by Fred Hersch
I wrote both the music and the text for a melancholy piece I titled “blues for an imaginary valentine,” and I performed it with baritone William Sharp singing in the AIDS Quilt Songbook concert at Alice Tully Hall in Lincoln Center, a program that included works composed for the occasion by Ned Rorem, William Bolcom, John Harbison, and more than a dozen others. It was the first of many times that I would be included in projects featuring numerous composers from the classical world either writing variations on one theme or interpreting and arranging music of another composer. It was also my first lyric song, and I wanted to express myself in a different and more direct way than I had in my instrumental compositions that had been inspired by the health crisis. So I wrote the lyric from the perspective of a bereft lover who can’t believe that his partner died before him—he thought he would pass away first.
It was a wrenchingly emotional concert, with Parker near death but clearly exhilarated by the extraordinary demonstration of generosity, unity, and creativity in the hall. A recording of the songbook material was scheduled for the following day, at the National Academy of Arts and Letters, but Parker was too debilitated by having performed in the concert to take part in it. Out of respect for him, the three pieces Parker had sung the previous evening were not included in the recording. Eight months later, in the spring of 1993, Parker died.
Over the course of the early nineties, I grew more and more engaged—and visible—as an AIDS activist. Later in 1992 I produced what may have been the first AIDS benefit concert in the jazz community, to take place on a Sunday afternoon at the famed Village Gate. I planned the event myself, got the venue to donate the use of the club, and gathered some well-known performers who played for free. But I didn’t have many media connections and had never promoted a concert, so I was unable to get the word out to draw a large crowd or raise much money. This would change when I met Charles Hamlen through record producer David Chesky.
Charlie, one of my closest friends then and now, was by that time well established as a manager of top-tier classical concert artists. Tall, with owlish glasses and a white beard, he is warm and easygoing but methodical and irresistibly persuasive. Charlie cofounded one of the leading concert-artist management firms in the late 1970s, sold it to the powerhouse International Management Group (IMG), and continued working at IMG with enormous success. He handled many of the biggest names in the classical world: Joshua Bell, Itzhak Perlman, André Watts, the Emerson String Quartet, and Leila Josefowicz, among others. Charlie’s partner, Carlos Flor, had died of AIDS in 1988. Taking stock, Charlie weaned himself from IMG and set up a new organization with the mission of mobilizing the classical music community to benefit AIDS services and education. He called it Classical Action: Performing Arts Against AIDS. After a few years as an independent organization, Classical Action became a program under the auspices of Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, one of the earliest performing arts initiatives to raise money to directly help those dealing with AIDS.
Though I wasn’t known as a classical musician, it has been a consistent passion in my life. And though Charlie didn’t know much about the jazz world, we both loved music and had enough in common to prompt a friendship. I liked Charlie immediately and was impressed that he had walked away from such a powerful, lucrative job to do something he found more meaningful. It turned out that Charlie was open to expanding the reach of Classical Action beyond the realm of formal music. One of the ventures he launched was a series of house concerts, for which musicians he had come to know through IMG would donate their talent, and ticket buyers would pay a healthy price to hear an intimate performance by someone such as Renée Fleming in someone’s fabulous living room. Other artists he knew would donate a percentage of their concert fees; this artist donation was prominently mentioned in the concert program, and often the presenters would match the amount donated by the performers. All the money went to Classical Action.
After my initial events for AVOC and at the Village Gate, I wanted to do something as well but was hardly in a position to write a big check. Inspired by the AIDS Quilt Songbook, I decided to produce a jazz album with a roster of artists appropriate to the cause with the proceeds going to Classical Action. I sat down and made a list of all my famous musician friends, studio owners, engineers, and others I thought I could count on, and I started making phone calls. I asked everyone to take part without payment, and nobody hesitated. For the repertoire, I thought ruminative or bittersweet pieces—ballads—would be fitting. (And I wasn’t sure that hard-hitting jazz would have as much resonance in the gay community.) The brilliant and idiosyncratic jazz singer Mark Murphy, who was gay (though not out) and had lost his longtime partner to AIDS, sang a devastating one-take duet rendition with me of Harold Arlen and “Yip” Harburg’s “Last Night When We Were Young,” which we named the record for. When you think of “Last Night” in the context of AIDS, it takes on a whole new meaning. Mark’s interpretation summed up the project beautifully.
Nearly a dozen other artists, straight and gay—George Shearing, Janis Siegel, Toots Thielemans, Gary Burton, the saxophonist Phil Woods, among others—contributed tracks. Jane Ira Bloom and I did a medley built around “In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning,” which we made the opening track—setting the “after hours” mood. Andy Bey, a deeply soulful jazz singer who is gay (but was still in the closet at the time of this recording), did a sensitive reading of Kern and Hammerstein’s “Nobody Else but Me.” Dave Catney, in a duet with the Houston-based singer Sandra Dudley, performed a poignant original of Dave’s “Little Prayer,” taped in Houston in what would be the last recording of his lifetime. And with my trio I played “Somewhere,” the Bernstein-Sondheim ballad of yearning from West Side Story. We used a touchingly sweet black-and-white photograph—taken by master photographer Lee Friedlander of his two toddlers (’cellist Erik and his little sister, Anna) innocently embracing in a tender dance, which he donated for the cover art. David Hajdu wrote the liner notes. It came together organically, session by session, over about a month, and I was thrilled by all of the music and by the generosity of everyone involved. The jazz community had united to raise funds for the health crisis in a visible and artistic way.
Originally, I had hoped to have the album picked up and marketed by a major label that would then distribute the profits to Classical Action and other worthy AIDS causes. I thought I would have no problem at all placing it given the level of talent involved and the high quality of the performances. But no one would take it. A number of labels said, “We love it—it’s a beautiful record with great artists, and it’s a great concept. But if we’re going to do something like this, we’d rather do it in-house with our own artists.” Of course, none of the labels I talked to actually did that. All of the artists had put heart and soul into this album, and I was offering the labels something world-class that was ready to release—for nothing. And they wouldn’t run with it.
After numerous rejections, I couldn’t wait any longer to get this record out into the world. So I called Charlie and said, “I guess we’re going into the record business!” The Chesky brothers donated manufacturing and graphic design, and Classical Action made the record available by phone orders. Dial (800) 321-AIDS, and read us your credit card number. No Internet, no “one-click”—just an 800 number—and we brought in more than $150,000 for Classical Action, all profit for the organization.
My publicist at the time, Helene Greece, did amazing pro bono work for the project, and the media response to it was overwhelming. Other than the choreographer Bill T. Jones, who had lost his partner, Arnie Zane, a few years previously, no prominent and active performing artist was revealing that he had AIDS—so there was a great deal of interest in my story. I knew I was coming out about it all for the right reasons, and though it took a lot of energy, I saw this process as an opportunity to make a difference, to put a face on something that, frankly, people were scared of. Over the course of the next few months I did interviews with Newsweek, Entertainment Weekly
, CNN, CBS Sunday Morning, Billboard, the Advocate, various newspapers, and the jazz magazines, speaking candidly about my history as a semi-secretly gay man in jazz and the larger issue of AIDS consciousness. It was an exhausting process, as my health was tenuous at the time, but I felt that these media opportunities had been handed to me and that it was in my best interest—and that of everyone else in both the jazz and gay worlds—for me to put myself out there, speaking forthrightly about AIDS and the price of being in a closet of any kind. Most people were amazingly supportive—though one jerk of a jazz critic told me, “Yeah, Fred, this AIDS thing will be great for your career.” As if having a deadly disease is good for business!
With all the press, I found myself front and center as an AIDS activist. In an interview for the Los Angeles Times I told the writer Dan Heckman, “Very few of the gay jazz musicians I know are out. But there’s a longer list than you might think, and nine out of ten are still in the closet. So I decided it was time for somebody to break the mold a bit.”
Still, it has always seemed to me that effective activism doesn’t actually need to be so visible. There’s an activism that comes from just being who you are—setting an example and making a statement, minute by minute, in your daily life. If you actively live life as an open human being, that’s a kind of activism.
I was fortunate to get to know Tom Stoddard, the influential attorney and gay-rights advocate, who directed the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund in the late eighties and early nineties. Tom was the principal author of a landmark act of municipal legislation: the 1986 gay-rights bill, which for the first time protected homosexuals from discrimination in housing, employment, and public accommodations in New York City. Tom was easygoing and unintimidating but brilliant and unrelenting on matters of principle. He put a cheery—and cheering—face on the gay-rights movement. In the summer of 1996, less than a year before he died of AIDS, Tom was the grand marshal of the Gay and Lesbian Pride March in New York. As the march began, the clouds grew dark and it started to rain. Tom found the pool of reporters covering the event and told them, with a smile, “The rain is not a metaphor! The future of the movement is full of sun!” He understood the power of symbolism.
Tom was a master of the political system—Ed Koch, the New York mayor who signed the gay and lesbian rights bill into law, called him “extraordinary” and the legislation “perfect.” Tom also understood that human progress begins on the personal level. He was a big believer in private action. We talked about this quite a bit, and we agreed that much of the most important activism takes place in the workplace, in the lunchroom, in the gym, and at family gatherings—in day-to-day life. If you’re straight and you meet someone who is out at your job, at a party, or as your neighbor, and get to know the person and become friends, and then one day there’s a ballot initiative to deny rights for gay people, you won’t think of gay rights as “special rights.” You’ll recognize them as human rights—and you’ll know deep down that the gay people you know should have the same protections and advantages as everybody else. In the twenty-first century this way of thinking is pretty standard. But in the 1990s it was groundbreaking.
As Tom once said, “We have to change the way people think one by one, and then they’ll change the way they act. But we need to be out to make that happen.” History has proven him right.
I had learned from experience that telling is the best policy, in combination with showing that the whole world won’t go to hell if there’s a gay person on the assembly line or in the judge’s chambers—or at the piano in a jazz club. In fact, the world may be a little richer for it.
Activism can take a great range of forms, as I saw many times in the early days of the AIDS crisis. I was in and out of St. Vincent’s, the Catholic hospital on Seventh and Greenwich Avenues in the West Village, half a block north of the Vanguard. St. Vincent’s was the first medical center in New York City to have an AIDS ward, and it was a busy one. If you walked past St. Vincent’s in the late eighties, you’d often see a black town car parked in front, with a driver alone in the front seat. He’d likely be waiting for a woman named Judith Peabody.
Judy was a celebrated socialite from the Kennedy era, a doyenne of old-money Upper East Side society. Her husband came from the family that founded the Kidder, Peabody investment firm, and one of his uncles was an Episcopal bishop. She dressed strictly in Chanel and Bill Blass, custom made for her. Her appearance was striking: white hair perfectly sculpted into a lacquered mane. Rouged cheeks, scarlet lipstick.
In the early 1980s, Judy and her friends noticed that men in the support system for high society—designers and stylists and florists and hairdressers—were dying. Judy learned about AIDS. Driven by the sense of social responsibility that was once considered part of being a woman of privilege, Judy volunteered for the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, working as a “care partner” at St. Vincent’s. She would walk down the halls in her spike heels, major jewelry, and designer clothing, and she’d see that a nurse had left an AIDS patient’s food on a tray in the hallway. There were people, even nurses, who were afraid to get too close to people with AIDS.
Judy would find the nurse and say, “Excuse me, John seems not to have gotten his dinner yet. Could you kindly bring it in to him? Right now. I’ll go with you.” If she didn’t get results, she’d go to the nurses’ station and find the person in charge. She’d say, “Excuse me, my name is Judith Peabody, and my husband, Samuel Peabody, is on the board of this hospital. You need to get John fed, immediately.”
Her friends would say to her, “Judy, why don’t you dress a little more comfortably if you’re going be working in an AIDS ward and carrying trays around?” She would say, “When people see me, they expect Judy Peabody. They will get Judy Peabody.”
She donated a lot of money to the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, and she made sure that friends contributed substantial sums as well. But it was her hard work in the wards that made the deepest impression. She was no checkbook activist. She lived her activism. And she looked sensational doing it. I was grateful to and had intense admiration for Judy, Charlie, and others who were actively engaged in helping the cause, walking the walk—taking personal risks and putting the greater good first.
CHAPTER 12
NONESUCH
There are moments in the act of playing jazz when everything comes together. It’s hard for me to explain, because I don’t entirely understand it. Maybe nobody does. You’re on the bandstand one night, and you know the same things you knew an hour earlier—how the tunes go, how harmony and counterpoint work, how to sit on the stool and how to breathe, how to listen and respond to your bandmates as you play. And yet something’s different. Everything works, and you’re soaring along in the slipstream of a mysterious force. Most people would probably think of this as the moment of inspiration. As I learned in Latin class at Walnut Hills High, the derivation of that term is spiritus, which referred originally to breath or wind. One could think of the breath of God, if one is so inclined, or the wind as a phenomenon of nature. Either way, it’s something invisible, ungraspable, outside your power. And the more you try to achieve this state, the less likely it is to happen—you have to be relaxed and present enough to allow it to occur.
The same kind of thing can happen in the course of a musical career. Just as there are moments in a performance when things mysteriously come together, there can be periods in an artist’s creative lifetime when everything suddenly connects.
For me, all the pieces started falling into place in the mid-1990s. After practically begging Chesky Records to let me do a second album, I got the Grammy nomination for Dancing in the Dark, and Chesky was happy to have me do another record for them. I made a no-gimmicks album to showcase my working band and called it, simply, The Fred Hersch Trio Plays. It featured my spin on tunes by my favorite jazz composers. I had become a solid enough club and concert performer to attract the attention of a good booking agency, SRO Artists. After a time, my point person there, Alison Loerk
e, went out to form her own agency, and I went with her. But after two years she decided to concentrate on booking world music acts and not jazz artists. So I persuaded Robert Rund, a youngish agent at IMG as well as a composer and arranger of choral music, to manage me when he left the agency for another position that allowed him to take outside work. Though he was solidly in the classical world and didn’t know that much about the jazz sphere, Rund, a low-key, bespectacled, warm, and musically astute guy, liked that I didn’t fit the standard jazz mold, and he was keen on strategic planning. He was enthusiastic, uncorrupted by the business of music, and was an avid supporter of my music.
In 1995 I released four albums on three labels: Sunnyside, Enja, and Verése Sarabande. One was a solo-piano record of the music of Johnny Mandel, a master whose association with movie music and reputation as an arranger for singers probably kept him from being thought of as the first-class writer of jazz tunes that he was. I had met Mandel in passing a couple of times in Los Angeles, and I let him know I was doing a whole album of his music. He sent me some lead sheets including a piece that had never been recorded before—a beautiful, moody tune called “Moon Song.” I titled the record for Mandel’s bittersweet minor-key ballad “I Never Told You.” In the same year I also made an album with my working trio and two guest soloists, the tenor saxophonist Rich Perry and the trumpeter Dave Douglas, called Point in Time, which featured a tune I wrote in memory of Dave Catney and his joyful spirit, “Cat’s Paws.” I made a second album with Janis Siegel, Slow Hot Wind, continuing our exploration of multiple traditions in jazz and pop. And I made a different sort of vocal album of standards with the experimental singer Jay Clayton, whom I had known for several years and admired greatly. Jay, who is ten years older than me, had been an integral part of the jazz loft scene in New York during the 1960s, and she embodies the experimental loft sensibility. She had worked with avant-gardists such as Steve Reich and Muhal Richard Abrams and has a gift for free, nonverbal vocal improvisation. Singing like an instrument—much like a jazz horn player—she utilizes wordless sounds and extended techniques that are unique to the human voice. She’s a fearless improviser, but she can also dig into a lyric and sing with superb interpretive sensitivity and spontaneity.