Good Things Happen Slowly Read online

  This is a work of nonfiction. Nonetheless, some of the names and personal characteristics of the individuals involved have been changed in order to disguise their identities. Any resulting resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental and unintentional.

  Copyright © 2017 by Fred Hersch and David Hajdu

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown Archetype, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  crownpublishing.com

  crownarchetype.com

  Crown Archetype and colophon is a registered trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 9781101904343

  Ebook ISBN 9781101904350

  Cover design by Cardon Webb

  Cover photograph by Matthew Sussman

  v4.1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Introduction: Kings Island

  Chapter 1: Short Arms

  Chapter 2: Diminuendo and Crescendo

  Chapter 3: Boston

  Chapter 4: Bradley’s

  Chapter 5: Rollerena’s World

  Chapter 6: Sideman

  Chapter 7: Classic Sound

  Chapter 8: Horizons

  Photo Insert

  Chapter 9: Out

  Chapter 10: Dancing in the Dark

  Chapter 11: Acting Out and Activism

  Chapter 12: Nonesuch

  Chapter 13: A Wish

  Chapter 14: Scott

  Chapter 15: Madness

  Chapter 16: Coma

  Chapter 17: Better

  Chapter 18: Together and Alone

  To Begin

  Acknowledgments

  Selected Discography

  About the Author

  For Scott

  After the dazzle of day is gone,

  Only the dark, dark night shows to my eyes the stars;

  After the clangor of organ majestic, or chorus, or perfect band,

  Silent, athwart my soul, moves the symphony true.

  —WALT WHITMAN

  Start where you are.

  —PEMA CHÖDRÖN

  INTRODUCTION

  KINGS ISLAND

  If you drove out of Cincinnati on Interstate 71 and went north for about twenty miles, you’d see the Eiffel Tower—actually, a one-third-scale model that stood at the entrance to the Kings Island amusement park. Rural Ohio was years ahead of Las Vegas in the art of erecting cheesy replicas of iconic architecture for the vacation trade. In 1975, when I was living back in Cincinnati after dropping out of Grinnell College, Kings Island was a fairly new park, open for only three years. It gleamed in its brown-and-olive-green seventies splendor, and it was vast, filling hundreds of acres of paved-over cornfields with roller coasters, kiddie rides, souvenir shops, snack stands, and more souvenir shops. At the center of the main grounds, not far from the Eiffel Tower, stood an inflatable-dome theater that seated a couple of hundred people on benches. In ’72, The Partridge Family shot an episode there. That’s how perfectly the place exuded middle-American wholesomeness. The following year The Brady Bunch came and filmed a show. The year after that, I was playing there.

  Kings Island, like most major amusement parks in those days, put together a short musical revue every summer. The idea was a throwback to the tent shows that, early in American musical history, traveled the country bringing entertainment to people living on farms such as the ones Kings Island had replaced. I remember reading once that Lester Young, the tenor saxophonist who became known for his radically beautiful, lyrical improvisations, had started out as a child musician in a family band that worked the tent-show circuit. But that fact had nothing to do with my decision to take a job as the pianist in the orchestra pit of the Kings Island revue that summer. I did it for the work. It was a well-paying gig—a professional job when I was just beginning to see what it was like to be a professional musician. I got $500 a week, as I recall, for playing seven thirty-minute shows per day, one every hour on the hour, six days a week.

  The show was called Hit-Land USA! The exclamation point was part of the title, as in Oklahoma! and exclamatory exuberance was the mode of the singing in the production. It was a revue of mainstream pop hits, skewed somewhat toward the older crowd of parents and grandparents who came to these shows to sit for half an hour while the kids were flipping upside down on the rides. We did things like “Up, Up and Away,” the Jimmy Webb tune, and “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” from Jesus Christ Superstar. Not my favorite music, but not the absolute worst shit ever written, either.

  There were two groups of performers in this show: the singers and the musicians in the pit. The singers were either gay boys right out of the local conservatory or straight girls with dreams of going to Broadway and starring as Marian the Librarian. They were all terrifically talented in the musical-theater way. They were young and full of fire and hope, and so was I. The musicians were all older, more seasoned, and jaded. These guys—and they all were guys—were solid working pros or local high school music teachers from the Cincinnati jazz scene. They were making a buck, but they all really loved jazz. Many of them thought of themselves as jazz musicians, and so did I. I was nineteen years old.

  I didn’t get to know the gay boys in the show—I didn’t let myself—even though I was gay too. For me, so far in my life, being gay meant being romantically obsessed with a couple of my friends in school and fantasizing about messing around with one of them. I didn’t really understand what it meant to be gay. I had no one to talk to about it, and I barely knew a thing about the gay subculture.

  One night late that summer, the boys in the show invited me to a party at somebody’s house near the University of Cincinnati. I was jittery and went by myself. As I walked in, the first thing I saw was a guy in a blond wig with bangs and a ponytail. He was dressed like a bobby-soxer, in a short pink poodle skirt and saddle shoes with the socks rolled down. Another guy was dressed like Rita Hayworth in Gilda, with that amazing red Rita Hayworth hair and the elbow-length gloves. I had never seen men in drag before other than straight old show-biz people such as Milton Berle or Bob Hope going for cheap laughs on TV. I thought to myself, Is this what gay men are supposed to do? My head was spinning, and I left in a hurry without talking to anyone.

  I had more interaction with the musicians in the show, because I was already playing in the local jazz clubs and getting known as a young cat on the scene. I saw the guys around. Some of us gigged together. I was beginning to be accepted as a jazz musician—one of them.

  The jazz guys didn’t know I was gay, and I hadn’t directly admitted it to the boys in the show, either. But now and then during a performance one of the boys would look down into the pit and catch my eye and give me a wink, just to mess me up. And the guys in the band would watch the singers as they did a little twirl or a time-step, and they’d mutter to me, “Get a load of those fags!” This incessant banter made me nervous.

  Between shows we took our break in a pair of trailers set up behind the theater. They were attached to each other and arranged in an L shape, with one trailer for the singers and one for the musicians. At the elbow of the L there was a tiny common area, and that’s where I would sit. To my left, I could watch the jazz guys as they rested and refueled. They’d huddle on the metal folding chairs, munching on sandwiches and chitchatting about their women, cars, and the Cincinnati Reds. To my right, I could see the gay boys entertaining themselves and the girls as if the real show were only starting—lip-synching to Bette
Midler and Judy Garland records, dishing one another in catty ad libs, calling one another Mary. Could either group really have been such a sociological cliché? Or was that just the way I saw them?

  The internal conflict of knowing I didn’t completely fit into either group took me many years to resolve. That summer I sat alone between them—wondering where, if anywhere, I belonged.

  Courtesy of the author

  CHAPTER 1

  SHORT ARMS

  These days I rarely make a set list. Whether I’m performing solo piano in a concert hall or playing a set with my trio in a jazz club, I prefer not to plan what I’m going to play too thoroughly. I like to work spontaneously, organically—in the moment. Though I might have an idea of the tune I want to open with for any given set, as I’m walking onto the stage I start to pick up a feeling for the audience. I sit down, settle onto the piano stool, and see what kind of mood I’m in. Sometimes when playing with my trio I will ask them what they feel like starting with—a nice surprise for me, as I tend to play better if I don’t overthink things. If I’m playing with the group, I get a thousand cues from the bassist and the drummer, and I send my own cues back to them. The music is like a rhythmic and harmonic river rushing along, and each of us jumps into it in our own way as it flows by. We are making spontaneous music together—and the fact that we are speaking the same musical language gives the music power and a feeling of pure joy. When we are in sync with one another it’s unlike anything I have ever experienced. The music, and each evening, takes on a shape of its own. Every night, every performance, every tune—every moment—has its own character, its own life. I believe in honoring that.

  I’ve never been a big fan of overplanned, tightly constructed show business—nor of the practice of some jazz musicians stuffing generic licks and patterns they’ve worked out in advance into whatever tune they are playing. I can admire the craft involved, but it doesn’t move me. This “one size fits all” approach is pretty uninteresting; for me, each piece should occupy its own specific and considered musical world. I have always been most interested in the kinetic, almost magical spontaneity of improvisation, the open give-and-take among musicians. I love jazz—and great jazz has to have the element of danger, even if it doesn’t sound wild or crazy. Sometimes just changing one tiny detail in the moment can open a musical door.

  There are many reasons for my aversion to elaborate constructions of theatrical show, and one of them is surely that I grew up in an environment of carefully planned and meticulously executed artificiality. I spent my childhood in a household that would have appeared from the outside like a model of middle-class American excellence. Everything about it adhered to the script of midcentury domestic rightness. But it was essentially a grand charade, more than a bit like the film Ordinary People—and I felt lost in it all.

  I was raised in a handsome older neighborhood of Cincinnati called North Avondale. It was a gaslight district, literally. The streets were spotted with flickering gas lamps set atop cast-iron poles, conjuring something of an old-world atmosphere in the modern Midwest. The houses were well designed and sturdily built in an eclectic range of styles, with Tudor, Victorian, and Gothic Revival elements artfully employed and sometimes combined. They were homes that sought to show the sophistication, and not merely the prosperity, of the people living in them. North Avondale was one of the first suburbs of Cincinnati proper—not one of the super-fancy, newer, snooty ranch-house suburbs where the richie-rich families lived but a neatly tailored community. Each house had a real personality, and the oak, maple, and gingko trees lining the winding streets were enormous. It was a postcard image of the ideals of social aspiration and assimilation that midwestern Jews such as my parents upheld. It was racially integrated and religiously diverse; incomes ranged from solidly middle class to upper-middle class.

  Both of my parents had grown up in West Virginia, not known for its large Jewish population. They met in Charleston, married there in 1952, and decided to settle in Cincinnati, where my father helped build a prominent legal practice in corporate law and my mother served, for as long as she could, as a good lawyer’s wife. I came along in 1955, followed by my brother, Hank, just over two years later. My mom, a petite, smart, poised, attractive, and eternally optimistic woman, educated at Smith College, has always had a strong sense of what should be done and how things ought to be, though I’m not sure if she could always tell you why. My dad, a graduate of Princeton and Yale Law School, was also intelligent and good-looking in a fifties movie-magazine way, and he exuded the competence and self-confidence expected of successful males in the Mad Men era.

  As I entered the double digits, I realized that my parents’ marriage was an unhappy one. In the midst of their marital difficulties, neither one of them was available to teach me life skills and discipline. My father was largely disengaged from his family—none of us knew until many years later that he had a problem with alcohol. He was a member of “the greatest generation,” who lived through the Great Depression and fought in World War II, but he didn’t talk to me or Hank about those experiences until he was in his late eighties and I persuaded him to write down what he went through as a nineteen-year-old army sergeant in the trenches of France. He was a small-town kid who saw unimaginable horrors that no doubt scarred him for life and may have led to his self-medicating by drinking. And though I have tried many times, I can barely remember an instance of the two of us doing anything together when I was growing up.

  My mom seemed to always be busy doing something, though I am not completely sure how she filled her days given that she didn’t work and had help at home during the week. An energetic woman then, as now, she did do a good amount of schlepping Hank and me to and from various after-school activities. But until I was able to drive myself at age sixteen, I do remember her taking me out after school to run errands with her in a somewhat conspiratorial way—“Don’t tell your father, it’s our secret.” I think she was lonely at home and needed an ally.

  In addition to her involvement in groups such as the temple sisterhood, my mother was part of a group of women who had all gone to elite eastern colleges and needed a reason to keep their minds sharp. They held meetings they called “Current Topics”; rotating among their homes, each meeting two women would read a “paper” they had written on a subject of their choosing—followed, of course, by “luncheon” featuring elaborately shaped Jell-O molds, tomato aspic, and other sixties buffet foods. Shortly after we moved to a bigger house in 1965, my mom wrote a paper entitled “My Life with HHH” (my father’s initials). In a happy, sitcom manner she described our home life, with the cute, high-spirited kids, the obligatory dog, and my father’s constant volunteer work. She was putting a comic face on what she must have known, deep down, was anything but funny.

  So I ended up creating my own life, without much guidance. My parents were committed to showing the world a rosy, almost WASPy model of a marriage—though it was bankrupt in the important, emotional ways.

  Thank God there was music, my great escape from the unbearable tension in the house. Music had come down on both sides of my family in my grandparents’ generation, and my folks appreciated it through their parents even though they didn’t play themselves. My paternal grandmother, Ella Hersch, was a skilled amateur pianist. When she turned twenty-one and graduated with a music degree from Pittsburgh’s Chatham College, her parents gave her a six-foot, mahogany 1921 Steinway Model O piano—an instrument built during a high point in Steinway history. After I inherited it in 1997, I have had it at various times in my New York home. And as I have upgraded instruments, I have lent it to some of my best students who needed (and couldn’t afford) a grand piano. My grandmother emigrated from Russia in 1904 and lived until 1996, experiencing almost all of the twentieth century. She always did what she could to encourage my interest in music. She also, touchingly, went out of her way to show me that she welcomed the multiple ways in which I was different. Later in her life she would always ask me if I had a “spe
cial friend.” For a person of her time and place, she had an enlightened attitude.

  On my mother’s side, my grandfather Fred Bloomberg, whom I was named for, was a semiprofessional violinist. He was first generation, born in Brooklyn of Lithuanian and Russian heritage. He made his living in furniture sales but was passionate about classical music and helped found the Charleston Symphony Orchestra. I adored my grandfather and was broken up when he died, in 1974. He had a dignified appearance, with a mane of white hair combed straight back. We visited him often in Charleston when I was a child, and I was fascinated watching him practice the violin. I myself have always hated practicing, but I loved to watch him do it. His wife, Roslyn, née Thalheimer, was a descendant of German Jews who came to the Deep South in the mid-1800s. She was the granddaughter of the mayor of Selma, Alabama, where she grew up in a Victorian household complete with a staff of five. Coddled as she was, though well read and highly intelligent, she was much better at arranging for those in her employ to boil her an egg than making one herself.

  When my parents married, one of the things they made a point to buy with their wedding money was a piano—a five-foot Lester baby grand in ebony. By the time I was four I had discovered it. I started picking out little tunes—nursery rhymes and cartoon-show music like the themes from The Huckleberry Hound Show and The Flintstones, which I learned later is actually fairly hip and is based on “rhythm changes,” the harmonic structure of George Gershwin’s “I Got Rhythm.”

  When my parents saw me doing this, it struck them that I seemed to have some talent. They put me in class piano lessons at the age of five. To their credit, after it was clear that I was outgrowing the class lessons, my parents rather quickly arranged for me to study with the best teacher they could find in Cincinnati, a woman named Jeanne Kirstein, who was the local heavyweight. She was a New Yorker—she had that cachet—and had won the prestigious Naumburg Piano Competition. Her husband was Jack Kirstein, the ’cellist in the LaSalle Quartet, a group well regarded for its important early recordings of music of the Second Viennese School: Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern. Jeanne was a serious musician and a lovely person, and I liked going over to her house and playing. And lying on the floor of their house and hearing the string quartet in rehearsal made me forever love music in four parts—I would try to hear the viola against the second violin or one of the two violins against the ’cello. But I didn’t practice much and never went to my lesson fully prepared. I would get to a tough passage and either fake it or close my eyes and grit my teeth and hope that I could get through it. Unfortunately for my discipline but fortunately for my development as an improviser, I often got away with winging it.