Pianist, composer, educator, and author Fred Hersch brings his trio, with bassist Drew Gress and drummer Jochen Ruekert, to the Outpost in Albuquerque on September 16, Unit B in Santa Fe on September 17, and the Harwood Museum in Taos on September 18—part of the New Mexico Jazz Festival. Over the last four decades or so, Hersch has established himself as an original and respected voice in modern jazz, releasing more than 60 albums and winning multiple accolades in the United States and Europe. He has played a wide range of musical styles in an equally wide range of formats, from solo piano to large-scale orchestras. One of the first—if not the first—jazz artists to step out of the closet, Hersch has helped open doors for others, particularly through his memoir, Good Things Happen Slowly, a frank account of his health struggles and triumphs as an openly gay, HIV-positive jazz musician. Near death in 2008, he was placed in a medically induced coma for several weeks, during which he experienced an unusually realistic series of dreams, which he recounted in one of his signal projects, My Coma Dreams, a moving multimedia jazz theater piece.

He graciously offered to speak to Musically Speaking in advance of his New Mexico Jazz Festival performances. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

MS: Let me start first with your sound. It’s something that has struck me since I first heard you. There’s a kind of ringing clarity to your sound on the piano. Every note that you play seems to have a backbone, seems to have a spine. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how you achieve that and what it took to develop that.

FH: Yeah, well, I appreciate that. It’s something that I have worked on, and it’s something when I talk to young pianists that I work with, and they ask about sound, I say, “Well, the main thing about developing sound is you have to really care about it. You have to want to do it.”

It’s not just about the notes. It’s the sound, and how it exists in the rhythm of what you’re playing, and in the phrase, and your touch, and it’s something you have to care about. If you just want to shred and play a lot of loud, fast kind of things, then go for it. I mean, if that’s your thing. But you know, if you think of Miles Davis, who had that unbelievably fat sound, you know, he didn’t have to play as many notes as, say, a trumpet player like Woody Shaw, who had a thinner sound and had to come up with a different way to play, because he didn’t have that fatness. Or, you know, Chet Baker had that beautiful, fat sound. He could play just eighth notes and make it gorgeous.

MS: Well, that’s the thing about yourself. It doesn’t matter if you’re playing fast or slow, loud or quiet. That spine is always there.

FH: Well, you know, I grew up with the sounds of the great classical pianists, Rubenstein and Joseph Hofmann and Rudolph Serkin, and people like that, and Glenn Gould, and I had some inkling of how important sound was. But when I first started playing jazz, I was kind of a banger. It wasn’t until I really started studying with my longtime teacher [Sophia Rosoff] in the early ’80s that— Her contention was that it’s not so much the fingers that make the sound. It’s like how the whole body engages with the piano. And that’s something that I pass on to people that I work with, and you know, it’s not just sound. It’s balance between the hands and balance between the fingers, and use of counterpoint, and all these things that I find that the piano does better than any other instrument. So why not do this?

MS: You use the word “balance,” and that’s something else that really strikes me about your playing. I don’t ever get the sense that you overplay or underplay. There’s always a steady, restrained delivery of your ideas and of your expression, and I really appreciate that. There are so many people now who are just blowing notes past you as fast as they can. But I’ve never heard you do that.

FH: Yeah, well, I’m not anybody who’s practiced patterns or licks or transcribed other pianists’ solos. I mean, I’m a trained musician, but I did not come up in the current crop of jazz school kids. I learned in a very different way. In some ways, I’m self-taught as a jazz pianist, and you know, a lot of it is just sticking with it, just finding what you love, and you just keep doing it, and eventually, it’s like, Oh, that’s your style. You can’t say, “Oh, I want to have my own style.” It sort of discovers you, and I think that’s a different orientation.

MS: So you studied with Ms. Rosoff for decades.

FH: On and off, 35 years.

MS: What were you learning in the last 10 years that you hadn’t learned in the first 10?

FH: Well, the last 10 years, it was more of, like, I would see her from time to time and just play jazz for her. I wasn’t seriously playing any classical music. I’d play some jazz, and she was looking as much as listening, and saying, “Oh, you seem to be interfering with this or that,” or “You’re holding on to your fifth finger while you’re stretching too far with your . . .” You know, like that—just work with physical diagnosis. I’ve been lucky. I’ve never had hand problems or tendinitis or anything like that, but it was just a check-in, and we were great friends, and we shared some students that might study classical with her and jazz with me.

MS: You mentioned students. I just want to pass on one comment I had from a student, Luis Perdomo, who worked with you. I reviewed his album Montage a few years ago now, and I noted the remarkable independence between left and right hands. He credited you with helping him develop that kind of independence, which was extremely important for one particular song on that album. He passed that on to me, and I thought you’d appreciate it.

FH: Yeah, that’s lovely. I’ve got a bunch of students out there and, you know, people pass things on to me, so I try to pass things on to other people. There’s certainly a young crop of piano players who are technically extremely gifted and gifted in many other ways. Bravo for them, you know? If I can help any of them save a step or two when they come to me, I feel like that’s something that I can do.

MS: Great. So I noticed that you’re coming with [bassist] Drew Gress and [drummer] Jochen Ruekert. I’m used to seeing you with John Hébert and Eric McPherson. So I’m curious about the change.

FH: Yeah, well, that trio with John and Eric had about a 10-year life, from about 2009 till probably around the pandemic, early 2020, and it was great, and we played all over the place and made some, I think, really nice music and some good records. When I came back from a pandemic, it just felt like I wanted to play the field. So I started. I’ve been playing with Drew on and off for 40 years.

MS: He was in your first trio, wasn’t he? Yeah, yeah, with Tom Rainey. Yeah. We were together for a long time. So I’ve been playing more with him. I’ve been switching up drummers, I play with Jochen sometimes. I play with Jonathan Blake sometimes. I play with Marcus Gilmore sometimes. I have three weeks scattered through the year that I play at Village Vanguard, so I just mix and match rhythm sections. I’ve been playing with Thomas Morgan. So it’s like a residency. So I just keep doing different things. In the fall, I’ll play with a quintet. It’s kind of my hometown club, and I always want to go in there with something different, interesting.

MS: Okay.

FH: I’m not really writing so much music at the moment. I’m playing things from my repertoire, my catalogue, just things I want to play, and so it’s nice to keep playing some of the same things with just different people and see what they bring to it. I think it was great to have that band for 10 years, and I’m really, really happy with what we did, but I just had the sense it was time to move on.

MS: Speaking of moving on, I know you primarily in a trio situation. That’s what I’ve heard you do most often. I was amazed to hear Silent, Listening [a recent release]. It’s just a phenomenal immersive musical experience for me. I think that’s the first time that I had heard you play that kind of free improvisation solo, and it was lovely. I really enjoyed it.

FH: Yeah, thank you. I call that— I don’t like the term “free music” as much as I like either “spontaneous composition” or “open music.” That’s another way to look at it, but that’s been part of my DNA, really, since the very beginning. A lot of the things that I did in my early trio records with Charlie Hayden, collaborations with Jane Ira Bloom, and other artists that are more left of center. I put out a record in about 2017 or so called Open Book, and there’s a 20-minute piece on there.

So, yeah, I mean, I like to just make stuff up. But I also love to play tunes. So, yeah, I feel like that record was something that Manfred Eicher [ECM producer] was wanting me to do. Not just tunes. So he was important in making that happen, as well, you know, because he’s a great producer.

MS: I get the sense that you have a special fondness for the trio. Am I right about that?

FH: Well, solo, duo, trio, I’ve probably done 14 of each—you know, records.

MS: So maybe it’s just because I’ve seen you in trio most of the time.

FH: Yeah, I mean, it’s like your children, you know, you love them all. I’ve been doing more solo and trio, less duo in the last number of years.

MS: I watched My Coma Dreams again this week. I hadn’t seen it for several years. It’s an extraordinary piece of work. I can’t really imagine how difficult that might have been for you to relive that and to perform it, to have it out there in the open. But for me, very moving and very educational. I was particularly taken with “The Monk Dream” for two reasons. First of all, the music in that section, I thought I was hearing a Monk tune, and I love Monk, and I couldn’t figure out what tune that was.

FH: Right.

MS: And then I looked at the credits, and it wasn’t a Monk tune at all. [Hersch composed all the music.] But I think you were channeling Thelonious.

FH: Yeah, I was trying. I’m doing my best anyway.

MS: But one question about that chapter. The two of you are in adjoining cells, and you have a contest: whoever writes a tune quickest gets released. But we never learn who wins the contest.

FH: Well, I wrote mine tune first, but well, Monk wasn’t really competing, you know? He was just kind of chilled out. He was just being Monk and not in any particular kind of rush or anything.

You know, it was very trippy, especially the premiere of that piece. I mean, here I am with an actor on stage playing me and my partner, and I’m not really even supposed to be alive, and here I am, writing this music. It was very strange and very emotional, and you know, we worked on it for months and months. I mean, my collaborator, Herschel Garfein, was extraordinary. It was a heavy lift, with all the video and staging and orchestration and composition, and you know, it was a big project. I previously had done Leaves of Grass,which was my Walt Whitman setting, and I’d never tackled, you know, like an 85-minute piece like this. It’s unique. Herschel calls it jazz theater.

Unfortunately, it’s very cumbersome to produce, expensive and unwieldy, and probably that video that we now have of My Coma Dreams, that’s probably going to be the last time that we do it. So I’m really glad that it exists in that video, and it’s a good video and a good production, and you know, I’m just glad it’s out there.

MS: I think the final thing I want to touch on is your extraordinary memoir. I read the book this week again for the second time. I had reviewed it when it first came out. Two things about it strike me. First of all, you have an extraordinary memory, or you’re a dedicated journalist, because the detail that you bring to it is remarkable. And the other thing, and this goes hand in hand with your music, I think, is the honesty with which you wrote about yourself. Again, extraordinary and touching. I really appreciated what you were willing to share.

FH: Thank you. I mean, when I hit 60, you know, it just felt like this is the time to tell the story, and I have a story. It’s all kind of set up in the introduction, you know—how to reconcile the jazz Fred and the gay Fred, and the story of all the years of health struggle—and there’s no reason not to be honest.

I mean, I have read some jazz memoirs. I checked out a few before I did mine, and some of them just seemed like lists of accomplishments, and others seem like very kind of inside for jazzy jazz guys to check out. I wanted something that kind of reached across the aisle between the medical worlds, my identity world, my kind of unique upbringing, something that would kind of get out of the sort of jazz ghetto, and if people take inspiration from it, well, that’s the best thing you can do. I collected a number of emails after it came out, and just strangers wrote to me about this, that, the other, and you know, if I can help somebody else be more honest in their lives about who they are, what they’re dealing with, then I’ve done my job.

MS: Sure.

FH: I also wanted to write enough about why I love jazz so much—for people even who weren’t necessarily jazz fans to understand how extraordinary an art form it is, and how cool and interesting and unpredictable, and maybe help them listen, maybe in a slightly different way than they might have before. So, you know, I’m very happy that I did it. It was also a heavy lift, and I really appreciate your reading it again. I really appreciate that very much.

Fred Hersch Trio
Weil Hall
Outpost Performance Space
210 Yale SE, Albuquerque
Wednesday, September 16 at 7:30 p.m.
Tickets

Unit B
821 San Mateo Rd., Santa Fe
Thursday, September 17 at 7:00 p.m.
Tickets

Harwood Museum
238 Ledoux St., Taos
Friday, September 18 at 7:00 p.m.
Tickets