A tragic story-AIDS-powers this collection. Pianist Fred Hersch, an outstanding ballad player, produced the album as an AIDS fund raiser: he is gay and infected with the virus, though he remains healthy. Hersch mainly enlisted musicians he’s known and worked with for years, and he plays on eight of the 13 cuts. Only a few of those on the record are marquee names-the Belgian harmonica virtuoso Toots Thielemans, pianist George Shearing and vibraphonist Gary Burton. But all the performances are noteworthy for their quiet poignancy, what Hersch calls a “bittersweet, after hours” mood; the clarity that death often brings survivors infuses the playing and gives the record an emotional cohesion that most compilations lack. “This arrangement was very much for Fred and me to perform,” says saxophonist Jane Ira Bloom, whose duet with Hersch on “In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning” leads off the album. “It’s hard to talk about,” she says. “That’s why we play.”
With this record, Hersch defies jazz’s macho image. In the subculture’s folklore, the flaunting of hyper-heterosexuality by such icons as Charlie Parker and Duke Ellington set a standard -even though at least one other great of the same epoch, Billy Strayhorn, was gay. Most gay jazz musicians remain in the closet. “The [macho] image is there,” says Bloom. “It’s societal and cultural and political-everything but musical.” Yet for Hersch, 38, secrecy didn’t square with a key jazz tenet: be yourself. By the mid-’80s, “it was starting to mess with my creativity,” he said. “I stopped worrying about what people think.”
Now his career is taking off. Last year his fifth trio album, “Dancing in the Dark” (Chesky), was nominated for a Grammy. Six new records he’s made have been released since March. “I’m up against the clock,” he says. But he considers the ballad album the “hub” of this creative outpouring. So far, it’s been available only through the charity Classical Action: Performing Arts Against AIDS (1-800-321-2437), but it soon may be distributed to record stores. Still, Hersch worries that he’ll be “known as ’the jazz guy with AIDS’.” As long as he keeps turning out work of this quality, that shouldn’t be a problem.
