Good Things Happen Slowly: A Review of the Autobiography of Jazz Pianist Fred Hersch

By Ellen Cantarow, Reader Supported News

14 September 18

n the 1990s, I studied with Fred Hersch, a renowned jazz pianist and also a wonderful teacher. I was the least of his students (others have included Brad Mehldau and Ethan Iverson). By the time I came to him, he had learned much about teaching from the late pedagogue Sophia Rosoff.  The great bebop pianist Barry Harris was one of her celebrated students; I was fortunate to study with her, as well. All of this has of course influenced my writing about Good Things Happen Slowly. But that Hersch has achieved the stature he has, both as a unique contributor to the history of jazz piano and as an AIDS activist, is a matter of history, not of personal opinion.

In 2008, Hersch went into an AIDS coma for six weeks. By then he was recognized throughout the world as a unique pianist who had infused jazz with an underlay of classical reference, most notably Bach counterpoint. Everything in Hersch’s playing is illuminated by his magical harmonies and his depth of feeling – he is one of the rare musicians who can make listeners cry. And his music is stamped by the influences a wide range of players and composers have had on him, among them Billy Strayhorn and Thelonious Monk.

The book begins with Hersch’s childhood in a dysfunctional Jewish family in Ohio. His parents didn’t get along; they were often absent; his mother once told him his “arms were too short” for him to play the piano, a charge that impelled this child prodigy who didn’t like to practice (he started playing the piano at 4) to keep at it anyway.

At once insecure – “a scrawny, nerdy little kid with glasses” – and convinced of his musical acumen and superiority, he fought his way to success. Pianists with whom he studied included the late Jaki Byard at The New England Conservatory, who introduced Hersch to the solo work of Earl “Fatha” Hines, James P. Johnson, Fats Waller and Teddy Wilson. Hersch’s early search for his own sound (I first heard him when people were comparing him to Bill Evans); learning about pianists like McCoy Tyner and Oscar Peterson and the little-known Ed Moss [p. 44]; his apprenticeships with trumpeter Art Farmer and saxophonist Joe Henderson (“If you feel it, it’s right,” Henderson once told him [p. 110]); his learning Brazilian music; and his progression to playing at the legendary Bradley’s and then The Village Vanguard make up part of what stands as a history of jazz from the 60s to the present. (It is necessarily a partial history: many great musicians are omitted here, including the wonderful pianist Harold Mabern as well as others including trumpeter Don Cherry and drummer Ed Blackwell. This is autobiography; it is not intended to be encyclopedic.)

Many of Hersch’s personal disclosures, not the least of them about his sex addiction and how he overcame it, include ones like this, about his music:

[E]ven when I play my own pieces, I have to learn them just the way I have to learn a Monk tune or a standard. I have to internalize them. I have to memorize them. I have to work with them. I have to find just the right tempo. I have to fine-tune them so I can play them with fluency. I have to interpret my own music just as I would anything else. A tune doesn’t have to be a so-called original to have originality. [p. 174]

Hersch became one of the last musicians to learn jazz, in his words, “the old-fashioned way, figuring it out by fucking up, getting back on your feet again, fucking up again, hanging out, learning from the masters.” [p. 113] The Vanguard has long counted as Hersch’s musical home where his photograph hangs on the wall alongside other masters – Bill Evans, Barry Harris, Byard, Monk, and more.

Hersch’s acknowledgment to himself that he was gay, and his progress toward disclosing his sexual preference to the jazz and wider worlds, were difficult parts of his long journey toward reconciling “the gay Fred and the jazz Fred.” [p. 122] In his young adulthood, a hallmark along the path was discovering Walt Whitman; a friend and lover introduced him to the poet’s “Calamus”:

For the one I love most lay sleeping by me under the same cover in the cool night,

In the stillness in the autumn moonbeams his face was inclined toward me,

And his arm lay lightly around my breast—and that night I was happy.

“It blew me away that Whitman dared to write this in the mid-nineteenth century. That poem made me believe that love between two men was possible,” writes Hersch [p. 69]. In 2005, Hersch’s album “Leaves of Grass,” an hour-long octet with libretto sung in first performance by Kurt Elling and Kate McGarry at New York’s Zankel Hall in Carnegie Hall, paid tribute to the social and poetic pioneer. “I have often experienced audiences palpably losing interest in long-form jazz pieces well before the finish,” wrote New York Times jazz critic Ben Ratliff at the time. “This one brought a full house to its feet.” In Good Things Happen Slowly, there are many more stories about the albums Hersch compiled over the years. I leave it to readers to discover these for themselves.

Hersch’s discovery that he had AIDS after years of addiction to sex, and his activities at the forefront of AIDS activism, are woven into the narrative of his progress as a pianist. A wonderful part of the book describes Hersch’s and Morgan’s romance – their meeting, their decision to bind their lives together, and their marriage.

During the coma, Hersch was attended by assiduous doctors and nurses and by Morgan. When Morgan asked one of Hersch’s doctors about his chances of recovery, he was told, “Good things happen slowly. Bad things happen fast.” With little chance of surviving, Hersch recovered through his medical experts’ care, but even more through Morgan’s love.

Far from brain-dead during the coma, he had a series of remarkable dreams (in one, women sit knitting, and from their skeins geese fly up in droves). From these he composed “My Coma Dreams,” first performed at the Alexander Kasser Theater at Montclair State University in 2011 and reviewed with acclaim by Ben Ratliff in The New York Times. Hersch went on to perform it in 2013 at Carnegie Hall and then widely elsewhere.

Since Hersch’s near-encounter with death, his playing has acquired even greater profundity, and the feeling that has always marked his art has become transcendent, as have his humor and his gaiety (in the old, playful sense of the word). His music is a celebration of his survival and of life itself.

What amazes me as a writer is that this book is so beautifully crafted and written. It’s a real page-turner. You don’t want to put it down. You don’t want it to end. Given a choice, I’d prefer Hersch the musician. But fortunately we don’t have to choose. Get this unique book now. You won’t regret it.

Ellen Cantarow has written and published for nearly fifty years on topics including women’s social and economic issues, Israel’s occupation of Palestine, and fracking. She played the piano starting at age 6 and studied jazz improvisation and piano from the late 1980s through the early 2000s.