by Fred Hersch
I originally planned not to include “ ’Round Midnight” on the album, because it’s so well known it’s practically a cliché. Then I realized I could use it as a statement of the idea of Thelonious Monk, and I bracketed the album with it in two different interpretations. All of Monk’s material presents the same kind of challenge. It’s so distinctively his own that it’s hard for anyone to do the music justice and make an original contribution to the material. There’s an idiosyncratic spirit in Monk’s tunes, a kind of impish wisdom. You feel compelled to either fight it or give in to it—you have to humbly interpret it (from the written score rather than from his recordings), not imitate it. When I play Monk’s music, I find different things in it every time, and I love it.
On the surface, Monk and I couldn’t be less alike—we are two generations apart and are of different races and backgrounds, and our piano sounds are not remotely the same. Yet each of us values space in the music, has a devotion to the beat, and loves to improvise specifically off of the elements in the composition itself. At the end of a long set of music (and usually after I have played a ballad), to play my version of a Monk tune is to have serious fun—and it is totally freeing. By forcing me to have a different take on his musical language and enter his world on my own terms, I somehow connect to it and feel more myself playing his music than I do playing anything other than something I have composed.
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My first three albums for Nonesuch, all interpretations of music by other composers, were well received critically. Still, I picked up an unspoken feeling of something other than full-throttle enthusiasm from Bob. I was making the records Bob wanted me to make, yet I had the sense that he wanted something from me that he wasn’t getting. This left me feeling insecure and a little nervous. I was certainly working hard for the label. In addition to the songbook albums, I played and arranged on two albums on which Nonesuch’s star soprano, Dawn Upshaw, sang standards. The label also released a duo album of standards and jazz classics I made with the wonderful guitarist Bill Frisell, appropriately titled Songs We Know, as well as the recording of a solo recital I gave at the New England Conservatory, called Let Yourself Go: Live at Jordan Hall. Although the recording was done for archival purposes and hadn’t been recorded specifically for release, Bob and I were so pleased with the performance that Nonesuch issued it. But after four years of recording for Nonesuch, I could tell Bob Hurwitz was getting impatient with me.
At the same time, I wasn’t sure that Nonesuch was bringing out everything I had in me, either. I felt constricted by Bob’s limited view of me as a solo interpreter of others’ music, to the point where he was unwilling to record my working trio: “That’s what Blue Note does, not Nonesuch,” he’d say. And after Forward Motion I didn’t want to give up on composing, which was an important aspect of my musical persona. Frisell had released numerous albums on Nonesuch featuring his original music, so I surmised that Bob didn’t take me seriously as a writer. I was grateful, of course, for all the opportunities he was giving me, but since the beginning I had never been able to shake the feeling that Bob and I weren’t on an even playing field as recording artist to label chief. I felt sometimes like the chorus girl in the back who is made into a star by an impresario who doesn’t see the real her.
In the summer of 2000, a few months after the release of Let Yourself Go, Bob called a meeting with me in his office at the new Nonesuch headquarters in Rockefeller Plaza in Manhattan. The location made apparent that we’d be having a serious discussion, not trading thoughts over a meal. Bob told me he was frustrated that my last few releases had not had the “impact” he had hoped to see—though the albums must have sold at least well enough for him to continue to honor my multi-record exclusive contract. The diplomatic framing of his feelings as frustration—rather than disappointment—cast him as my ally, rather than my overseer, and I found some comfort in that. Bob said, surprisingly, “Let’s give them something they can’t ignore”—a “big statement,” meaning a multi-disc set.
It was not at all clear whom he meant by “them” and what, in his mind, constituted “impact.” I had gotten consistently strong reviews, with the minor whimper of dissent that every musician who’s in the arena will get once in a while. Maybe he wanted another Grammy nomination for me? But I took the challenge Bob set before me as a great opportunity. We jointly—then and there—decided to make a four-CD set, showcasing me both as a composer and as an interpretive pianist. I’m not sure if he had a project of this scope in mind before the meeting, but I was nonetheless excited about the prospect.
I called the project Songs Without Words, after the first disc in the set, which was a collection of original music for piano mostly written specifically for this project. Though I had composed quite a bit of music by this point, I had, strangely, not written much for one of my favorite formats, solo piano. Most times, but not always, when I compose a piece, I just write, not knowing in which format the music will end up: trio, duo, quintet, or solo. I try to stay out of the way, letting the music take me where it wants to go. There are some tunes that I play only with a quintet (which I call the Trio +2) and others that work best for the trio. But I had seldom composed specifically for solo piano, and I looked forward to the challenge.
The heart of that opening disc was a six-movement suite inspired by the six-part Bach Partitas I’ve always loved. (The title was an overt nod to Mendelssohn’s well-known suites, also called “Songs Without Words,” each of which was also a set of six works for piano.) In addition to the new compositions, I included four tunes I had already written, including “Child’s Song,” “Heartsong,” and “Sarabande,” because they seemed to fit—they have something lyrical and pianistic about them. I wanted this first disc to be solo piano in my own musical language: jazz at its core but with other elements (classical and Brazilian most prominently) in the mix. I wanted each piece to lead nicely into the next and for it all to come together in the end as a statement of my approach to composing for the piano. I tried to avoid concerning myself with how “jazzy” a statement I was making. I wanted only to say something that was meaningful and true for me and that conveyed my lifelong love for the piano.
The second album in the set was a collection of tunes by some of my favorite jazz composers: Wayne Shorter’s “Fall,” a lesser-known Monk number called “Work,” a superb ballad by the underappreciated London-based trumpet and flügelhorn player Kenny Wheeler, “Winter Sweet,” which I had played with Kenny himself in England; two of Charles Mingus’s tributes to composers he admired, “Duke Ellington’s Song of Love” and “Jump Monk,” combined; and six others. The third and fourth albums I recorded for the set were each dedicated to a single composer: one, Cole Porter; the other, Antonio Carlos Jobim. Almost all of the performances were solo piano, though broken up occasionally by a few duets, trios, and quintets with varying combinations of guest musicians.
In literal terms, the project ended up being too big for Bob Hurwitz—and, I admit, for me. We opted not to include the Jobim set, deciding that to release just three volumes would actually make the project stronger. I described the three discs in the set as representing “the three basic food groups” of my musical diet: original compositions, jazz works with rhythm at their center, and songs with intelligent lyrics at their heart. I sought to communicate something of myself through all three bodies of work, in my own musical language.
The critical response to Songs Without Words was overwhelming. Among the many rave reviews, Fernando Gonzalez, in the Washington Post, wrote: “Songs Without Words might be the one three-CD set, this or any year, that leaves you asking for more. Talent combined with this much intelligence has its rewards.” There were major feature articles about me—and about the boxed set—in the New York Times and in Keyboard magazine. I was excited that our idea of making a big statement was finding resonance in places that mattered to both of us, and felt proud of the work I had done on every level—the recorded sound, my approach to the repertoire, and
above all, just being myself in the music. My confidence was high, and for the right reasons.
But if Songs Without Words left listeners like the Washington Post critic asking for more, Bob Hurwitz was not among them. I had been itching to record my working trio, but Bob wasn’t interested. In 2001 the small Palmetto Records label gave me an opportunity to record it live at the Village Vanguard. I wanted to make a straight-up jazz record, and Bob just said, “Take the opportunity.” It was a surprisingly natural evolution from one label to another—and finally I had total control about what I was going to record and with whom. I don’t in any way regret my time with Nonesuch—Bob and I made some memorable records together, and being on a major label opened some important new doors for me. But we were both ready to move on.
CHAPTER 13
A WISH
At the beginning of every year, my manager, Robert Rund, and I would make something we called the BAWL, our “big-ass wish list.” It was a dream litany of career aspirations—venues and cities I wanted to play in, projects I hoped to do. I’d let my imagination run free, not concerning myself with matters of feasibility.
In January 2002, the first year after my contract with Nonesuch had lapsed, I told Robert that one thing I would love to try someday was the writing of a big piece, a long-form work of some sort, using the poetry of Walt Whitman. Ever since I had studied Whitman at the New England Conservatory, I had a special affection for his Leaves of Grass. I was taken by the vivid beauty of the language, its intrinsic musicality, and Whitman’s celebration of the connectedness of humankind and the natural world—as well as the glory Whitman took in male union. Since the wishes on the list I made with Robert were of the big-ass variety, I had a vague conception of the scale of a hypothetical Whitman project, but no ideas about its potential form. Then, a few months into 2002, Robert called me and said he had secured three performances of the piece in the spring of 2003. He had successfully sold and committed me to performing a huge piece I had yet to compose.
The time felt right for me to try this. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, I found solace in Whitman’s view of life. By this time, I had been involved in a school of Buddhist practice for a couple of years, and I thought Whitman, at his most transcendental, was essentially Buddhist in his attention to self-awareness, acceptance, and love of nature.
What I practice is called insight (or vipassana) meditation, which is a widely practiced version of Buddhism in the United States, and I consider it an important part of who I am.
I wouldn’t describe myself as religious in the Jewish sense—although I jokingly refer to myself as a “Jew-Bhu.” Insight meditation, for me, is grounded in reality and humanity. You meditate by sitting on a cushion or walking back and forth, paying close and gentle attention to your breath (for me, usually first thing in the morning), carrying that awareness during the rest of the day and learning how life occurs as a series of present moments. The more you are aware of each moment, the more alert you are to how you react to situations, how you affect other people, and how other people and events affect you. It is not about “emptying your mind,” as the mind’s job is to think—it’s about slowing down enough to see the mind as it is and to gain insight into how it works and what its tendencies are. During some sittings, I can remain largely free of planning, grasping, and avoiding—and other days I have “monkey mind,” filled with internal chatter. But I try to be present in a nonjudgmental way with whatever is going on.
When I began my practice around 1999, it struck me immediately that, in a way, I had been meditating my whole life but on a piano bench instead of a zafu. My focus was on making sound in rhythm, and when I had a lapse of concentration in performance, I would just concentrate on the simplicity of the tactile relationship between my body and the piano keyboard, the same way that coming back to the body quieted discursive thoughts during my seated meditation.
As often as I can, I attend weeklong silent retreats at the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts—these are highly inspiring and grounding. Self-observation becomes more acute, though it is not easy to be with yourself and what can arise in complete quietude for so long when you are slowed way down and totally free from the distractions of modern life. It is a gift to myself to take this personal time out of my schedule—it provides fuel for my spiritual engine.
Whitman, in his poem “Song of Myself” in Leaves of Grass, seemed connected with this school of thought. He began with the self and celebrated living, but he also saw the self as intrinsically, interdependently connected to other people and the world. Whitman spoke to me in a number of ways. On the level of the ideas, I connected to his love of nature and his recognition of the primacy of the present moment. I related to the way he used language, too. The long, free-form, kinetic phrases of most of the poetry in Leaves of Grass felt improvised. In fact, Whitman revised Leaves of Grass frequently, as if he were starting fresh in each version, like a jazz musician rerecording a tune many times over the course of a long career.
Initially published in 1855, a hundred years before I was a born, Leaves of Grass was a perennial work in progress—or a series of works that varied in character and grew exponentially over more than three decades, until Whitman’s death at age seventy-two in 1892. The first edition, something of a vanity project published by Whitman himself, included a dozen poems on 95 pages. The second edition, published fourteen months later, contained 32 poems. Over the next four years Whitman achieved full bloom as a writer (and as a person, owing in part to a visit to New Orleans that inspired the “Calamus” poems, concerned with male union), and he expanded Leaves of Grass to 156 poems, including revisions and new orderings of the earlier ones into thematic clusters. Whitman devoted most of the rest of his years to recasting and reshaping the work. By the last of the nine versions Whitman put together, the so-called Deathbed Edition of 1892, Leaves of Grass presented more than 400 poems on more than 600 pages. The Complete Deathbed Edition is the one I bought and started marking up with notes after Robert Rund plopped that deadline into my lap.
I also read up on Whitman’s life and work as a prose writer, and was not surprised to find that he had been a public champion of homegrown American sounds and “black music” in particular. He worked for a while as a newspaper music critic in Brooklyn, using his forum to argue in favor of newly emerging modes of American folk music over forms of Western music then considered more respectable. He praised what he called “heart music” (earthy, informal, American) over “art music” (refined, formal, European). I was certainly sympathetic to his way of thinking, though I’d never thought of the heart and art as mutually exclusive. The more deeply you tap the heart as a musician, the better your art, in my view. Like innumerable readers of Leaves of Grass over the years, I found the passion that permeates the work electrifying; and like many other gay men, I was knocked out by the vivid evocation of what Whitman called “manly attachment,” in the “Calamus” poems:
We two boys together clinging,
One the other never leaving…
Arm’d and fearless—eating, drinking, sleeping, loving,
No law less than ourselves owning…
Whitman, however, was also an opera lover, and he thought of Leaves of Grass as indebted to the “emotions, raptures, and uplifts” of his musical experiences. “But not for opera,” he said, “I could never have written Leaves of Grass.” Though virtually all of Leaves of Grass has no rhyme scheme, if one looks closely, its internal rhythm makes it hospitable to a musical setting. At the same time, the monumental scale and stature of the work made the task of adapting it to music terribly daunting.
In the summer of 2002 I brought my copy of Leaves of Grass, all 628 pages of it, to a residency at the Banff Center for the Arts in Calgary. I had applied to Banff citing Leaves as my work in progress, though I had not yet made very much progress on it. I also applied for a Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship to buy me some time to write, and found out a little later in 2003 that I had
been awarded one—a major vote of confidence in the project. Alone in my studio after I arrived, I picked up my copy of Leaves of Grass and started marking poems and parts of poems that I thought might work well set to music, just using my gut reactions. I had begun the process.
I had already spent two (and would ultimately spend eight) fruitful and, in some ways, life-changing residencies at the MacDowell Colony, an artists’ retreat in Peterborough, New Hampshire. I was honored and exhilarated to find my first application accepted in 2000, since in those days there were few, if any, jazz composers awarded residencies there. Much jazz composition (think of Monk) doesn’t look nearly as impressive on the page as a string quartet or an orchestral piece does—the performance is what really makes it work, and the recording of the piece is more important than the score.
When I arrived at MacDowell—a hundred-year-old campus of pristine rustic cottages, evergreen woods, and rolling fields on some 450 acres—I was swept away by the bucolic serenity and history of the place. There’s a wall of wooden “tombstones” in each studio where people who have done past residencies signed their names. I looked over the signatures, and there was Aaron Copland. There was Thornton Wilder. DuBose Heyward. Leonard Bernstein. I thought, What in the hell am I doing here? How did I fake my way in? How long can it be till they catch on to me?