Good Things Happen Slowly

by Fred Hersch

  Musically, I was making a proclamation of my identification with AIDS. After the release of Forward Motion, I began the process of coming out more personally. I knew that it was just a matter of time before I spoke publicly about my sexual identity and HIV status.

  I was ready but nervous, fearful of coming off as publicity-hungry or self-pitying. But when I finally went ahead and revealed everything to the world, I was genuinely motivated by a desire to help others who were closeted about AIDS and being gay. I was also tired of the effort required to keep secrets. I was much less concerned about being ostracized by homophobes and those scared of AIDS, despite the warnings from gay friends. People were saying, “You really shouldn’t do this. You’re going to kill your career. Jazz is a club for macho guys. Nobody’s going to book you for next season, because they think you’re going to be dead by then.” And I easily might have been.

  I thought, If I’m going to die, that’s all the more reason to come out now. I was haunted by a regret I had about Sam Jones.

  My debt to Sam was immeasurable. He was not only one of the greatest bass players in the history of jazz, he was my mentor and my friend. Playing with him gave me credibility and got me started in New York. Sam died in 1981, and I had never told him I was gay—though he probably surmised it. He trusted me and put his reputation on the line for me, and I was living a lie with him. I never showed him the respect he deserved by telling him who I was. I never told Bradley Cunningham before he died, either. Before I died myself, I was going to make sure people knew me for who I was.

  I was out about everything to my family and close friends but not to the world. I had given it a lot of thought, that’s for sure, but had always been afraid that straight musicians might not understand and that the music—and my reputation—would suffer as a result. I don’t know how much sense this makes, but that is what I thought: When people are playing jazz music, creating something new and unique together spontaneously, it’s extraordinarily intimate. When you’re in a band, you fall in love with other musicians in a way. If you’re a pianist, you may have found the perfect bass player, finally, or the drummer of your dreams. Musicians get musical crushes on one another. Then you get to know that player personally and musically, and you realize, well, maybe you’re not so compatible after all; or one of you changes over time. What happens is a lot like what goes on in any personal relationship.

  I play at a fairly high level of intensity and emotional engagement. With this in mind, I thought the musicians I was playing with might misconstrue that with me as a kind of come-on. I was genuinely concerned about this. I didn’t care so much if they disapproved of my sexual orientation. I just didn’t want any misunderstanding to get in the way of the music. I didn’t want anything to undermine the musical intimacy that I count on and that I need to fully express myself.

  At various times, certain straight jazz musicians who knew I was gay would say things like, “It’s okay that you’re gay. Just don’t hit on me,” and I would think (or sometimes say to them), I don’t need your permission. You think you’re being open-minded and magnanimous here, but, in fact you’re not—and don’t flatter yourself!

  My fear for the music had kept me closeted. As time passed, though, I realized it would be better for the music, as well as for me, to come out.

  There was another jazz pianist, an African American man just a few years older than me, who was also gay but never came out. Musicians suspected he was gay, though he never talked about it. I can’t even remember exactly how I knew. But I knew—and eventually we came out to each other. We were able to fess up that each one of us was not the other’s favorite piano player but that we did have this one thing in common. This pianist died in his fifties in the early twenty-first century. Because he never chose to come out, I’m not going to out him here.

  To my ears, his music sounded somewhat constricted and forced. It didn’t feel natural and organic. And I thought that in his playing he was putting on an act, playing the way he thought his audience would expect a straight piano player to play. This is not to say that if he had let down his guard, he would have suddenly sounded like Liberace. I don’t know how he would have sounded if he had come out. But I have a feeling that he would have sounded different—more comfortable, more relaxed, more at home in his own skin. There was a quality of artifice in his music that must have been a burden to sustain. I believe his music suffered because he wasn’t honest—and I feel that as I became more honest with the world, my music evolved into a more personal and relaxed form of expression.

  The pianist I’m describing was far from an isolated case. I didn’t want to out anyone or pressure other people to come forward as gay if they didn’t want to or weren’t ready. I knew how hard it was. It took years and the immutable force of AIDS to stir me to come out myself. I understood the pressures gay jazz musicians faced in a creative sphere that was dominated by straight males, a world closely associated with so-called heteronormative values. Historically, the rhetoric of jazz was rife with the tropes of straight machismo: “cutting contests” of pseudo-pugilistic musical competition to prove your prowess. With no mission to smoke people out, I thought my precedent, if it went well, might make things easier for others.

  In 1992 I took my first major step as an emerging AIDS activist, and it seemed karmically right for this to happen in Cincinnati. That February I was the featured artist in a concert to benefit AIDS Volunteers of Cincinnati (AVOC), a community-based service organization founded in 1983 after the first known death by AIDS reported in the city. Grass-roots groups such as AVOC, run without government funding, were critical to patient care in the days before institutional support for AIDS was well established, and AVOC was early among them. The concert, held at the First Unitarian Church of Cincinnati, was sold out and covered prominently in the regional media. I selected the performers and the format, wanting to make a musical statement of where I was at that time as well as doing something challenging and raising some much needed funds. One of the reasons I got connected with AVOC was that my father was quietly serving on its board. I give him a lot of credit for standing up, giving his time and insight, and helping so many people and numerous worthy causes for many years—as he does even in his nineties.

  The other musicians were four members of the string section of the Cincinnati Symphony who named themselves the Bartlett String Quartet for the concert. We played a Mozart piano quartet, a Beethoven trio, and a few reconsiderations of classical pieces I had arranged for my French Collection album. I arranged Monk’s “I Mean You” for the five of us. And I played one original tune acutely attuned to the occasion, “…departed.” I was a bit nervous—it was the first big coming-out concert I gave, acknowledging my HIV status, and I was playing some difficult music as well. As something of a local-boy-made-good, I thought I could come home and put a public face on the disease for people in Cincinnati who might think, Oh, it’s too bad about AIDS. But that doesn’t have very much to do with us. It couldn’t happen to anyone from here.

  The Cincinnati Enquirer published a story about me and the concert on the front page of its arts section with a huge photo of me at the piano, and the American Israelite ran a similar piece, mentioning my HIV status matter-of-factly and describing me in oversize type as “a 1973 graduate of Walnut Hills High School and piano student of the late Jeanne Kirstein.” A Hersch other than my father had finally made “Jews in the News.”

  It was meaningful that both of my parents attended the concert—along with my grandmother Ella. They were many years divorced now, fortunately for each of them—especially my mother, who had been dutifully fulfilling her role as a prominent lawyer’s wife without much emotional reward. Not long after they formally divorced in 1976, my father remarried a dynamic woman in their social circle, Gloria Fabe. By the time of the concert, my mother was also in a very happy second marriage, with an intelligent and kind attorney, Harry Hoffheimer.

  As I came out more easily about being gay, I found myself sp
eaking to others about the price of keeping that personal closet locked. Gary Burton, the innovative vibraphonist, heard about what I was doing, coming out. Divorced and living in Boston, he was playing with Marc Johnson, the bassist who had recorded with me, and he told Marc, somewhat cryptically, that he was very interested in my situation. Marc gave him my phone number, and Gary called me out of the blue. We didn’t know each other, though of course I was very aware of his prominent stature in the jazz world. He started the conversation in his characteristically direct manner and said, “Fred, this is Gary Burton, and I think I’m gay.”

  I said, “How does it feel to be talking about it?”

  “It feels pretty great,” he said. It wasn’t long after that that Gary decided for sure that he was gay and came out in an interview in the Advocate.

  Gary was a household name in jazz, and he could come out without sacrificing his reputation or his concert calendar. But there were others for whom this decision was much more fraught. There was a younger gay jazz musician in Texas named Dave Catney. He had come up slowly in and around Houston, playing lounge piano and small jazz venues, taking requests, and singing a tune sometimes. He had spent some time in New York studying with some heavyweight jazz pianists, and those in the know were aware of his considerable talent. Dave played beautifully and began developing a personal style in the nineties, around the time he turned thirty. He recorded two subtle, lyrical trio albums, and later a first-class solo record. On his debut, First Flight, he did a slow, somber version of “Put on a Happy Face” that teased out all the poignancy in the act of putting on a good front in the face of adversity. It could have been his leitmotif.

  Dave had AIDS but had never really come out to his parents. In the early nineties I got to know him through his booking me at a small club in Houston where he was the artistic director, and we eventually became good friends. (Though not right away—the first time I played at the club he was in the hospital for CMV retinitis, a viral infection that affects the eyesight, more common in the early days of AIDS.) Despite being very thin, he was warm and boyish, good-looking, smart, and seriously talented—a total package with all the potential for success were it not for his health.

  Playing small clubs and the occasional jazz festival and recording for a minor local label, Dave never made a lot of money and was struggling mightily to pay for his medical treatment. He had no health insurance and couldn’t actually afford to go to the hospital. But he was so beloved by the doctors and the hospital staff that they treated him anyway and just buried the cost of his numerous stays and medications in their accounting. As he got sicker and sicker, he and I grew closer. By late 1993 and into early ’94, we were talking on the phone weekly. Over about six months, I talked him through what turned out to be the end of his life.

  Dave had always assumed that if he fell on hard times, his parents would help him. But he was afraid to tell them what was really going on. They were obstinately intolerant—both homophobic and AIDS-phobic.

  I told him, “Look, in your own self-interest, you need to come out, because you never know if your family will be there when the chips are down. Just save your own ass. You’ll be surprised that certain friends will really stand up, and some people in your family may be there for you. But some people won’t, for whatever reasons. So you have to learn who’s on your side, because if you really get sick, you have to know who you can count on.”

  I said, “Dave, you need help, and they’re your parents. You don’t have a lot of options. You’re dying of AIDS, and you haven’t even told them directly. And if, God forbid, you pass away, you’ll go without them ever really having known you. That would be a tragedy for all of you. At the very least, you need to be honest with them, just to have some closure one way or the other.”

  Just a few days before he died, in August 1994, from his hospital bed, Dave mustered the strength to call his father, and he told me about the conversation when it was over. Dave said, “Dad, there’s something I’ve got to talk to you about.”

  His father said, “Dave, I told you, we’re not going to discuss your lifestyle choice.”

  And Dave simply said, “Bye, Dad. I love you.”

  Dave died at age thirty-three, owing hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical expenses, with no life insurance to cover any of it or pay for his funeral. His parents never laid out a cent—but they did spend a couple of thousand dollars to embalm him for a rosary service, despite his written wish to be cremated. His memorial celebration took place in the grand ballroom of the Wyndham Warwick Hotel in Houston. The room was packed; there was a gospel choir singing and every musician in town was there. But his father didn’t show up, and his mother came in disguise, sitting in the back wearing oversize sunglasses and a wig.

  I wanted Dave to benefit from what I learned from coming out. As a person and an artist, you have to be who you are. And to be honest with yourself, you need to be honest with other people.

  When I started talking about my sexual identity and HIV status in interviews, the process was more liberating than I had expected it to be. I felt different—more complete. As I explained in interviews at that time, it takes a lot of energy to stay in the closet, any kind of closet. And I think now, looking back, that until Forward Motion I had been in a bit of a musical closet as well. Once everything was laid bare, I felt this tremendous surge of confidence, of energy, to do and say whatever I wanted. I became more relaxed as a person, even as my health was deteriorating, by coming out about who I was and what I was dealing with. I didn’t think making music could become any more important to me. But it did.

  CHAPTER 10

  DANCING IN THE DARK

  In the mid-1980s and early ’90s, there was an explosive resurgence of interest in jazz, much of it attributed to and focused on a group of musicians the press was calling “the Young Lions.” Like many social and aesthetic trends, this one was a phenomenon that journalists not only observed and identified but also helped construct and sustain. The jazz repertory movement, which I brought up earlier in the context of Gunther Schuller and my experience at the New England Conservatory, dovetailed neatly with the conservative atmosphere of the Reagan era. There was a vogue for entertainers such as singer-pianist Michael Feinstein, whose cabaret-style renditions of both well-known and obscure standards harkened back to the pre-rock entertainers of the fifties and sixties.

  The simultaneous emergence of the CD format, a new delivery system for recorded music that turned the album market into a replacement market, provided record companies with a rationale for promoting their back catalogs—product that cost practically nothing to repackage and was therefore fantastically profitable. All this came together in a way that focused the attention of the jazz world on music made by masters of the past—or newcomers who brought the past masters to mind. Many of the so-called Young Lions were, broadly speaking, musicians who brought fresh faces to old ideas.

  Always serious-minded and superbly gifted as a jazz and classical trumpeter, Wynton Marsalis was anointed as the de facto leader of this group, and he took to his prominence with fervor and skill, playing a key role in establishing Jazz at Lincoln Center, an institution that conferred formal status to jazz as an art equal in stature to symphonic music, opera, and ballet. I first met Wynton when he was still at Juilliard and had begun playing with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers in New York. He came to Fat Tuesday’s one night to hear Art Farmer when I was working with Art—whom he justifiably admired. Between sets, Wynton and I talked for a few minutes at the bar, and he struck me as a smart and charming guy who cared deeply about music. I’ve never had a problem with Wynton as a person or as a musician, and I think that he is a fantastic educator and a fine ambassador for the music. What I’m not so fond of is the aesthetic of musical traditionalism and conservatism that Wynton is associated with.

  I believe that Wynton subscribes to the theory that the essence of jazz is best exemplified by Louis Armstrong and, through extension, Duke Ellington.

>   My take on jazz history, which follows here, is not original. I believe that the three great revolutionaries in jazz were Louis Armstrong, in the twenties (the first great solo virtuoso; inventor of scat singing; way ahead of his time harmonically); Charlie Parker and the beboppers, including Monk, Bud Powell, and Dizzy Gillespie, in the forties (jazz as art music; as listening music, not dance music; fast and complex compositions played with astounding technique); and Ornette Coleman, in the late fifties and early sixties (harmonic progressions are not always played literally; improvise melodically and create your own structure as you go). There have been many major figures in the music who have moved it forward in important ways, but these three giants marked the beginnings of new eras and were perhaps the most influential from where we sit today.

  Thanks largely to the hype surrounding this craze for new talent, all the classic jazz record labels became active again. Verve and Blue Note Records were revived. Atlantic, RCA, and Warner Records reconstituted their jazz divisions and went on a signing frenzy, with everyone competing to snatch up the youngest of the Young Lions. Looks were important, and even clothing designers and hairstylists were credited in CD packages. These musicians were marketed like pop stars, even though the jazz record market was small.

  After years of working on my craft, playing and learning, studying and maturing, I was beginning to hit my creative stride in the early nineties, and I was pushing forty years old. Leonine or not, I was not quite young anymore—nor was I yet an old master. I didn’t have matinee-idol looks or great hair, and I wasn’t a super-flashy player. I didn’t qualify for classification as a member of the voguish new-jazz herd on many levels.

  By now I was well accustomed to not fitting in. Strangely, it didn’t feel odd at all to watch much less seasoned (and, in a few cases, less skilled or less creative) musicians getting signed to major labels. Some of them were huge talents and have sustained long and successful careers; others have long since disappeared. But a few of these musicians who got these label contracts had been my students, and that hit me hard. I thought, Why am I being passed over? Again, I wanted to be a member of a club whose entrance seemed closed off to me.