Good Things Happen Slowly

by Fred Hersch

  I loved working with both Janis and Jay—so different from each other. I have been lucky enough to work over the course of my career with many great singers from every sphere of the music world. In fact, I’ve always had as much in common with singers as I’ve had with the wonderful jazz instrumentalists I’ve played with. From my days in the boys’ choir in Cincinnati, I’ve always enjoyed singing. Historians say the voice was almost certainly the first musical instrument, and it is self-evidently the most human, produced in the body itself. We draw breath from our lungs, give it shape with our mouths, and produce music. The breath, after all, was the original inspiration for the very idea of inspiration. I’ve sung for pleasure my whole life but have never considered singing professionally—mostly because my voice just isn’t good enough but also to avoid the stereotype of the gay man singing and playing piano. (I could never erase the memory of singing, in my T-shirt, at that Upper East Side gay bar.) Still, when I’m at the keyboard, I tend to think in vocal terms. The melodies I improvise have the flow of vocal lines, sentences in music. Some writers have said that I “sing” on the piano, and that’s not a bad way to describe my music—or at least some of it. Any great jazz singer who improvises abstract, nonverbal sounds is clearly working much the same way.

  When Janis or Jay is singing the words to a song, we’re working much the same way, too. For Slow Hot Wind, I came up with a new arrangement of “For No One,” the Paul McCartney tune from the Beatles’ album Revolver. The Beatles’ original recording sounds a bit too cheerful if you look closely at the dark lyric, a pained cry at the breakup of a relationship. I reharmonized it and added a few beats here and there, and we slowed it way down. Janis sang it with great subtlety and attention to the lyric. When she sang, “In her eyes, you see nothing,” she got across the meaning of the language better than McCartney himself on the Beatles record. Over the years since Janis and I recorded the tune, I’ve continued to play the arrangement as an instrumental piece—sometimes with my trio, sometimes on solo piano—and I think of the words as I’m playing as much as I would if I were singing them.

  There’s a story that has circulated among jazz musicians for decades. I’ve heard it mostly attributed to Lester Young, the lyrical tenor saxophonist for the Count Basie band and frequent collaborator with Billie Holliday. As the story goes, Young is in a recording session, in the middle of a solo, when he suddenly stops. The producer hits the talk-back button and says, “What happened? Is something wrong?” And then Lester says, “Oh, sorry—I forgot the words.”

  I can’t count the times when I’ve applied the lesson of that anecdote while teaching jazz piano. A student will play a standard for me, and there will be no question of the student’s skill—or lack thereof. But there will be something missing in the playing. It will be disconnected from the content of the music—more about showing off what the student can do than expressing the meaning of the song.

  I once heard a student play “It Never Entered My Mind” by Rodgers and Hart. The song has a simple diatonic melody (made out of the pitches of the major scale) and a devastating lyric by the repressed, gay, and alcoholic Larry Hart. The student’s performance was middle-of-the-road—and, more important, he seemed to be missing a point of view in his interpretation. I said to the student, “What’s the tune about?” He was flummoxed. He had never thought about that.

  So I got out the original sheet music and asked him to read the lyrics to me. He said, “Now I get it. It’s sad. It’s all about loneliness and disappointment.”

  I made him play the tune again. It was like he was playing a different piece of music. He made an emotional connection. He was putting across a feeling—a specific feeling—instead of just playing the notes as they appear in a book of lead sheets for jazz musicians.

  With four releases I was proud of and with a new manager, things really were coming together for me. And then, in a moment, I suddenly found myself on the next level. At the time, I was just about to sign an exclusive deal with the small German label Enja Records, which had just released Point in Time. The contract was literally on my desk when my phone rang one day and it was Bob Hurwitz, the head of Nonesuch Records, asking if I could come up to his office as soon as possible to discuss my recording for his label. It was a prank-call moment, too good to be true, but it was real.

  Nonesuch was (and is) one of the most prestigious record companies in the world. It wasn’t a jazz label like Blue Note or Verve, but it had a famously eclectic roster of artists, including some of the most respected living composers and performers of the day. It had a reputation for taking what was essentially noncommercial music—the Buena Vista Social Club, the Bulgarian Women’s State Chorus, the obscure Polish composer Henryk Górecki’s Third Symphony, Cape Verdean morna singer Cesária Évora—and selling millions of copies of it.

  As a child of the sixties, I had grown up buying Nonesuch albums when the label was first establishing itself as a low-budget outlet for baroque, contemporary, and ragtime—music for refined but quirky, vaguely nerdish tastes. As I noted earlier, Cecil Lytle, my professor and mentor at Grinnell, had recorded for Nonesuch. The label was one of the first to present Moog synthesizer music, and it recorded new works by the avant-gardists George Crumb and Elliott Carter as well as important music by American iconoclasts Charles Ives and Conlon Nancarrow. I owned dozens of Nonesuch records, and now it looked like I might get to make a Nonesuch record.

  Bob had taken charge of the company in 1984, when it was floundering a bit, and he turned it into the major force in music that it had become by the 1990s. He had a huge reputation, so when he said that someone had handed him my Johnny Mandel solo album and, after hearing my version of “Emily,” he had immediately picked up the phone to call me—well, I was floored.

  When I hung up the phone, having agreed to meet Bob later that day, I was exhilarated and gratified and a little numb from the conjoined feelings of pride, self-doubt, and nervousness that come when you suddenly have something you’ve always hoped for. A few hours later Bob was regaling me with stories of his friendships with Philip Glass, Steve Reich, John Adams, and the Kronos Quartet. I was duly impressed and flattered. We talked a bit about me and my music and what I might do for Nonesuch. Bob seemed particularly interested in my ability as an interpreter of other composers’ music. He said nice things and smart things about my taste in material, my approach to harmony, and my piano sound. He said he’d love to hear me do an entire album of the work of one composer like I had done with Johnny Mandel.

  I thought immediately of Billy Strayhorn, and not simply because he was a gay jazz musician. For several years I had been helping David Hajdu with his long-in-the-works but still unfinished Strayhorn biography. David had uncovered a significant number of little-known or entirely unknown Strayhorn compositions, and he brought them to me for musicological help. We would sit together on the piano bench in my loft and study Strayhorn’s original pencil scores, including the music for some rarities such as “Ballad for Very Tired and Very Sad Lotus Eaters” and “Lament for an Orchid.”

  I chose twelve Strayhorn compositions, from tunes I had learned from Tommy Flanagan and Jimmy Rowles to some of the pieces David brought to me, and arranged them in a variety of musical settings: trio, solo piano, voice and piano (with Andy Bey singing on “Something to Live For”), and piano duet (with the concert pianist Nurit Tilles) on a transcription of “Tonk,” which Strayhorn and Ellington had recorded with four hands at one piano.

  When we were ready to record, Nonesuch was in the midst of a two-week “lockout” for the big tracking room at the Hit Factory, one of the largest and most deluxe studios in New York. A superb nine-foot Steinway was in residence. For the album, and for the first time since my days in London with Berniker, I was able to include three tracks with a large string orchestra playing my arrangements. Working with a big record-company budget for the first time in my life, I enjoyed the freedom to use some instrumental colors that I hadn’t been able to employ before.
It was a treat to have the machinery of a major label available to me.

  We called the album Passion Flower, in reference both to the Strayhorn ballad of that title and to Strayhorn as a composer of deep and colorful passions who referred to flowers in many of his tunes’ names, such as “A Flower Is a Lovesome Thing” and “Lotus Blossom.” Inevitably, I suppose, quite a few music writers took the album as a statement of solidarity with the best-known openly gay composer in jazz history. My intention was certainly not to make a “gay record.” But I definitely related to Strayhorn on several levels. I admired the harmonic sophistication, the maturity, and the melodic beauty of his music, and I enjoyed his sense of fun. He was a quadruple threat: a great composer of jazz tunes, a first-rate jazz pianist, a remarkable songwriter (music and lyrics), and one of the all-time great arrangers for jazz orchestra. I imagined that if Billy Strayhorn were still around, he and I would probably get along pretty well. We’d have a lot to talk about, and I bet we’d have some laughs—and more than a cocktail or two.

  Two weeks before Passion Flower was due for release, in January 1996, I got the news that I had been nominated for my second Grammy Award, once again in the category of Best Jazz Instrumental Performance, for my Johnny Mandel album. Strangely, this nomination felt more gratifying than the earlier one. I had been delighted the first time, of course, but took it as a kind of fluke—like, This is a great thing to have just once in your life. The second time it felt like more of a validation—like, Oh, I guess people are really paying attention to what I’m doing! It felt bigger, even though I didn’t win the final award.

  Prodded by Bob Hurwitz, I made three consecutive tributes to other composers in my first three years with Nonesuch. Following the Strayhorn project, I recorded an album of songs by Rodgers and Hammerstein on solo piano, followed by a record of music by Thelonious Monk, also solo. The idea of both these projects was to position me as an interpretive pianist, rather than a composer or bandleader. As Bob said to me at the time, “The solo recital is the test of a great pianist. Glenn Gould didn’t use a trio. We don’t make straight-ahead jazz albums like Blue Note or Verve. And besides, I have John Adams on the roster, and who composes better than that?” Though I have intense admiration for John Adams as one of the greatest living composers, this comment didn’t exactly thrill me. I thought I was writing some pretty good music too, even if it was not opera or symphonic work. But I also loved the challenge of creatively interpreting music, so I trusted Bob’s vision for me.

  I knew there were hazards in taking on Rodgers and Hammerstein, phenomenally successful Broadway composers whose collaborations were not as popular with jazz musicians as the songs Rodgers wrote with Hart. After all, their names are practically shorthand for mainstream middlebrow taste. But I think that point of view is a narrow one that ignores the richness and the beauty of the scores Rodgers wrote for all those hit musicals: South Pacific, Carousel, The King and I, and the rest. Hammerstein’s words are part of the vocabulary of twentieth-century America: “Some enchanted evening…,” “The hills are alive…” It’s almost impossible to hear or even think of Rodgers and Hammerstein songs without focusing on the words. The challenge for me on this project was to honor the lyrical meaning of the songs, as I always try to do, while teasing out the greatness in the music itself and bringing ideas of my own to the table. Interpreting Rodgers and Hammerstein songs wasn’t the simple task it may have seemed at first glance. It was a tricky balancing act to work with songs that are so iconic.

  Whenever I do an album of one composer’s music, I go into heavy research mode. I try to get my hands on everything the composer wrote, on separate lead sheets and in compilation books. I play through everything and don’t limit myself or choose the playlist too quickly. I don’t say, “I could never record that tune,” as it may work in the context of the rest of the disc. The more obscure the composition, the more faithful I am to it, but if something is very familiar, I assume that the listener wants to hear my take on it, and so I can stretch it out or totally rearrange it. But I have to find a way into the tune, a signature that I can put on it—and most important, I have to find a deep connection to it, through the words (if there are any) and the music itself, that will allow me to be myself while still respecting the song.

  Sometimes my take on a standard changes over the years. Cole Porter’s “So in Love” from Kiss Me, Kate is a tune that I have recorded three times. On Dancing in the Dark, it took shape as a floating up-tempo swing number. On Night & the Music the trio still played it briskly but we broke it up with meter changes for different sections. Then when the multi-disc Songs Without Words was planned to have a disc wholly devoted to Cole Porter, I took another look at it, this time getting deeper into the lyrics. In the musical itself, the main characters sing it with a lot of bravado, trying to woo each other. But when I looked deeply at the second line of the lyric, “When I’m close to you, dear,” I reconsidered it as a very slow ballad in three-quarter time and used the mental image of two lovers lying next to each other in bed, pillow to pillow, intimately confessing how deeply they feel about each other. It is tender, not blusterous—and that is the version that I play today in concert. The words gave me the clues that led me to this interpretation.

  After recording Rodgers and Hammerstein, it was important for me to return to the jazz repertoire. So I turned, naturally, to the music of Thelonious Monk. I also wanted to do something that freed me from lyrics at that point, to show that yes, of course I know what I’m doing with American popular song, but I can do a few other things, too. I was starting to get put in the standard-player bin, and I didn’t want to be stuck there. Monk’s music is all rhythm, unique (and sometimes challenging) harmony, and melodic motive—often with a healthy dose of humor. I may have been one of the first, if not the first, to be either brave or crazy enough to tackle Monk as a solo pianist.

  Thelonious Monk has always had a special place in my heart. Today I never play a concert or a set in a club without including a Monk tune, almost always as the closing number. The fact is that Monk occupies a special place in the history of jazz and in the history of American music as a whole. A brilliantly offbeat, cryptically fascinating person with a profoundly unconventional approach to the piano, he was one of the all-time greatest composers of short-form jazz pieces. His career began in the days of the great stride pianists such as James P. Johnson, Earl “Fatha” Hines, and Willie “the Lion” Smith in the 1930s, and it lasted into the 1970s. Monk absorbed the stride influence firsthand, and he played stride in a very idiosyncratic way in his solo work. Ellington was perhaps Monk’s greatest influence as a pianist; this branch of the jazz piano tree had its beginnings in the playing of the stupendously imaginative Hines. Monk was on the scene at Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem for the birth of bebop in the early 1940s, and he in turn was a major influence on Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Bud Powell.

  Monk’s music was never far from the blues. He wrote a number of tunes that could be thought of as twelve-bar blues but are unconventionally sophisticated compositionally, including “Ba-lue Bolivar Ba-lues-are” (great title) and “Straight, No Chaser.” He could work one idea through a tune better than anyone else. His blues “Misterioso” is built entirely of major and minor sixths. “Blue Monk” consists of mostly half and whole steps. He used rhythmic and chromatic displacement, turned motives upside down and backward, and it’s said that he spent years perfecting some of his compositions. His often angular tunes—with their profound use of space, harmony, rhythm, and motivic development—are compositionally tight and always have his musical DNA in them. His music is unceasingly fascinating and inspiring to perform. He wrote literally dozens of masterpieces: “Evidence,” “Crepuscule with Nellie,” “I Mean You,” “ ’Round Midnight,” “Four in One,” “Bye-Ya,” “Brilliant Corners,” “Ruby My Dear,” and more. Yet he composed fewer than eighty tunes in his life. The entirety of Monk’s output as a composer fits into one book of just over one hundred pages.
I’ve written more songs than Monk in a shorter lifetime. But I’ve never written anything that comes close to Monk.

  Among the qualities that align Monk with the great composers in any genre is his ability to write music that has a certain sense of inevitability about it. You couldn’t change one note without diminishing the tune’s effect. You could say the same of Bach.

  Monk is one of those jazz artists who tempt imitation. Miles Davis is another one. A trumpet player can use a mute and play softly and simply and use a few devices trumpeters all know and sound like an imitation of Miles Davis. There are Monkisms, too—his dissonance and unexpected accents—that any good pianist can duplicate. But they’re not what gives his music its depth. To play his music in a meaningful way, you need to internalize it fully and work from inside the tunes. You need to study it, play it, live with it, maybe put it away for a while and come back to it. So much is going on inside these short pinnacles of jazz composition. All the most interesting things aren’t on the surface—they’re not the Monkisms—they’re deep in the compositions themselves.

  While Monk’s music may seem simple at times, a careful examination reveals its sophistication. It’s worth taking a close look at one of his tunes, the deceptive little thirty-two-bar gem “Evidence.” (The title is reported to be a product of Monk’s inimitable sense of logic. The tune is based on the chord changes to “Just You, Just Me.” In Monk’s reckoning, if you had “Just You, Just Me,” you then get “Just Us”—and to have “Justice” you need “Evidence.” Fantastic!) The melody Monk composed to the tune’s fairly conventional harmony is sparse but fascinating. It sounds almost like a twelve-tone row in the A section, a sequence of major and minor thirds that are rhythmically displaced and encircle the basic harmony in unorthodox ways; he places the consonant pitches on strong beats, where one might expect them, and sometimes he puts the dissonant pitches on strong beats, landing hard on the dissonance. The B section is a displaced chromatic scale that ascends in half steps on offbeats until the final pitch is a totally unexpected whole step. The effect of all this, rhythmically, is like the sound of a drunken tap dance.