‘Good Things Happen Slowly’ for Fred Hersch
For years, pianist Fred Hersch kept his two identities at arm's length from each other. But when he began writing music professionally, he nudged them together.
"Through these first compositions, I was beginning to reconcile my two selves — the gay Fred and the jazzcat Fred — in music, without any overt plan to do that," he writes in "Good Things Happen Slowly," his new memoir.
Writing this memoir, too, has been a way for Hersch to weave the strands of his life together and to accept himself more fully.
Hersch spent nearly two months in a coma in 2008, brought on by AIDS-related dementia. In the ICU, when his partner Scott asked Hersch's doctor about his condition, the doctor replied, in a case like this, "good things happen slowly," then added, "but bad things happen fast."
When Hersch recovered, he was so weak he could barely stand, let alone play music at his world-class standard. But he stubbornly worked his way back to form, even documenting his medical odyssey in a music-theater production called "My Coma Dreams."
Born in Cincinnati in 1955, Hersch was a piano prodigy, though he didn't love the relentless practicing of classical competition pieces. In high school, he found his musical path when he discovered jazz. After a pep talk from a local jazz star, Hersch gathered up all the recorded versions of "Autumn Leaves" he could find to listen to their differences. "In jazz, it's individuality, not adherence to a standardized conception of excellence, that matters most. With this music, musicians are completely free to be themselves within the tune. Difference matters — in fact, it's an asset, rather than a liability."
But Hersch still draws on his classical training, in his contrapuntal playing and his more structured compositions.
As a young man in New York, he built his reputation as a musician, eventually recording and performing with Art Farmer, Gary Burton, Audra McDonald and Dawn Upshaw, among many others. He also enjoyed exploring his sexuality in the freewheeling '70s, though he confesses to having "felt a little alienated" then, "because I wasn't a he-man, I was a little unusuallooking, and I've never been rich. I was in the midst of figuring out my own way of being gay, just as I was working out my own approach to making music. I wasn't a queen, and I wasn't the Marlboro Man. I was Fred."
But he stayed in the closet around his jazz collaborators, fearful that negative responses would damage the musical intimacy that jazz depends on.
In 1986, Hersch was diagnosed with AIDS. As he notes, each person responds individually to that diagnosis and the threat of limited time remaining it once portended. He made his first album as a leader knowing it could be his last. He also composed a song for the AIDS Quilt Songbook, beginning his creative work as an AIDS activist.
"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 HIV positive."