Good Things Happen Slowly

by Fred Hersch

  Sometimes in a lesson with Sophia her students wouldn’t play the piano at all. She’d have them sit down and balance an egg on the carpet for concentration. Or she’d tell them to walk around the room slouching like Groucho Marx, relaxing their lower bodies. Sometimes she would ask me to shake out all of my limbs like I was a skeleton—with no muscles at all. I realize how this sounds, like the quack work of a cult figure. But Sophia’s methods were carefully designed to impart an understanding of the relationship of the parts of the body to one another, with a focus on balance. Through Sophia and her methods, I began to understand the physicality of sound production.

  I can usually tell an individual pianist by his sound, just as a drummer can hear someone playing a ride cymbal and say, “Oh, that’s Tony Williams” or “That’s Billy Higgins.” Drummers can choose their cymbals and sticks, but pianists don’t always have that option—we mostly have to play the piano we’re given. For us, our eighth note and our touch define our rhythmic signature, much like a great drummer’s distinctive ride cymbal beat. When Herbie Hancock plays an eighth note on the piano, it sounds different from an eighth note by Chick Corea. Herbie and Chick both have great sounds, but they’re different. A Chick Corea eighth note is thinner than Herbie’s, probably owing to his background in Latin music, where a brighter sound is the norm. You can hear the influence of McCoy Tyner in Chick’s sound. A Herbie Hancock eighth note is much fatter. You can hear his antecedents—the more solid sounds of classical pianists as well as Miles’s pianists Wynton Kelly and Bill Evans. When I play an eighth note, I do think that it sounds like me—there’s a note length, a space between each note, an approach to rhythm and pianistic color that’s distinctively mine—regardless of the music or the piano I’m playing. I could be playing a ballad out of time or something swinging, but that eighth note will sound like me.

  I believe in a “sound first” approach to the piano. No matter how much a pianist can do using harmonic devices, patterns, and scales, it will be meaningless unless it is put into sound in a way that grabs the listener. A useful analogy is that of a stage actor’s voice. With experienced stage actors, you can always understand what they’re saying without feeling as if they’re shouting at you or trying too hard. (That’s why the Broadway debuts of many famous film actors are often not successful; they are best at speaking while being closely miked and acting for the camera, not projecting in a naturalistic way to a large theater audience.) If you have a good, clear, relaxed sound as a pianist, you can draw listeners in rather than bludgeoning them, banging the crap out of the piano in the process. And your sensitivity to touch, sound, and the strengths and limitations of whatever piano you’re playing will enable you to be more emotionally involved with the music instead of struggling with technique. Though there is no one right way to get piano tone—and there are a wide variety of great jazz piano sounds—music that isn’t alive as pure, connected sound (often with the lyrics in mind if there are any) is just a bunch of notes.

  An important part of the Whiteside method that Sophia taught me is its emphasis on rhythm. The idea is to absorb the pulse underlying a piece of music—be it classical, jazz, or an Appalachian folk tune—and progress from there. When Sophia talked about the importance of rhythm, she liked to quote Virginia Woolf in a letter to the writer Vita Sackville-West:

  Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it; and in writing (such is my present belief) one has to recapture this, and set this working (which has nothing apparently to do with words) and then, as it breaks and tumbles in the mind, it makes words to fit it.

  When you listen to certain pianists, you always have a sense of where the music is going and what it’s saying. There’s a forward motion to their playing that transcends the fingers. The music is propelled by a complete internal rhythm rather than simply being a collection of individual notes typed out by the fingers. To my mind, the work of all the truly great classical pianists has this quality. I think of Arthur Rubinstein, Martha Argerich, Glenn Gould, and Josef Hofmann, just to name a few. Among jazz pianists, Herbie Hancock, Paul Bley, Ahmad Jamal, early Bill Evans, Art Tatum, and Tommy Flanagan all have that special ability to communicate through their instrument by using their senses of sound, touch, and internal rhythm so that they’re really talking to us though their playing. The content of the music is what is foremost in their performances, not the mechanics that achieve it.

  Once you have the rhythm of the music in your bones, you think of it as an outline, and you then fill in the musical details one by one. (If you were to paint a landscape, you would most probably start with a horizon line, then add clouds, trees, and grass. You wouldn’t start in one corner with all of the details in place.) Pianists who play jazz are almost always working from an outline—though they may not think of it that way. The chord changes (harmonic sequence), in combination with the melodic material, provide the basic structure to which we then add our personal improvisations. This structure is harmonic but also rhythmic—time moves forward on a continuum, and certain harmonies are the signposts.

  It’s as if the form of each tune is like a glass mixing bowl: solid but clear. In each chorus, you can put different “content” into the bowl—Jell-O, a goldfish in water, rocks, or M&M’s—and it will look different depending on what you put into it, though the shape itself will not change. This way each chorus or section of a tune becomes a variation on a theme—and the best jazz performances are continuous storytelling experiences. If I am playing five 32-bar choruses, I want it to sound like 160 bars of music, not the same 32 bars repeated five times. This effect is even more achievable with solo piano—which is one of the reasons I love playing solo. You can blur the beginnings and endings of bar lines and choruses—and obscure the harmony—thus making for a more continuous musical expression.

  Rhythm is the very essence of jazz and something I value greatly in every kind of music. On and off the bandstand, I like music that moves—and makes me want to move. Sophia said quite rightly, “Sound plus rhythm equals music.” That’s a definition that can apply to any kind of music at all. A lot of jazz does that, though some jazz can also be contemplative or cerebral—or formatted and predictable. As a musician, I’m interested in the wide range of ways that music can work on the body, the mind, the heart, and the soul. As a listener, though, I’m often attracted to music that is made not just for listening but for dancing. I love Earth, Wind and Fire and all the great R&B music, which you cannot listen to without moving, unless there’s something deeply wrong with you. (I suggest to some of my more intellectual, rhythmically challenged students that when they are alone, they put on some loud dance music they love, move with abandon, and get the rhythm into their bodies.) I love Brazilian music, with its special, earthy groove. In Western formal music, rhythm is often underemphasized. Part of the genius of the method Sophia taught is the way it leads you to focus on rhythm in whatever you’re playing. For me, Sophia’s lessons built beautifully on one of the first lessons I learned about jazz in Cincinnati, when Jimmy McGary played Ellington for me and said, “That’s time.”

  —

  In the summer of 1979 I moved out of the loft I had been sharing with Eddie Felson and into another loft, one of my own, on the fifth floor of an old building on Broadway between Prince and Spring Streets in SoHo. The district was still undergoing its transition from industrial use to residential occupancy by artists, would-be artists, and others who liked being associated with artists. Its subsequent transition into an upscale shopping district was still in the future and would have been inconceivable to anyone in SoHo in the seventies and early eighties. Most of the buildings were still occupied by wholesalers and distributors of materials for the garment trade and backroom supplies of every kind, but that was changing fast. The loft I moved into was in the Charles Nathan Building, so named for the seller of office furniture and business equipment who had been opera
ting out of the ground floor since the early twentieth century, when the building was new. Before the fifth floor was broken up into open-plan spaces for private renters like me, it had been occupied by wholesale distributor Liberty Electronics, which specialized in reselling tubes and diodes acquired as military surplus. When I moved in, only the second of the ultimately ten tenants on the floor, it was still a construction site and there was a lingering wisp of electrochemicals in the air.

  The loft was a clean, New York white space with a good amount of room, fourteen-foot ceilings, a large skylight, two north-facing windows, and an open plan like most commercial lofts. Since technically I had a commercial lease and was scared of being discovered living there, I kept the furniture to a minimum; it was all student-style except for my rather nice stereo, my large LP collection, and the 1896 Steinway B piano that I acquired in 1982 from jazz pianist Richie Beirach after selling the Schimmel. After years of selling, then trading up pianos, I finally had one I really loved. I felt fairly grounded in a place that suited me well and was very cheap to maintain. The fixture fee was on the high side, but the rent was negligible and I got a fifteen-year lease, important to one with a large piano. I could practice, teach, and have jam sessions there—there were other (mostly visual) artists living in the building as well. The fifth floor of 548 Broadway was certainly nothing like my parents’ house on Rose Hill Avenue in Cincinnati. That was my home of origin. This was my home for living my life.

  Eric had joined me there a few months after I moved in. There was a sleeping loft above the clothes closet, reachable by a ladder; we slept on the then-requisite futon. We settled into a groove and set up housekeeping, chipping in on the expenses, dividing the chores, cooking together sometimes, and hanging out at home when we weren’t working, all in a place that felt genuinely like a home to us. We were comfortable with each other. We took turns playing the piano, and we had an active social life—mostly after we both got off work in the evenings, sleeping in most days.

  But after two years or so, Eric and I were having problems. Though I would have preferred monogamy, we had established rules that allowed him to sleep with other men when I was out of town—only one time, not in our home, and no boyfriends on the side—but he was not able to abide by them. That year we broke up at my instigation. Model-boy handsome and super-sexy, Eric could always have all the men he wanted. Over time, I got frustrated that our once-fulfilling relationship was not progressing in a healthy way; in fact, it was slowly falling apart. Alcohol and recreational drugs were too much a part of our (especially his) life. Not long after, I learned that he moved in with one of his boyfriends-on-the-side, and I started going out again.

  As I approached my thirties, newly single, I started to wish that my professional life was more firmly grounded. There was a certain excitement in the precariousness and habitual contingency of life as a gigging jazz musician. But it could be harrowing never to be sure what was coming next.

  I was doing the right things—beginning to compose seriously while finding my personal voice at the piano—at the wrong time in jazz history. By the early 1980s, the music had become splintered into three predominant factions, and I didn’t quite fit into any of them. ECM, the German record label founded by Manfred Eicher in the late 1960s, had reached full bloom with its brand of pristine jazz art music—recorded in Europe with a more classical approach, it sounded more like it was played in a concert hall than in a recording studio. Keith Jarrett, Paul Bley, Pat Metheny, and John Abercrombie were among its artists. They made a lot of serious music—almost all original compositions—that I appreciated for its ambition and high audio standards. I adored a lot of their work, but my music didn’t fit neatly into the ECM category. I wasn’t composing the floating, atmospheric music like most of the artists on the label, and I had no presence on the European scene.

  At the same time there was a more commercial strain of jazz-rock fusion—fast, loud, but grooving music centered on synthesizers and electronic effects. This music was largely created by descendants of Miles Davis’s electric albums and featured many of his alumnae. Weather Report (Wayne Shorter and Joe Zawinul) and Return to Forever (Chick Corea)—along with Herbie Hancock’s efforts along these lines—were wildly popular, understandably. Putting aside the light shows and three-octave keyboards on shoulder straps that you played like a guitar, I genuinely dug them. (I had actually opened for both Weather Report and Return to Forever as a budding young pianist in Cincinnati with the Jimmy McGary quartet—quite a musical contrast.) But the technology involved was way beyond me, so I just enjoyed it from a distance.

  The third strain was a kind of Upper East Side jazz, a meticulous and elegant but aesthetically conservative school of music that included the swing revivalists who were emerging in the wake of the campaign by Gunther Schuller and others to canonize jazz. New Yorker jazz critic Whitney Balliett was the authority and main cheerleader for this kind of jazz. Concord Records occupied a part of this sphere, with all its albums by mainstream veterans such as Mel Tormé, George Shearing, and Rosemary Clooney, and younger musicians with retro styles such as saxophonist Scott Hamilton, cornetist Warren Vaché, and the singer Susannah McCorkle. I respected most of them, though I didn’t find the music very engaging—but I had gotten to know Shearing very well from Bradley’s, and I enjoyed visiting his apartment for afternoon tea with George and Ellie. I genuinely loved the old standards and could have gone in that direction, but deep down I was not interested in being a mainstream revivalist of styles of yesteryear.

  Great elders of bebop and post-bop were still among us, of course, and I had been working steadily with some of them for several years. There were audiences of varying sizes for varying kinds of jazz. It was clear, though, that most of the attention and most of the money was being paid to Euro jazz, fusion, and mainstream revivalism. Nearing age thirty and concerned about my job security, I decided to open my own recording studio, conceiving of that as a way to generate regular income without relying on gigs, while providing a mechanism for me to make my own records—my own music, made my way. In my grandiose way of thinking, Glenn Gould was my main inspiration—he walked away from a hugely successful concert career at thirty and only made studio recordings until the end of his life.

  I worked up a plan to convert the loft at 548 Broadway into a professional recording studio with living quarters upstairs in a low-ceilinged room that replaced the sleeping loft of the original design. For the new design and technical advice on all of the equipment needs, I went to engineer Paul Wickliffe, owner of the very successful Skyline Studios, who was married to Roseanna Vitro. Though at first I wanted to do something fairly modest, the project got out of hand. I insulated all the walls, built soundproof drum and vocal isolation booths, and installed very expensive custom-built studio monitors in a fully stocked control room with the requisite plate-glass window. I purchased a twenty-four-track tape recorder, Dolby noise-reduction modules, and a large assortment of microphones, many of them classic ribbon and tube models. Paul worked up plans for the space, and I helped the contractors who built it by stapling insulation and getting lunch and coffee. For funding, I used savings I had accumulated from the remains of my college fund set up by my grandmother Ella, and my parents and brother all contributed. I was excited by this new adventure and approached it with a lot of energy, but I was a bit in denial about the complexities of it and how running a studio would change my life.

  Looking back on this time, I feel as if I’m watching a documentary film about someone else. It’s hard for me to conceive of myself as a businessman, though I’ve always been responsible with money—and jazz musicians, except for the big stars, do all their own business. From the start of my life as a professional musician in New York, I had made sure to take care of the financial side of things, in order to sustain myself and maintain my independence. The decision to open a studio made practical sense, giving me a way to record my own music as well as a hedge against the financial insecurity of the jazz life
.

  I called the studio Classic Sound, a name that implied a longer history than the operation actually had, and incorporated the company with the state. It opened for business in mid-1983, after about a year of construction. I can’t remember what the first record we made in the studio was, but over the five years of its existence we made close to two hundred albums for independent jazz musicians and respected small labels.

  I was thrilled, at first. Classic Sound kept me busy. It was a great value in those days, anchored by my superb Steinway and low prices; I did my best to market the studio, sending out brochures to musicians and engineers. I needed to earn back the cost of all that equipment and construction—but I soon learned that jazz records are usually done in two days of live recording, maybe two days to mix, and that’s that. Many are done “live to two-track,” with the sound being mixed live as the music goes down, eliminating the postproduction mixing process as well as sales of expensive multi-track tape and thereby reducing overall profit. The successful studios had big-name pop and rock clients who would “lock out” a studio for weeks and months at a time, sometimes spending one whole day to get the snare drum to sound just right. As time went on and I realized that I was not technically wired to be an engineer, I found myself answering the phone, taking bookings—and making coffee and running out for sandwiches for other pianists who I thought were not nearly as good as I was. All the costly equipment needed constant upkeep, and the various engineers constantly clamored for new gear, eroding the small bits of money I might have made.