by Fred Hersch
I failed at the first stage. The test was stopped, and I was devastated. Yet, even if I had passed it and could start taking food orally, I would have had a high risk of aspirating, because I still had only one working vocal cord.
My doctors recommended a novel surgery by which my nonfunctioning vocal cord would be moved alongside the working one, so the one could vibrate the other, with the inert cord held in place by a plastic shim. Through this technique, I would be able to speak at something close to full voice, though not with the vocal resonance I used to have, and after more swallow therapy to strengthen my oral muscles, I hoped to be able to eat and drink again. I had this surgery, called medialization thryoplasty, done in November 2008. After three more months of therapy, I finally passed my third swallow test in February 2009.
The feeding tube was then removed, painfully yanked out, and I was cleared to eat and drink again, at first with some restrictions to get my system used to solid food. Since our experiments with pureed canned soup (and my illegal snacks), I was more than ready to celebrate the end of this seemingly endless abstinence from food and drink. Scott and I went to Bouley, the TriBeCa restaurant that was our favorite “big-deal meal” place, the night following the day of the test, which happened to be the evening before Valentine’s Day. We ordered the five-course tasting menu and a bottle of champagne, a gift from my mother. I ate it all, my senses overwhelmed by the delicious and varied tastes and aromas—poached egg with truffles, Dungeness crab, sea bass, mille-feuille—and we polished off the champagne. It was the most memorable meal I have ever eaten, though I couldn’t wait to go home and eat chocolate pudding again, legally. I would have preferred Scott’s homemade crème brûlée, of course.
Although I recovered the power of speech, my voice will never be quite the same. If I speak for too long or get fatigued by talking in a noisy environment, my voice conks out. I can’t sing very well anymore, either. This is no great loss to the audience for vocal music. Still, it’s a minor disappointment to me. I’ve always enjoyed singing for pleasure, and it has been useful in working as a composer or occasional vocal coach to be able to sing through a passage, to demonstrate what I have in mind. That’s one thing I’ve had to give up, along with a notion I’ve always had in the back of my mind but have never discussed publicly. Ever since my days at Bradley’s, when I would watch Jimmy Rowles and enjoy the way he would occasionally break into song with that unassuming, unpolished, gravelly non-singer’s singing voice of his, I thought it might be fun to sing just one song on very rare occasions late in my life. That’s not going to happen now.
Fortunately, I could still play the piano, if not with my old technical ability—not at first, though it came back before long. Indeed, I think my playing is better in many ways today than it was before I got so sick. I have found my left-to-right-hand independence to be looser and more interesting, and my general facility is much improved. Most important, I believe I am playing with more freedom and creativity and less judgment—just putting one phrase or idea after the next, telling continuous musical stories, being comfortable with my music making without needing to prove anything to anyone.
As I found at Smalls, I have come away from the coma experience with a deeper sense of myself as well as a heightened appreciation for the gift of the opportunity to make music. After my recovery I took more satisfaction in playing than I had ever taken in my life. I didn’t micromanage my improvisations. I became much more forgiving of any little errors I might make from time to time. The internal judgmental chatter that can occur when playing in public seemed to have gone away for good. I found myself sitting down and playing for pleasure for the first time in years. It felt eerily wonderful to run through a basic tune or play some Bach. The simple act of making chords was a thrill, and the notes sounded fresh and exciting to me.
I played and played some more, lost in the experience and enjoying the process, as my muscles grew stronger. By January 2009 I felt good enough about my playing to return to the public eye in a significant way. I honored a week’s engagement at the Village Vanguard I had booked long before, playing with a quintet billed as the Fred Hersch Trio + 2 after the 2003 album of the same name. With me was John Hébert on bass and Nasheet Waits on drums, along with Ralph Alessi on trumpet and Tony Malaby on tenor saxophone. We drew from the book of my compositions and arrangements for quintet that I have added to over the years, and it was a pleasure to present that material at the Vanguard. Candidly, it helped me to have four other musicians to share the solo duties.
We played two sets a night for six nights straight, and there was a lot of love in the room. Word of my coma and recovery had gotten around, of course, so quite a few people came to cheer me on. A few probably came more out of a morbid curiosity as to whether I was really okay. I think everyone in the club had to have walked away surprised that I was fully intact and, in some ways, playing better than ever—or at least more deeply. I remember Lorraine Gordon, the Vanguard’s notoriously irascible owner, being especially sweet, saying, “We love having you here—where you belong.” It felt great to be back.
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The dreams that I recalled in such details were still swirling around in my head. After all, they were all I retained of my two months on the brink of death. I read over the accounts of the dreams I had initially typed out just to have a recollection of them, and it seemed to me that they had dramatic resonance. I started thinking of making something from the material of the dreams—something, though I wasn’t sure what. From the beginning I wanted to use an evocative visual component. I didn’t simply want to compose an instrumental suite based on the dreams, where the dreams would just be written up and appear in a printed program. But I had no idea about how to go about it at all.
So I showed the short accounts of the dreams I had written to Herschel Garfein, the librettist who had helped me shape Leaves of Grass, and he was so moved that he offered to collaborate with me to create a theater piece with music, inspired by the dreams. We agreed that Herschel would conceptualize the piece, write the text (drawing from interviews he would conduct with Scott, my doctor Michael Liguori, and me), and—from my written recollections of the dreams—I would compose the music, mostly instrumental selections, though with one lengthy song that we envisioned as the centerpiece of the whole work. The song drew from my dream about “The Knitters” with lyrics by Herschel, adapted from my written account of the dream. I didn’t want to do another Leaves of Grass, which was so completely focused on Whitman’s words. I wanted to express each dream in a unique musical or visual way without it being another song cycle.
The piece took form as a hybrid performance/multimedia work, My Coma Dreams. Herschel, a gifted dramaturg, took my vivid but terse recollections of my dreams, added monologues and other dramatic material, and crafted a cohesive 85-minute work of what we ultimately called “jazz theater.” He added a couple of sequences that I wouldn’t have thought of, including an account of the life of St. Vincent de Paul, the namesake of the hospital, who, as Herschel described him, was “the first social activist saint.” To bring a leavening dose of lightheartedness to a grimly serious piece about illness and mortality, he wrote a flat-out funny section about the preposterous portrayal of comas in movies and TV medical dramas, where patients miraculously awaken with perfect hair, bright eyes, and big smiles.
One actor/singer, Michael Winther, who had performed in an earlier iteration of Rooms of Light, played all the roles in My Coma Dreams: Scott, me, and a few incidental characters. The two major parts were Scott and I, and Michael captured us both with a simple costume change, by wearing a T-shirt when he was I and slipping on a long-sleeved shirt when he was Scott. He also made tiny, meticulous actorly adjustments in his body language and voice—and those who know us both were amazed at the way he channeled each one of us with little obvious effort. Michael is a superb actor as well as a singer who has the rare ability to sing in character in a theatrical setting with the utmost unfussiness, sincerity, and commitm
ent.
I worked on the music during a four-week residency at MacDowell in August 2010. I arrived at the Colony with the libretto and not much else. But I knew instinctively that “The Knitters” had to be the first thing I tackled—I wrote it in three feverish days. For the dream of Thelonious Monk, I wrote the music using my kitchen timer so I could simulate the panic that I went through in the dream, writing a tune as fast as possible to get out of the cage.
The result was a set of thirteen instrumental pieces arranged for a mixed ensemble of eleven players, including a full string quartet, trumpet, trombone, two woodwinds (doubling on saxes, clarinets, and flutes), bass, drums, and piano. The musical language is for the most part what one would identify as jazz, though highly personalized, but some of the pieces were informed by my extensive knowledge of classical music so they were in that musical world. As I said to the woman at BMI all those years ago, it was “Fred Hersch Music.” I didn’t limit myself to any genre or style; I just tried to respond in a truthful musical way to the essence of each dream. There is much more improvised solo space in the piece compared to Leaves of Grass—though everything was precisely scored by me in pencil. But this time, I ultimately had the parts computer-copied and then edited for performance by my music director and conductor Gregg Kallor.
My original desire for animation proved more complex than any of us could have imagined. I hired a gifted young animator, Sarah Wickliffe (the daughter of Paul Wickliffe and Roseanna Vitro), but we realized in short order that there was going to be a need to use much more than hand-drawn animation for such a massive piece. Through a recommendation, we engaged Eamonn Farrell, who had worked on many experimental theater pieces that had a visual component. Using the amazing computer-graphic program Isadora, he ultimately became the thirteenth member of the ensemble. Since there was so much improvisation, nothing could be exactly timed, so he had to run the computer images (which he had helped design and generate) along with us in real time—and he had to know the piece inside and out. There were hundreds of video cues, and the images were projected on a giant screen at the back of the stage behind the ensemble. Aaron Copp was our imaginative—and patient—director of lighting and production. It was a labor of love on everybody’s part.
My Coma Dreams had its premiere in May 2011 at the Alexander Kasser Theater at New Jersey’s Montclair State University, where my suite of jazz portraits, Dedications, had been performed three years earlier. It was commissioned once again by Peak Performances, with generous additional funding from my close friends Linda and Stuart Nelson. Performing it—at the piano with the ensemble on stage, visible to the audience the whole time—was the most wrenching and strange experience I had ever had as a musician, with the singular exception of my first set back in the public eye, at Smalls. There I was on stage, playing music that by all rights I shouldn’t have been alive to write, and Michael was portraying me a few feet away—and my piano playing was itself a central character in the story. Herschel wrote an account of the moment in the exercise room at Rivington House when I saw a reflection of my frail, hobbling self in the mirror. At the very end of the show, as Michael described that moment, without speaking I rose from the piano bench, faced the audience for the first time, and mimed clumsily trying to walk using the parallel bars in tandem with him. I felt so faint from the emotion of the moment that I could have used a walker again. The audience gasped.
After its premiere in Montclair, My Coma Dreams was presented in a series of well-executed and very well-received performances, including for the European Society of Intensive Care Medicine in Berlin, as well as a staging at the Miller Theater at Columbia University, sponsored by the school’s innovative Department of Narrative Medicine. This performance was captured for a DVD release. In Berlin, more than one doctor came up to me after the show and said, “This is going to change the way I practice medicine.” These ICU doctors may have realized that they had not been giving enough attention to the extraordinary effort of the loved ones and caregivers who needed to be better informed and more than occasionally reassured. A patient is a whole person, not just numbers on a medical chart.
At the end of the year of the premiere of My Coma Dreams, I was voted Jazz Pianist of the Year by the Jazz Journalists Association. I gave David Hajdu a brief speech of thanks to read on my behalf at the award ceremony, because I couldn’t be there. I was on the road again, busier than ever.
CHAPTER 18
TOGETHER AND ALONE
I was different now—slapped down, knocked out, brought back, humbled, and, in the end, recharged by my lengthy incapacitation and difficult recovery. I felt different, too—lucky, grateful, and awestruck by the unpredictability of life. My music seemed freer, less effortful, more open to the unexpected. Not that I’m less proud of the vast amount of music I had made before my coma—it’s all me, made with care, and done for a reason. I’m pretty happy with all my output, or nearly all of it. Still, something happened to me—and my music—after my coma, and it was something positive.
Other people, including critics, seemed to treat me differently, too. I’ve been fortunate to get a great deal of favorable press since my first years as a professional musician in New York, from DownBeat and the other jazz magazines to the New York Times and The New Yorker. For the music I made after my recovery, the reviews got almost embarrassingly effusive. The critics who had always liked me said they liked me even more now, and the ones with reservations in the past said they were hearing qualities in my music they had never heard or noticed. And my calendar was even more full, with performances around the world both with my trio and as a solo pianist.
In February 2012 I played a week at the Village Vanguard with John Hébert and Eric McPherson, my now steady trio. Eric, who has been best friends with Nasheet Waits since they were in fifth grade, had filled in for Nasheet on drums a few times, and I felt that he, John, and I clicked in a different way. As a drummer trained as a classical percussionist, Eric is a great listener as well as a deeply creative player—he’s playing with John and me at all times, always at the right dynamic level, never under us or over us. John, who has one of the great bass sounds in jazz today, is as capable of playing a ballad with wisdom and patience as he is of creating something with a spontaneously generated structure. We had already recorded Whirl, my first studio album after my illness, but I was itching to record us at our “home club.”
Palmetto Records had all six nights of sets at the Vanguard recorded for a live album. We played things I like from every realm of jazz territory, mingled with quite a few of my own pieces, new and old: “Segment,” a lesser-known Charlie Parker tune that, as far as I know, is his only composition in a minor key; a slowed-down take on Sonny Rollins’s bluesy “Doxy”; a medley of Ornette Coleman’s “Lonely Woman” and Miles Davis’s “Nardis”; a few standards such as Cole Porter’s “From This Moment On” and Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn’s “I Fall in Love Too Easily”; and my tunes “Dream of Monk” from My Coma Dreams and “Tristesse,” a new number I had written in dedication to Paul Motian, the wonderful drummer, who had died just three months earlier.
Paul had played the Vanguard so often that he was practically the house drummer. He was part of the original Bill Evans Trio—along with bassist Scott LaFaro, who died in an automobile accident at age twenty-four in 1961. They pioneered the conversational style of trio playing that has been so influential. Paul and I worked together once for a week at the club in a trio with Drew Gress, and though we didn’t always click musically—Paul’s musical personality was so strong that it could be overpowering—I admired his music and was glad to experience making music with him firsthand. I knew he suffered from myelodysplastic syndrome, a debilitating blood disease, which he pushed his way through in his final years, and he knew what had been going on with me.
The magical drummer Billy Higgins had a similar story. He and I never got the chance to play together, one of my great regrets, as he was among my all-time favorites. He was on dialysis and su
ffering with liver problems when I saw him play his heart out at the Vanguard not long before he died. After the set I went back into the kitchen that serves as the musicians’ hangout to pay my respects. He seemed weak, completely exhausted, and he was sweating from the effort of the set. But he mustered the energy to get up from his chair when he saw me and give me a warm embrace. Then he held me at arm’s length, smiled, and said softly in my ear, “It’s good to be alive.” Though we never discussed it, he knew of my health situation and he was giving me some of his precious life energy.
For that whole week with my trio at the Vanguard, John, Eric, and I were beautifully connected. We were all full of ideas and really attuned to one another. When I listened to the recordings Palmetto made, I couldn’t bear to cut tunes to meet the running time of an album. Generously, the label agreed to release a double CD. In recognition of how good it felt to be where I was after what I had been through, we called the project Alive at the Vanguard. As there have been so many albums titled Live at the Village Vanguard (including my own in 2001), I was very deliberate about the choice of the word “alive.”
The intensifying recognition of my work after the coma had a strange retroactive effect. In 2011, two years after my coma but a year before Alive at the Vanguard, Palmetto recorded me at the club as a solo pianist. I was now established as the only musician in the eighty-plus-year history of the Village Vanguard to be presented regularly as a solo pianist. (If it sounds self-congratulatory to say that, I’m sorry. It’s true, and I can’t help but be proud of it, as I am of having my photo hanging prominently on the wall of the club.) It had all started by accident. Once, back in 2005, when I was slated to play at the Vanguard with Drew Gress and Nasheet Waits, I got a call at the last minute from Drew, saying that he was stuck in California and wouldn’t be there in time for the first set. I immediately reached out to John Hébert, and he too was en route from California. So as the lights went down at nine, and just as the owner, Lorraine Gordon, was walking into the club, I was making my way onstage to play a solo set with the blessing of the club’s manager, Jed Eisenman. The set was a mix of original tunes, some jazz classics, something Brazilian, and I ended, as I always do, with a ballad and a Monk tune. Though Lorraine might not have agreed with this solution had she gotten there earlier, she and the crowd were very enthusiastic and I think she could imagine a week of it. In 2006, Palmetto released a solo recording from a live concert in Amsterdam, Live at the Bimhuis, and I persuaded the club to give me a solo week to coincide with the release. The response was terrific.