Fred Hersch: The Lives of a Cat
Featured Album
The pianist heard on the newly released 2001 solo recital Fred Hersch Plays Jobim may be the best-known Fred Hersch: a consummate player of lyrical ballads, enriching their melodies and chords in subtle ways. He’s a master of singing right-hand lines and impressionist harmonies that recede into the distance. Antonio Carlos Jobim composed classics like “Desafinado,” “Corcovado” and “Insensatez” which helped make bossa nova a ’60s fad, when he teamed up with saxophonist Stan Getz. Hersch plays those tunes, alongside lesser known Jobimiana, with his usual precise touch, infusing some songs with melancholy (“Modinha/Olha Maria”), and others with spry Brazilian rhythms (“Desafinado”). As a sublime piano balladeer, Hersch is heir to Bill Evans. And like Evans, he’s good for more than that, stylistically. This cat has a lot of musical lives.
Some may know Hersch more for his compelling story than his music: I once heard him describe himself, half in jest, as “the jazz poster boy for AIDS.” A gay man diagnosed as HIV-positive two decades ago, he’s an AIDS activist and fundraiser, and an informal clearinghouse for information on treatment. He keeps up with the research, pursues any medically responsible course of action: he’s a fighter. All those sides of his personality are well captured, alongside some of his musical selves, in Katja Duregger’s recent documentary Let Yourself Go: The Lives Of Fred Hersch, on DVD and well worth a look.
Duregger doesn’t get to all his musical lives, but in fairness there are quite a few: like Hersch the Thelonious Monk expert, the free improviser and friend and ally of outcats like Amsterdam reedist Michael Moore – their most recent collaboration is the duo album This We Know. (They were at New England Conservatory together in the ’70s, when NEC pianist Jaki Byard’s integration of diverse strategies and historical styles made a big impression.) Then there’s Hersch the trio pianist, the leader of small bands, the accompanist to singers lucky enough to get him (like Norma Winstone), and Hersch the composer of chamber music.
A few of those lives converge on his other 2009 release, the fine Live at Jazz Standard with his Pocket Orchestra – a quartet of piano, drums, trumpet and Jo Lawry’s voice. She’s mostly wordless, her hummed or scatted lines sometimes mimicking cello (the beginning of “Canzona”), jazz horn (the early jazz repartee of the strutting “Down Home,” recycled from Fred’s quintet) or Return-to-Forever-era Flora Purim (“Child’s Song”). But she also tackles a couple of Winstone’s sticky lyrics, and speaks and sings her way through an arty setting of Mary Jo Salter’s poem “Light Years.” As elsewhere trumpeter Ralph Alessi’s monster chops tempt him to overplay a bit, as on “Lee’s Dream,” but his Harmon-muted tone bristles agreeably, and his crack timing helps keep the structures well defined and sturdy.
Some of the Pocket Orchestra’s best and loosest moments are for the de facto duo of Hersch and drummer Richie Barshay. Without bass, Fred’s left hand takes a more prominent role: walks basslines, hints at early-jazz stride piano, rumbles down to the basement and brings musty treasures back up. With this foursome’s odd instrumentation no roles are completely fixed – everyone fills in where they can. They’re a tiny theater troupe doing Dickens.
Hersch reminds us great jazz pianists often have a bit of the drummer in them. Piano is a percussion instrument, and he’s always mindful of flexible timing and coaxing out a resonant tone. For Hersch swinging in the groove, hear his post-2000 trio with bassist Drew Gress and drummer Nasheet Waits. Gress’s virtues are much like Fred’s: warm lyricism, harmonic cunning, and the ability to follow or chuck the rules depending on the setting. The trio shines on Live at the Village Vanguard with Monk’s “Bemsha Swing,” a lowdown lower-octaves blues (“Swamp Thang”), Fred’s playfully jittery, repetitive waltz “Stuttering” (reprised by the Pocket Orchestra) and an awful lot of loose and pushy drumming: check out Nasheet’s rattle-trap cymbal combinations on the uptempo “Phantom of the Bopera.”
The sequel Night & the Music takes a few tracks to get rolling, but there are exemplary standard ballads (“You and the Night and the Music,” “How Deep Is the Ocean”) and two more excellent takes on Monk tunes. Monk’s faux fumble-thumbs routine is a far cry from Fred’s refined touch, yet Hersch’s airy “Misterioso” stretches the time and theme in ways that evoke the composer’s playful approach to blues form. Monk’s clunked adjacent-key minor seconds sound almost genteel on “Boo Boo’s Birthday,” as Waits perfectly catches a Monk drummer’s falling-forward/falling-back timing.
Some Hersch chamber music is collected on a Naxos disc. Not surprisingly Concert Music 2001-2006 all involves piano, is attentive to pianistic nuances, and is lyrical and sometimes playful (a modernized rag, a piece for left hand alone). You won’t wonder where he gets his ideas. The harping on a couple of intervals, the long-form, myriad variations on a single theme, the strutting on Iberian rhythms, the dramatic shifts in dynamics and intensity, are all components of his jazz and improvised music – lest we forget all those cats are one versatile cat.
