip of the stick for drummers—is the end point of a longer chain that starts much farther back. A great drummer can’t swing at a brisk tempo on a ride cymbal by only playing from the wrist down.
Working with Sophia, I learned to come
forward when I play. I put my left foot back, almost on the ball of my foot. That brought my torso forward, hovering over the keyboard. To play on the upper registers of the keyboard, my left foot pushed me up there, giving me support, and allowed my right arm to stay relaxed instead of becoming extended as if I was reaching from the center of the bench. When I moved down to the bottom of the keyboard, my left foot kept me balanced. Her point was always to be anchored to the floor and adjusting to the keyboard, because it cannot adjust to you.
I think a clear and singing piano sound comes when the fingers are working sensitively and efficiently; gliding on the pads of your fingers allows for more control than pushing down hard with curved fingers. By this I don’t mean that a pianist can get away with not using the fingers at all. I just mean that you may get a better sound with less effort if more of your body is involved. And the more relaxed (yet alert) you are, the better the music will flow. After all, if you want to pick up something heavy, you don’t use just your hands and wrists—you lift the object using your legs and back. You need to play connected to the floor. Just because your fingertip is the point of contact with the key doesn’t mean that it should do all the work—it needs something lined up behind it in order for it to have any tonal quality.
There are various schools of piano technique, some that stress finger strength and others that emphasize arm weight. But this way of playing is closer to yoga than to weight lifting. For a jazz pianist, who doesn’t know what’s coming next, flexibility is more important than brute strength. The approach I learned from Sophia involves playing from the upper arm, allowing the larger muscles to “draw” the big rhythms and phrases. If you were to place your left hand under your right elbow as you play, the elbow would be “drawing” the shape of the phrase. The fingers and arm simply transfer these into sound with a flat hand and a minimum of effort. You might think of a violinist’s bow arm, which can play many notes with a single large motion. Since a jazz pianist is making up the content of the music in each moment, flexibility is what matters.