by Fred Hersch
As a result, I bounced around a bit within the industry. At Concord Jazz, the label that had released Horizons, the marketing people had never quite known what to make of me. On a roster with Mel Tormé and Rosemary Clooney I was an outlier. I had to go elsewhere with my second record, Sarabande, which was released by Sunnyside Records, a highly independent-minded label run by the French impresario François Zalacain, who made a policy of not signing artists to multi-record contracts. The trio album I recorded next, E.T.C., was issued by an Italian label, Red Records. The following year Sunnyside recorded a trio CD, Heartsongs. After that I decided to record an album of Bill Evans music, Evanessence, primarily to hush up the critics and show that I admired Evans’s music but had my own viewpoint on it.
I was fully coming into my own as both a pianist and composer. Though Chesky Records tried to market the Fred Hersch Group as a hip, “downtown” ensemble and we played big concerts in New York at Town Hall and the Bottom Line, Forward Motion didn’t sell terribly well. Chesky was not exactly clamoring for me to do another record. In the midst of a big boom in jazz, my music wasn’t booming in accord. I didn’t look or sound like a young Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, or McCoy Tyner, and I didn’t play like them either. Although critics were responding well to my music and giving me great press, I wasn’t breaking through to the jazz audience in a significant way. I was unsuccessful in getting interest from a reputable agent or manager.
I was reminded of a story I once heard about Duke Ellington. He was recording for Columbia Records in the late fifties and early sixties and created a series of unqualified masterpieces, including the Live at Newport album with “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue,” which I studied in the back room of the Family Owl in Cincinnati, and the “Shakespeare suite” he composed with Strayhorn, Such Sweet Thunder. In the midst of this string of creative triumphs, the head of Columbia, Goddard Lieberson, told Ellington he was dropping him from the label. Duke said, “Why?”
Lieberson said, “You’re not selling records.”
And Duke said, “I’m sorry—I thought it was my job to make music and your job to sell records.”
Forty years later, the records Duke Ellington made for Columbia were still selling well, and Ellington was Wynton Marsalis’s role model. The Ellingtonian aesthetic of jazz classicism, the living jazz legends who survived—and the sixties Miles Davis Quintet model—so dominated the jazz record business that it was hard for those who made a different kind of music to get a foothold or to be widely heard.
The Chesky label was run by two brothers, David and Norman Chesky. David, a Juilliard-trained pianist/composer himself and around my age, did a lot of the hands-on work with the musicians. After Forward Motion had been out for a little while, he told me, in so many words, that I should be talking to other labels. I said to him, “Look—I’m not doing so great here. The fact of the matter is, I don’t know how much longer I have on the planet. I just want to record. You don’t have to pay me anything, just cover the band’s fees and the recording costs. Please let me make another album for you.”
Being a very decent guy, Dave said, “Okay,” and I went into the studio with my working trio: Drew Gress on bass and Tom Rainey on drums. We had been playing together for a year or two, gigging around, traveling some, appearing in such clubs as Visiones, a venue for mid-career artists in the Village, getting used to one another over time and beginning to gel nicely as a group. This was the first trio I had that was truly my band. We were devoted to working with one another.
In contrast to Forward Motion, this album had no original compositions. I didn’t have any time to write new material, so we just recorded tunes we had been playing that I liked, our takes on standards from the Great American Songbook: “So in Love” by Cole Porter, “I Fall in Love Too Easily” by Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn. The record is named for an evocative song by Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz, “Dancing in the Dark.” The title had a double meaning—I was truly in the dark, dancing as fast as I knew how, and not sure of what would befall me. We made the tunes ours. After all, it can be as creative an endeavor to play someone else’s compositions as it is to play something you wrote. Louis Armstrong played a lot of music with other people’s names on the copyrights, and he turned every song into a work of original expression by the force of his interpretive imagination. Coleman Hawkins didn’t write a great deal. Nor did Miles Davis.
But even when I play my own pieces, I have to learn them just the way I have to learn a Monk tune or a standard. I have to internalize them. I have to memorize them. I have to work with them. I have to find just the right tempo. I have to fine-tune them so I can play them with fluency. I have to interpret my own music just as I would anything else. A tune doesn’t have to be a so-called original to have originality.
We recorded the eleven tracks on Dancing in the Dark over two days of sessions in December 1992. Chesky had it pressed and packaged for release in the spring of 1993, and thought well enough of it to submit it for consideration for a Grammy Award. I didn’t think much about it, figuring the Grammys was another exclusive club that wouldn’t have me as a member. When the nominations for 1993 releases were announced in December, I was stunned to see that I had been nominated for Best Jazz Instrumental Performance, Individual or Group, for Dancing in the Dark.
The awards were presented at that time on a schedule that alternated between New York and Los Angeles. Fortunately for my travel budget, the 1994 ceremony was held in New York, at the historic Radio City Music Hall. To celebrate, Hank, his wife, Sharon, and I had a fancy dinner in SoHo; she had just lost her older sister to colon cancer, and I got her a hard-to-get ticket to the ceremony and the after party to cheer her up. I invited a new friend of mine, David Hajdu, to join us.
David and I had recently bonded over the music of Billy Strayhorn, which I had been playing often since my early days at Bradley’s. I was doing a trio date once and slipped for a moment, absent-mindedly introducing “The Star-Crossed Lovers” as a composition by Duke Ellington. During the break David came up to me, introduced himself as a writer working on a biography of Strayhorn, and gently corrected me. Ever since then, we’ve been close friends and occasional songwriting collaborators.
The Grammy in my category that year went to my old boss Joe Henderson for his album So Near, So Far—a tribute to Miles Davis. It was the second album Joe had made for Verve since the label had been revived. The first was Lush Life, another tribute to a past master, Strayhorn, which also won Joe a Grammy. The awards were timely honors for a retrospective time. I never expected to win but was weirdly, irrationally disappointed.
I thought about Joe, who had been playing at the highest level since the late 1950s and didn’t win a Grammy until 1992, near the end of his life. (Of course, dozens of remarkable jazz albums are released each year that are not even nominated.) I knew he had worked hard and steadily for decades and was absolutely revered by all astute jazz musicians. I recognized the wisdom in patience—not just in the way Joe built those incredible long solos at the Village Vanguard but in sticking it out and doing things resolutely his own way. I was grateful for the peer recognition, and it dawned on me that by simply being my musical self, playing the way I play without trying to “get over,” and letting go in general, good things might come. It would just take time, the one resource I knew I could never count on.
CHAPTER 11
ACTING OUT AND ACTIVISM
It is not always easy to think or act rationally when you have a debilitating disease that no one fully understands.
Three years after my diagnosis, in 1989, the first drug approved by the FDA for the treatment of HIV/AIDS became available, and I went on it. It was a retroviral repressor called azidothymidine (or zidovudine), which had been developed as a cancer treatment in the 1960s, when new research had linked cancer to retroviruses in birds. After the drug failed to have much application outside the avian population, drug companies shelved it until research proved that AIDS was caused by a retrovirus.
Azidothymidine was marketed under the name Retrovir, though everybody called it AZT. There was intense debate in the gay community about whether or not to go on the drug, with some even denying that HIV was the cause of AIDS, but I was so desperate for any treatment with some promise that I crossed my fingers and went ahead.
AZT was, in some cases, effective at slowing the progression of HIV, though it failed to stop it entirely. (Eventually the drug was administered in combination with other medications as part of an antiretroviral therapy regimen that became known as the “triple cocktail.” But this development was seven or eight years down the road.) The side effects were rough: weight loss, stomach pain, and sleeplessness, not to mention potential risks to the cardiovascular system. Before long, AZT, which had been invented as a cancer treatment, was found to be a possible carcinogen; and initially it was prescribed in doses that were way too high—some people even died as a result. At the new, lower dose I was on, AZT somewhat slowed the replication of my HIV. But it kicked my ass.
I was sick from the effects of the virus and sick from the treatment, both debilitated and rejuvenated, driven by a new sense of purpose, and more than a bit confused. I’d wake up light-headed and aching, put something in my stomach so I could take my first pill for the day, try to get up the energy to sit at the piano and play or compose, then often end up lying down on my couch and closing my eyes, exhausted and afraid.
During my first years with the illness, I did some smart and constructive things. But I also did some stupid and destructive things. It was a rocky, dark time in many ways—there was still no cure, and people were dropping all around me. The papers reported the deaths of famous people who passed away from the effects of AIDS: Rock Hudson, whose startling decay and death helped destigmatize AIDS to millions of people who hadn’t even known he was gay; Freddie Mercury, from the pop-rock band Queen; Liberace. But there were also the unpublicized deaths of un-famous AIDS casualties every day. I lost a lot of gay friends and acquaintances. The world lost an entire generation of supremely creative individuals: visual artists, dancers, musicians, and writers. I was scared each day to read the New York Times’ obituary section—or the one in the local gay newspaper—which chronicled the deaths of men in their thirties and forties from pneumonia or heart attacks, hardly normal for men that age. They no doubt died from the effects of AIDS, their death notices written in code. It was dispiriting and destabilizing. I didn’t know what to think or how to feel or what to do with myself sometimes, and I acted out in ways I’m hardly proud of now.
My sexually compulsive activities escalated. My addiction to pornography became more consuming. I went out to bars and picked up strangers, just for the sex, went home with them or brought them to my loft, and never thought about them again. The next night I’d go looking for someone new. Eager to hook up, I dated men I would be ashamed to be seen with now, just for the sexual connection.
I always told the guys I was HIV positive and always practiced safe sex, of course. I was being obsessive but not reckless. I felt somehow like I needed to have sex as much as possible, to numb myself, even though by that time it wasn’t any fun and I actually had enough insight to know that this behavior was just a way to get away from myself. But I couldn’t stop. I was using the only coping mechanism I knew to act out my justified anxiety about getting sick—just as I was deluding myself that I was actually looking for love.
Being a musician, I worked at night. So I couldn’t always count on doing nighttime pickups. I mined the personal ads. Toward the end of my addiction, I even hired call boys a few times. In a state of delusion that is probably not atypical among customers of skilled sex professionals, I started thinking that one rent boy and I had a special thing going on. I believed he was truly attracted to me and wanted to see me again for reasons unrelated to the nice payment he always made sure to get in advance. I thought about him even when I was playing music. He took up way too much of my brain space. In 1999 I was on a long solo tour of the United Kingdom and I was obsessed with him the whole time. After a month of this self-torture I decided that I had had enough and that paying for sex didn’t square with my values; in fact, it made me feel disgusted. And given the endless supply of men out there, this type of acting out could only escalate; it was dangerous to me on every level. This was the proverbial bottom that eventually led to my recovery from sexual compulsion.
As I sensed myself slipping into an ever-darkening hole of addiction, I hoped that my longtime psychotherapist would be there for me. I had been seeing him at least twice a week since 1980. Unfortunately, this Freudian-oriented gay man with a nice office and impressive credentials was extremely destructive in his own ways, though they were so subtle that it took me almost two decades to recognize them. Over time I realized he was taking advantage of my insecurity and had begun to control my life. Instead of helping me with clear-eyed insight and useful counsel, he was increasingly dismissive, belittling, and manipulative. He was narcissistic and, toward the end, verbally and psychologically abusive.
For years he had done much more damage to me than good. He fostered my low self-esteem and became completely directive about everything. He had to approve of my love interests, how I read the newspaper, and what I was doing as a musician—not that he actually cared to learn anything about my music. If he was filing his nails while I was talking to him and I intimated that I wanted him to pay closer attention, he would remark in a condescending manner, “You’re not being very interesting.” He took phone calls in the middle of sessions and, without my consent, mentioned things that I had said in private sessions to the gay men’s therapy group that he ran once a week—with me sitting in the group and having no choice in the matter. Therapy is supposed to be a safe space, but his version was anything but safe. He deluded himself into thinking that he was practicing a new and improved form of psychotherapy, but he was using his position of power to indulge his outrageous grandiosity.
At my own initiative, I eventually enrolled in a 12-step program to confront my sexual compulsion, and it was invaluable in helping me to see my behavior as out of control and self-destructive—and giving me support and concrete tools to help me stop. Though entering that first meeting and saying, “Hi, I’m Fred, and I am sexually compulsive” to a roomful of strangers was difficult, I knew from my past coming-out experiences that I needed to be brutally honest and out of this new closet if I was going to get better. No more secrets. (In a wild twist, at my first meeting I recognized one of the men in the couple that I had seen strolling around together on the Grinnell campus so many years before.)
Over about two years of hard work, following the guidelines of the program, I was able to see my compulsion with growing clarity and to contain it. I got a sponsor and learned to sponsor other men struggling as hard as I was in the grip of this addiction. My work on my issues in the program also enabled me to recognize the harm my therapist was doing to me. Terminating with him—once I was solidly in recovery—was akin to a battered wife leaving a batterer. He had me in such knots that it was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. After twenty years of psychological entrapment, I reached a point where I simply could not take his belittlement and manipulation anymore. I fired him and I never saw him again.
—
Since I first came out as gay and HIV positive, I’ve said many times that I never wanted to be the gay jazz poster boy. I’ve always wanted to be thought of first and foremost as a person—just a person, not one defined by his sexual orientation or his gender or his ethnicity. Then I’m a jazz musician, specifically a pianist and a composer. After that I’m a jazz musician who happens to be gay. And after that, I’m a jazz musician who happens to be gay and HIV positive. Those are the file folders nested on the computer desktop—this is how I would, ideally, like the world to see me. My thinking is this: I don’t want to be defined by any one classification or by my disease—I don’t want to be limited as a musician or as a man. Also, I don’t want anyone ever to think I have exploited my s
exual orientation or my health status for the benefit of my career.
At various times circumstances have prompted me to organize the files in that folder of my selves in particular ways. For many years, the reality of being a person living with AIDS felt like an enormous slab of prime rib completely covering a dinner plate, leaving no room for any side dishes. I took many medications that had terrible side effects I couldn’t ignore: weight loss, depression, facial wasting, lipodystrophy and lipoatrophy (loss of and disfiguring movement of body fat), lack of salivation that made eating almost impossible. When I first came out, I moved my sexual orientation to the top of the pile. It was important at the time, and in addition to the emotional and creative benefits to me, I thought I might be able to help others by my example. I soon realized that I could leverage my growing visibility as a public advocate for gay consciousness and HIV/AIDS awareness. I found myself becoming what I call an “accidental activist.” Over the decades, I have embraced that mission as a vital part of my life’s work.
In New York my first high-profile involvement in a project to benefit AIDS research and treatment came to fruition in the summer of 1992, when I contributed a song to the AIDS Quilt Songbook, a project organized by the lyric baritone William Parker, who was gravely ill with AIDS. He was widely known as a champion and interpreter of new American art songs as well as the core European classical vocal repertoire. He had a creamy voice and great diction and was a superb musician. When I heard about the project, I got in touch with him immediately to ask if I could participate, but he told me that there were already too many composers involved. When I told him right then that I had AIDS (as I knew he did) and about my sense of urgency, he agreed to include me.