Philadelphia is known for being a city of firsts — and now we can add to that moniker with OutBeat, the first LGBT/queer jazz festival, a four-day event that will serve as the finale for the William Way LGBT Community Center’s annual music series. Headlining the event is this week’s profile, pianist Fred Hersch.
If I listed all his accolades, there wouldn’t be room left for the interview, but here are a few excerpts from his bio. Born in Cincinnati in 1955, Hersch began playing piano at age 4, was composing by 8 and winning national piano competitions by 10. Proclaimed by Vanity Fair as “the most arrestingly innovative pianist in jazz over the last decade or so,” the six-time Grammy nominee balances his internationally recognized instrumental skills with significant achievements as a composer, bandleader and theatrical conceptualist, as well as remaining an in-demand collaborator with other noted bandleaders and vocalists. Hersch has been awarded a Rockefeller Fellowship for a Bellagio residency, grants from Chamber Music America, The National Endowment for the Arts and Meet the Composer, and seven composition residencies at The MacDowell Colony. In addition to a wide variety of National Public Radio programs, Hersch has appeared on “CBS Sunday Morning” with Dr. Billy Taylor. A committed educator, Hersch has taught at The Juilliard School, The New School and Manhattan School of Music. He is currently on the jazz-studies faculty of The New England Conservatory and Rutgers University. A passionate spokesman and fundraiser for AIDS services and education agencies since 1993, he has produced and performed on four benefit recordings and in numerous concerts for charities. His two-CD set “Alive at the Vanguard” was awarded the 2012 Grand Prix du Disque by the Académie Charles Cros in France and was named one of the Best CDs of 2012 by Downbeat Magazine, which wrote that Hersch is “one of the small handful of brilliant musicians of his generation.”
PGN: What a career. How did you get started?
FH: I started playing music when I was about 4 and writing music when I was about 8.
PGN: Was it always classical?
FH: Yes, I always improvised but it sounded like classical music. That’s what I listened to and that’s what was around the house.
PGN: Did your parents have any musical aptitude?
FH: No, but there was a piano in the house and I had musical grandparents on both sides of the family. My parents went to the symphony every Saturday night. There was also a motley assortment of records in the house, classical and some Broadway albums and children’s records. My parents made lessons available to me, including theory and composition at a pretty high level starting in third grade. That was a really great thing for me.
PGN: Tell me about your musical grandparents.
FH: My mother’s father, Fred, played the violin — I’m named after him — and my father’s mother played the piano.
PGN: A piano-playing granny. She sounds interesting.
FH: Yes, she came over on a boat from Russia in 1904. Both of my parents were born and raised in West Virginia and both of my grandmothers actually went to college in a day when women routinely did not go to school for higher learning. My grandmother Ella studied piano and played locally around town and in the synagogue. She played pretty well.
PGN: I read that as a youngster you had a Baldwin piano but didn’t want to play on it after you’d had a taste of a [better] piano. I find it amazing that you had such a distinguished touch at such a young age.
FH: Yeah, I was 10 years old. Well, I didn’t want to put in the kind of hours that it would take to be a concert pianist on that piano. I’ve always been particular when I can be about pianos. And now I have two Steinways and I’m constantly tinkering with them. It’s really important.
PGN: What were some of the things you liked to do as a kid outside of music?
FH: Well, within music there were a variety of different things I did. There was piano, there was violin, there was singing and there was being in shows. I went to summer camp for eight weeks every summer. I was not particularly athletic but I was a pretty good swimmer and diver, but I was never into team sports. I was also a pretty voracious reader. Reading and music were my great escapes.
PGN: A favorite or disastrous summer-camp memory?
FH: Oh, there are many of them. It was the summer of my 13th year that I really discovered that I was gay, and there I was at an all-boys camp with all-male counselors and a lot of nudity. It was quite an intense summer, having a lot of feelings and not knowing quite what to do with them.
PGN: I read it was chamber music that helped switch you from classical to jazz.
FH: Yes, I went away to Grenelle College in Iowa and begin singing chamber music. I discovered the joy of making music with other people. With chamber music there’s a lot of discussion about interpretation and you have to work together and listen to everybody’s opinion. I also heard a lot of great jazz and started reading up about it. I flew back to Cincinnati after a semester, dropped out of school and started playing jazz in nightclubs there. I was not only smitten with the music but with the whole social scene. It was very underground and there were a lot of colorful characters involved. The older musicians were really kind to me, even if they were sometimes tough. I really embraced the whole thing and became professional very quickly. I stayed on that scene until August of ’75, when I moved to Boston to go to the New England Conservatory. I just felt I had to get out of Cincinnati. I had to get away from everybody I knew and have a chance to explore my sexuality.
PGN: Speaking of the old musicians, I read a great story about Jim Mc Garry.
FH: Yeah, he was a tough little Irish tenor player. He’s the one who really kicked my ass in terms of getting my time and rhythm on track and encouraged me to learn by listening.
PGN: I love the fact that you were able to hang with the old heads at 18. Unfortunately we seem to be so uptight these days that there’s no way an 18-year-old kid would be able be in a nightclub with the adults smoking and hanging out.
FH: Fortunately there are a lot of high-school programs, Summer Jazz Institute and workshops where they can learn the craft. Of course it’s not the same as going out and hanging with the old musicians who can really school you and pass down the oral traditions. It’s amazing what you can learn just from talking to people and finding out what they’re listening to and hearing about their lives. It’s something you can’t get in academia.
PGN: What was a memorable moment for you hanging out with the old musicians?
FH: I can’t even pick one, there were far too many. I spent five or six years hanging out at Bradley’s in New York. It’s probably the greatest jazz hang that I’ll ever be a part of. All the great pianists and horn players and drummers all hung out there. I got the chance to rub shoulders with all my heroes and feel like I was one of the cats.
PGN: You do so many things — play, compose, record. What do you like about each of them?
FH: Obviously performing jazz in front of a live audience is a special thing because you only play whatever you’re playing the same way once; it’s different each time. I play with musicians who surprise me and, even if I’m playing solo, I try to surprise myself! You get instant feedback from people. You can feel their energy. Or they’ll talk to you after the show. There’s nothing better than that for me. Recording is always a challenge. I’ve made a lot of live albums, which is like acting in a play; there are no second takes and if someone flubs a line, you just have to deal with it. Recording in the studio is more like film acting, where you can do multiple takes or the occasional edit. You tend to get a little self-conscious and you don’t have the energy you get from an audience. Though I’ll say that my last trio CD, “Floating,” really has a live feel. We played at the Vanguard the week before recording, so it had a real fresh feel. Composing I’ve done all my life, from big projects like Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass,” which we did at the Kimmel Center to smaller pieces. I’ve written classical music — fully notated concert music and dozens and dozens and dozens of jazz tunes — and I love doing all of it. I also did a large piece based on dreams I had when I was in a two-month coma in 2008.
PGN: Tell me a little bit about that.
FH: It was called “My Coma Dreams” and it was a multi-media jazz-theater piece with actor/singer and a large ensemble. I’d suffered from dementia earlier in the year and then lapsed into a two-month coma.
PGN: How did the dementia manifest itself?
FH: I was absolutely stark-raving nuts with paranoia, delusions, withdrawal from society, etc. I was pretty gone. Dementia for people with HIV/AIDS, especially in the old days, was kind of the canary in the coalmine. When people started to get wacky, you knew it wasn’t long before they would be dead because the virus had gotten into their brain and there was no stopping it. Fortunately, I was able to get on new drugs and reverse the problem.
PGN: That must’ve been a scary time for you, but also for your partner.
FH: Yes, I think it was as difficult for Scott when I was crazy as it was for him when I was in the coma. Living with a person who was that disturbed is very difficult, very stressful. Fortunately, I’m doing much better than I was even before all that happened.
PGN: It sounds like that would have been interesting fodder for a show; I’m sorry I missed it.
FH: Well it’s coming out on DVD Nov. 25 and the benefits will go to the organization that my partner Scott works with called Treatment Action Group. They are a science-based think tank that works with HIV/AIDS, hep. C and TB, speeding up drug trials and getting people treatment, etc. They’re an outgrowth of Act UP and a really incredible organization.
PGN: How did you two meet?
FH: We met in a jazz club at Birdland 13-and-a-half years ago. He was familiar with my music and introduced himself. We started dating and 10 years ago in October we had a commitment ceremony. When I met him, he was in the technology business but has since changed his career 180 degrees. He works in the nonprofit world now and is much happier. He’s a radiant human being and really saved my life.
PGN: Speaking of life-saving, when it comes to teaching, especially with younger students, you always hear about how important sports are because they teach teamwork and discipline, etc. What would you say are some of the values of teaching music to young people?
FH: Oh, there are so many. Not only do you learn teamwork if you’re in an ensemble, but problem-solving, when you’re practicing and holding yourself to a high standard, and math and self-esteem; I could go on. Fortunately it seems that playing jazz is now cool among a lot of high-school students and there are a rash of high-school programs and jazz competitions that didn’t exist when I came onto the scene. When I went to the New England Conservatory in 1977, there were half a dozen schools in the United States that even recognized jazz as an art form, and now every conservatory and almost all institutions of higher learning have some kind of jazz program.
PGN: What was your coming-out experience?
FH: I told my parents at 19 and most people knew, especially after I moved to Boston and New York. I came out very publicly in 1993 about being a gay jazz musician with HIV/AIDS and it became quite a major news story. The reason I did it was that I felt that I didn’t know how long I would be alive (this was before protease-inhibitor drugs) and I thought that if I came out maybe it would give other people the courage to come out too. I believe being in any closet carries a steep price tag, whether you’re an artist or not. And you learn who your friends really are, who’s going to stand up for you when things begin to go south. A lot of people thought they could count on their families, only to find that the families would disown them. So I became an accidental activist and started making jazz albums and held concerts to raise money. I became the poster person for gay musicians and persons with HIV/AIDS.
PGN: What was your biggest fear in coming out and your biggest surprise?
FH: Well, a lot of people told me I shouldn’t talk about my HIV infection because no one would want to book me for fear that by the time the engagement came around I might not be there. So I thought my career might take a hit, but obviously that wasn’t the case, which I guess was the surprise. As the years have gone by, I have found myself free to express myself as a composer. Everyone knows I’m gay and they know my partner and it’s no big deal.
PGN: Random questions. What are three things on your bucket list?
FH: I want to go to the Galapagos Islands. I’m going to go next year after I turn 60. I want to go to Wimbledon. Hmmm … I’ve played everywhere I’ve ever wanted to play. Oh, I want to play with Sonny Rollins.
PGN: [Laughs] I read that you were a little intimidated about playing with him.
FH: Yeah, but that’s a reason to do it sometimes, face your fears.
PGN: People tell me I need to stop …
FH: Playing computer solitaire.
PGN: Well, I’m excited about the OutBeat concert. In addition to performing, you’re also doing an interview with Nate Chinen from the New York Times. What are you looking forward to?
FH: I’m excited to find and build an audience for jazz among gay people and I’m hoping it will bring in some new people who haven’t been exposed to my music. There are a lot of gay jazz fans but maybe there will be a few more after this!
Hersch will take part in a free conversation with Chinen at 5 p.m. Sept. 18 at William Way LGBT Community Center, 1315 Spruce St. The Fred Hersch Trio will perform at 5:30 p.m. Sept. 19 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2600 Benjamin Franklin Parkway. For more information about OutBeat or tickets, visit www.outbeatjazzfestival.com. For more information about Fred Hersch, visit www.fredhersch.com.
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